Version of the Flammarion engraving that features a person venturing beyond the firmament to discover the mechanism behind the celestial spheres. Metaphor for scientific discovery as reaching reality beyond appearances.

I have a multi-disciplinary background.  

My research in Cultural History (more specifically: African History and History of Ideas) centered on how the Basotho received and interpreted the beliefs preached by missionaries from the French Société des Missions Evangéliques de Paris (SMEP) in the 19thc (University of South Africa). This was largely based on the earliest written sources we possess on the History of Lesotho. Prior to that I studied the evolution of the power structures in Basutoland in the 19th c (Paris Diderot University – Paris 7).

In History and Philosophy of Science, I studied the emergence of dimensional analysis in the 19th c, and compared Ptolemy’s astronomical models to those previously described by Theon of Smyrna (Paris Diderot University – Paris 7).

My research in Theoretical Physics focused on the Scharnhorst Effect, which is of interest for Foundations of Physics: the “Scharnhorst Effect” consists in the theoretical prediction that light would travel faster in a Casimir vacuum than it does in normal vacuum. I re-derived it in soft-collinear effective theory (University of Arizona).

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