Episode 7: Nadir Jeevanjee

Deep Convection

Nadir Jeevanjee is one of those rare people who have both depth and breadth in their skills. He is probably the only person who ever wrote a textbook about tensors and group theory while taking a few years off from grad school to tour with a rock band, and that fact alone should make you want to listen to this interview.

Nadir was born and raised in Los Angeles, and when he was 12 or 13, he got obsessed with music, especially with drumming. Towards the end of high school, he joined The Calling, a rock band that had a huge hit on the radio in the early 2000s. He went to college with the goal of becoming a professional musician, but found himself enjoying physics classes more than music theory, so much so that he embarked on a PhD in physics at UC Berkeley.

About three years into it and struggling with a bit of a “mid-PhD crisis”, Nadir left academia for what turned out to be four years, to tour the country with another band — that’s when he wrote that textbook about tensors. Eventually, though, he finished his PhD and moved into atmospheric science. He is now a Research Physical Scientist at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, where he studies the physics of clouds, radiation, and climate, using a hierarchy of approaches ranging from pencil-and-paper theory to comprehensive computer simulations. His specialty is to condense the complexity of the atmosphere into simple, elegant frameworks that are tractable for human brains.

Nadir is also deeply engaged in the communication of climate science to the wider world and confounded a group called Climate Up Close, which tries to make the essentials of climate science accessible to a broad audience and give people the opportunity to talk directly with climate scientists.

“So I started to give public talks called “Climate Science: How Do We Know What We Know?”, trying to focus on evidence and trying to de-emphasize the consensus on climate change. It’s a very useful fact for people who don’t know it, but for people who do know there’s a consensus but aren’t convinced by that, I think that beating them over the head with it if they’ve already heard it, I think can backfire. And so I wanted to try an approach where I just focused on the evidence. […] And not only try to share a little bit of what we know about climate science, but also get face time.”

The interview with Nadir Jeevanjee was recorded in November 2020.

• Nadir’s website
• His book, An Introduction to Tensors and Group Theory for Physicists
• Climate Up Close
• Three blackboard lectures on simple models in climate science, which Nadir gave in February 2018 in Princeton