For the graduate student who spends long hours in a small office, seemingly endless all-nighters and regular caffeine highs are endured in the hopes of coming to a ground-breaking research discovery or completing a dissertation. For Graduate Arts & Sciences student Jaideep Singh, years of research have led to another result: the accumulation of an award-winning collection of physics textbooks.
Last year’s winner of the University’s Bi-Annual Book-Collecting Contest, Singh has 357 texts.
Though he began his book collection during his undergraduate years, Singh said physics has always been a part of his life. Singh’s father was a theoretical physicist and though he did not push Singh toward that particular area of study, Singh said, “it’s hard not to become interested in physics when you’re in that type of environment.”
Singh’s childhood predilection toward physics deepened during his time as an undergraduate at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif.
In addition to the general textbooks for his classes, Singh would buy the supplementary books and extra recommended material. Back then, his textbook purchases were for the simple purpose of helping him to pass his classes, giving an opportunity him to “gain a different perspective on the material,” Singh said. Singh said his collection was of particular help while trying to pass the “really killer” qualifying exam during his second year of graduate school.
As Singh’s collection started to pile higher, his goals for acquiring physics textbooks changed. The books helped Singh gain a better understanding of physics material, but soon after, his efforts became less geared toward “helping to complete school work” and more toward “actually becoming a collector,” Singh said.
He started completing textbook sets. “If I had volumes one through nine, and not 10, then I figured I might as well get 10,” Singh said.
Singh acquires new textbooks in whatever ways he can, whether by providing shelf space for a retired professor’s textbook that otherwise would have been thrown away or scouring Web sites of used book stores.
“A lot of the time, the books I am looking for aren’t very valuable in the sense that they are hard to find or expensive,” Singh said, noting that often, when ordering textbooks online, “the shipping is more than the price of the book.”
Luckily for Singh, the majority of the books he has or currently is looking for are not necessarily collector’s items and therefore are not too draining on his bank account.
“It’s a real stretch for me to be spending money on the kind of books that I don’t really need for my classes anymore,” he said. “I’ll get them one day when I have a real job — I am still a graduate student.”
One collector’s item Singh has his eye on is “Quantum Mechanics and Path Integrals” by Richard P. Feynman and A. R. Hibbs. Although this textbook is currently out of print, costs a few hundred dollars and was co-written by an author who is famous even outside the world of physics, Singh hopes to one day add this to his collection.
Having collected books for about a decade, Singh finally considers himself his “own library.” Singh’s fellow graduate students, his professors and his advisers often borrow books from him.
“It’s really convenient because in some cases he has books that a library doesn’t have,” Graduate Arts & Sciences student Peter Dolph said.
No library card is needed for this informal collection. “I just e-mail myself with the name of the book and who borrowed it,” Singh said. “It’s very free-flowing, which I enjoy.”
Singh, who has worked with a team at the University on the polarization of helium-3 targets since 2001, is a resource for his peers.
“He’s really interested in knowing everything that he possibly can about the work that we do,” said Graduate Arts & Sciences student Karen Mooney. “He’s become the best resource we have in our group because he enjoys learning about the things that we do. It’s amazing the amount of knowledge that he has in his head.”
Doctoral Education student Heather Burns, an honorable mention in the 2008 book collecting competition and the collector of more than 200 autographed books of contemporary poetry, described Singh’s collection as being “really unique as far as being so subject-specific” as well as “having a big span through the years.”
Having a collection of books published throughout many decades and eras of physics is one of the most interesting and important things to Singh about his collection.
By comparing textbooks from different eras, Singh has “found it interesting seeing how people choose what they teach,” he said. “You can see the evolution of a particular physics subject by what people teach in a different era.”
Despite the intellectual stimulation and passion that Singh derives from his textbooks and the seemingly endless resource Singh has become to his fellow graduate students and professors, Singh has set his collector goals high.
“If I had my way, my super-dream is to become the Oprah of physics books so that if I give a recommendation for a particular textbook, the sales for that book goes up,” he said. Ultimately, he would like to “become so important to publishers that they send me free exposition copies.” For now, though, it looks like he will have to stick to eBay and professors’ dusty shelves.
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