Eid-ul Adha and Paper Collection

Yesterday, we celebrated Eid-ul-Adha. We went to our local surau for our 'Eid prayers. After the 'Eid prayers, I had to take pain killers for my back pain since I can no longer stand it and I was already feverish. The current bad back episode was with for a few days already but I went on without any pain killers until yesterday. So, my plan for 'Eid visits with the family had to be cancelled and I rested for most of the day. My other half and the rest of the family proceeded without me to visit my sister-in-law in Bandar Tun Hussein Onn.

Since my 'Eid was rather uneventful, I will post on something different. Since end of last year, I have been busy rearranging my collection of papers. When my house was renovated more than a year ago, a lot of my papers was packed, bundled together (irrespective of the physics topics; I did some form of rearrangement while I had an attic before and thus there is some residual pre-arranged in the bundles). These were placed at my son's balcony (lacking of space within). Little by little I throw away some stuff away (mostly minutes of meetings and paperwork that I consider will no longer be of use). I planned a little about how to arrange the research papers. Those that fall under quantum topics, I decided to store them in the store at our balcony (attached to our room) and hence will be of easy access. Those that are in use and related ones, are kept in my room itself. Gradually, the whole store was filled up.

For other themes, I thought of using the top of the cabinets that I use to store the books. As such, they will be harder to access since it requires me to use a stair to reach them. 

Thus, the topics will have to be of less relevance to my current work. They are Complex Networks & Related Topics (including scientometrics), Relativity & Cosmology, High Energy Physics, and of course Mathematics. Complex Networks was one topic I tried to pursue while I was at INSPEM. The reason was that I find this area has wide applicability and is based on (purely) graph theory. But my real interest stems from a paper of Aste & collaborators on complex networks on hyperbolic surfaces, having done some research on hyperbolic geometry before this (quantum theory on punctured surfaces). I was curious to see other applications of hyperbolic geometry particularly real world applications. However the graph-theoretic aspects are harder to do research on and most students opt for applications of real networks. I gradually left the topic for others to explore as they can be computer labour intensive (not my real strength). Being the latest to be explored and had left it to focus more on quantum research, I thought I could fit the papers in the leftmost part of the cabinet (which is smaller and of one 'column' space). I was wrong (see pic below; note there are two layers, the visible front and the back).

The next category is Relativity & Cosmology. I had quite an interest in mathematical cosmology (less on the speculative topics) but this is not quite my specialization, despite my interest in geometric ideas. So when I had Hassan Amirhashchi as a PhD student and he insisted to do this in cosmology (my suggestion was more on quantum stuff), I told him then that we need to appoint an external supervisor who has expertise in the area (Prof. Anirudh Pradhan). My view is that one could try to explore new areas at MSc level but for PhD, one need a true sense of direction (normally comes with expertise). So during this time, I accumulated quite a large number of papers (including observational ones particularly one that points to accelerating cosmology and dark energy). Read also some alternative ideas on the back reaction due to inhomogeneities. This, too almost filled up the space allocated (see below).

The next category would be high energy physics but this was not filled up. I thought I had a lot of high energy physics papers including 'pre-arXiv preprints) accumulated during my PhD years. I must have either thrown some away or was left for my students to pick up during the move from the old theoretical physics at the ground floor (now used as a store). A possibility is now to swap this space with that of Complex Networks.

The final category is mathematics, which quickly filled up the allocated space. Have yet to figure on how to rearrange the spaces for Relativity & Cosmology. My other half has offered the upper cabinets in our room but let's see.

There are some leftover papers that I have yet to place systematically somewhere. This will need the second rearrangement when I am up to it. For now, I have plenty on my mind, even causing nightmares[ perhaps another post to tell) and will need to rest.

When I showed the first pic of the quantum papers store, someone made the remark that I should be storing these papers in the cloud. This was indeed the suggestion of my sons and some 'unread' papers have been stored electronically. It would have been the wish of my other half and the family to throw most of these away but somehow I resisted that. Mathematical papers are best read in hard copy where one can scribble on them, and brought anywhere for reading. You can of course do these too with electronic files on the mobile phone, but the experience is different (limited). I will start to throw them away once I have decide that I have no use for them, not even for reference (and most probably this is when I give up on science but that time has not come as yet).