Ghostly Understanding at Dusk

My second article with Majalah Sains has just been uploaded. It is about neutrinos. Some may ask why would I want to write on something in whch I have not done proper research on. Particularly I'm a bit anxious on how our real researchers will react to the article. I did refer to their earlier article in Majalah Sains out of respect. As a contributing author, I thought it would be good for the magazine to have article(s) of current interest (neutrinos in this case given the recent Nobel Prize in Physics). Indeed that was my intent to  promote better understanding of neutrinos but with a different take on the subject (mine would be its mathematical structure).

While I'm not a neutrino physics expert, I do have interest in the topic. I took several particle physics courses in my BSc., Part III and PhD studies. In that respect, I do have the necessary background to say something I guess, but more than that, my B.Sc. (Hons.) thesis was on Minimal SU(5) GUTs and its modifications and these would include the topic of neutrinos. Of course, at the time, neutrinos are considered massless. With neutrino oscillations, that has changed. Thus, I thought it would be nice for me to update myself on the topic of neutrino masses. I thought I would be able to use simple 2×2 matrices to demonstrate the more common knowledge of matrix diagonalization in dealing with the mismatch between flavour and mass eigenstates of the neutrinos. With neutrinos being neutral, there are two possibilities i.e. introducing Dirac masses and Majorana masses.Then I found I had to introduce too many things to make the introduction accessible. I finally decided against the original idea and suffice for the article, to introduce verbally the main concepts without the mathematical details. To do it properly, one would have to do a mini course at least.

This year's Physics Nobel Laureate is Francis Halzen. He happens to be the author of the book Quarks and Leptons with Alan Martin. I have the book for quite sometime and was my reference book on particle physics even before I studied for Part III. Unfortunately, I did not have the book during my final year honours project; my main reference then was Langacker's Physics Reports article. The book by Halzen & Martin that I had, was a present given to me by my late eldest brother (may Allah forgive him and be placed among the righteous; regretted that I was not able to be with him in his final hours and attend his funeral).

Alan Martin was one of my lecturers in Durham University. He taught us Introductory Particle Physics; we had to take courses during the first year of PhD. Having learned Particle Physcs quite substantially during my Honours year, I remembered my attempt of looking intelligent in Alan's class by asking a subtle question about isospin. He immediately pointed out my confusion on the topic. It was later that I realised I had mixed up between strong isospin and weak isospin (should be kept separate). This demonstrates that learning with humility is better than learning with a sense of arrogance (often disguised as self-confidence).

So when I wrote the article, the attitude I adopted is for the betterment of my understanding of any subject of interest, more than anything else. I no longer have to chase formal academic recognition but one thing I still do have is the pushback against stereotyping or belittlement particularly in technical areas. At this old age, being humble is relatively easier (though one has to keep on guard not to let ego slip through) and that drives my interest even at this late stage. Being an average Joe, I know that I have many gaps in my understanding and I do wish I can close this gap wherever I can before I go. Depite my sometime fatalistic attitude (accepting fate), it does not reduce my sense of agency. I can only recall this hadith:

"If the Final Hour comes while you have a shoot of a plant in your hands and it is possible to plant it before the Hour comes, you should plant it."

Eldest Son's Birthday

Today is my eldest son's birthday. Given that I could not afford much, I've made sure that there is no preferential treatment between our sons and I should buy at least a cake. So I've bought a Dubai chocolate cake just the day before. We only ate the cake this morning since my son is working a six day week and often comes back late in the evening. Thus, we let him have his good night rest first.

We also took him out for a special lunch despite the financial strain. As I have often said, happiness needs efforts and sacrifice.

Other trivialities: our three-legged cat Hitam has caught a flu for several days now and seems to be losing weight. I hope he quickly recovers (going to vet is really expensive). Below is Hitam (right) with Fifi (left).

Also today, my third son went to get the key to his rented room in Bangsar South. He will start to move gradually during the week. Hopefully he could now save energy, money and time with this move. I have also told my other half that it is better for me not to follow her to Terengganu this coming weekend. I could only be a further burden to her financially and physically given my bad back. It is not something I decided lightly. She will travel with my second son from JB and take turns driving there. It is a pity that the ECRL has not started operations. My prayers that they will have a safe travel there and back.

Slow Progress

 

I have been going through ups and downs lately but more of the latter. Yet it is in such a position that suits best for one to progress better, slowly but God willing surely. With opportunities, they could accelerate such progress of course, but there is this delicate balance that needs to be maintained. I'm reminding myself that one learns better from a place of humility. During last Friday sermon, we were reminded about the market place for being the worst place to dwell in and then I thought current social media is even worse. Trying my best to avoid social media now.

If there is any goal that I'm pursuing now, is to see my own family through these challenging times. On my own personal life, I just want to be a good person and do well in the hereafter, It is a good thing that I've dug up my books from the store (mainly religious books) and I will begin to spend time reading them carefully, not just merely keeping them. My wish is that I have enough energy and time to finish them (funny, these are conjugate variables). On scientific pursuit, I guess I will be writing plain expositions (if anyone ever cared); perhaps can count as good deeds and make up for my shortcomings during my working life. Still, whenever I read (old papers and books), I still have to do reading on recent developments and perhaps update my understanding. I realized that there are plenty of gaps in my understanding of many topics of interest but I simply aim at having at least qualitative key ideas for the topics of interest.

Last Friday, we fetched our youngest from Kampung Sri Mendapat to spend some time with us during the weekend. Our second son from JB was also around, so we briefly had the full family around, but we stayed home mostly. On Thursday, we (me and Ihsan) helped send our third son's car for service - Izhar did not have too much free time these days, which include late night meetings. Ihsan has gone back to JB last Saturday and we had to send back Izzuddin on Sunday. Here is a photo of him driving after stopping by at Ayer Keroh RnR.

Alhamdulillah, it was lucky for him to be back with us last weekend. For otherwise, he would hav followed his friends for a weekend outing and we heard that they were involved in a small accident. We told him to be extra careful whenever he drives and avoid unnecessary trips outside his daily routine.

After Ten Days

I thought I should do another update since the last post was ten days ago. Been quiet mainly tending to my own problems which I try my best not to say too much. I will just say enough so that those who are close to me are in the know.

I had gone to UPM Medical Center and told Dr. Sufi about HPUPM could not help me with the letter to IJN. He rang up some of his acquaitances to see if HTJ has a cardiologist that could help but could not get anyone and then he suggested either Hospital Serdang or PPUM; since the former will have a longer queue, I decided on the latter. Managed to get an appointment at PPUM on 24th December and lets see what happens from there.

Was worried about my youngest in UiTM who is staying out of campus.He send us his first own cooked meal.

He was supposed to be able to go home last two weeks due to the haze (when the university decided to have online classes but he decided not to in order to keep his friend company at the rented house. Here is a photo of them eating dinner in Merlimau.

I have also asked my other half to help out with his pocket money before I top it up this week when my pension pay is in. Soon again, we will have to travel to Terengganu for my other half to attend a course (necessary for her to renew her practicing license). Just two days ago, our TV in the living room was not working and I told my other half, let us not do anything about it (it has already had problems before). In any case, I rarely watch TV nowadays but the TV was often used to play Qur'anic verses and prayers as my two sons tend to come home late in the evening (we had unwanted incidents before).

Some time last week, I decided to have a haircut since I wanted some change.

I have also decided to look through at all the books that I want to let go (mostly religious books at the moment). Started making notes on the Muslim World Book Review journals that I had advertised to let go (nobody seems interested). I discovered lively debate in the journal and saw people like Maryam Jameelah, Abdul Rahman I. Doi and S. Parvez Manzoor giving reviews on books. The last one, I recognize as a columnist in the now-discontinued Afkar Inquiry magazine. I used to follow this author as one that I had the greatest difficulty in understanding (need to look up the meaning of sophisticated English words). None of them writes on physics and mathematics but at the time, I sort of had a religious awakening.

I will probably stop putting books that I wanted to let go on social media and will do it elsewhere if I have the energy. I am working on another writing project now.

Next Please

In the last post, I spoke about my writing project. It was really an article I have promised to write for the online-magazine Majalah Sains. The magazine publishes articles in Malay, written largely by local scientists. In the past, the magazine has published a few of my articles but they come from posts of my Malay blog. The current article is the first written exclusively for the magazine and it is semi-technical. When I started writing it, I wasn't sure if it is ok if I include equations in it and had asked the editor on the matter. Once I had the green light, I continued with the writing for otherwise, it will just keep brewing in my head. They uploaded it last Friday and I was anxious to see the reception by its readers. Before it was even uploaded, I had gone through the article a few times and each time, I thought I could have done better. Knowing that there will never be a perfect piece, I just let it go. The semi-technical nature is really by design since I thought the article should serve more beyond a layman introduction to the subject. Indeed, we need more of this; as most popular articles tend to touch merely the (top) surface and almost always made the subject too easy (giving a false picture of the efforts that go into developing the subject matter).

After the article was made available online, I gave another shot of explaining the subject better and be less technical and posted the writing on my blog. I think it had better exposure that the semi-technicalarticle. The feel-good mood sets in thereafter. But as usual, once the writing is done, the feeling that one always have is that the things one write had a sense of triviality, several houra after. Indeed, I consider myself as an average person/scientist/writer, with many others are much more talented than me. This is also the reason that I stalled the idea of writing an autobiography. I come from an average family and whatever experience I have is simply a result of good accidental opportunities that I have in my average life. In comparison to others, I was never involved in things like the (different) olympiads or well-known competitions. The only competition I was in (as a group member, not individual based), is a state-level science competition during my high school. The project we took up was on detecting polluted water (so, it is chemistry-based) and if I'm not mistaken, we did not win anything.

I'm happy to have taken up the writing project mentioned above; it help me feel I am still useful. Will there be another one? I guess in a way, this depends if the magazine is happy with the one that has been written. In any case, I will just continue to write regardless (whether for publication or simply my blogs), much to satisfy my curiosity and my sanity needs.

Family matters: My third son has changed job since our trip to Kuching. He now works for Touch n Go office in Bangsar South. So far he has been travelling from home to work. It was actually tiring for him, partly due to his many late evening (online) meetings. So yesterday, we went to scout for a possible place of stay for him to rent, closer to his place of work. It is in Vista Angkasa apartments - from the outside, it seems a bit rundown but it will do if everything clicks.

Small Steps Forward

 Yesterday, I have managed to complete a writing project and in some way, I consider it as an 'achievement' of some sort for me to take small steps in believing myself again. Ever since my retirement and not taking up part-time jobs, I have always been questioning myself with may periods of feeling self-worthlessness. In any case, some people say that it is after retirement that one gets to do what one really wants to do. To some, it may be going on holidays (not rich enough), going for pilgrimage (only managed to do umrah, not yet haj). For me, it seems I just want to make the most out of my thinking life while I still can (I take note of the moments of when I get to be forgetful).

Before my retirement, I told myself that I wanted to return to quantum field theory where problems are aplenty. Instead I found myself to relearn statistical mechanics. Among the theoretical subjects that I have taught back in UPM, this was the least comfortable. It was when I started using DiCastro & Raimondi, "Statistical Mechanics and Applications in Condensed Matter", thinking that it might help the students who are largely from the materials science major. It is certainly not the friendliest book to start on Statistical Mechanics. However I found one topic that was rarely discussed anywhere else in statistical mechanics text book, which is the Boltzmann equation (not the formula for entropy). Whenever I read Boltzmann's molecular chaos hypothesis, I wonder what would be its mathematical form look like and it seems Boltzmann's equation gave what it needs.

From there, I veered into picking up more Statistical Mechanics book that I have. I first took up Yourgrau, van der Merwe and Raw, "Treatise on Irreversible and Statistical Thermophysics". 

However after a while, I found myself taking up this book by Denbigh & Denbigh, "Entropy in Relation to Incomplete Knowledge" again. This is much due to my reading on Chris Fuchs correspondences (see here)

The book deals with objectivity vs subjectivity, a topic that I got interested from reading Fuchs. I thought it would be a main part of the writing project that I mentioned at the beginning of the post but unfortunately it didn't. In the beginning, I wanted to read this book from cover to cover and thought that I could finish in a month. Three months passed and then only I finished the book. This is because I was making notes as I read it and often these notes are being written twice (the first is a draft, the second is the tidied written notes for me to keep). Towards the end (the last chapter), I've given up on the notes. To a certain extent, I was really disappointed with myself.

The writing project actually began quite late (slightly less than a month ago) with most of the time was brewing ideas in my head. I was also reading other papers along the way (without taking notes unfortunately and had to rely on my memory reading them). Having that project out of the way, it's time for me to start a new one. One of the things that I wanted to do is to go through the details of this paper "On the Cocycle Structure of the Boltzmann Distribution" and I hope to blog about it. Associated to this, I would like to go through the work of Caratheodory and Souriau's book "Structure of Dynamical Systems". Let's see how it goes.

Neverending Story ... of Problems

Last two days, our next neighbour contacted us, telling us about that some of their things in their store were damaged due to dampness and fungus growing in the store. They asked us to check our own store which is next to their store, True enough, our store had the same problem.

The suspicion is that there is an underground pipe from our side that is leaking. Why from our side? Well, the last few months we had our water bill increased from around RM20+ to RM30 to over RM50. Trying to be a good neighbour (we know that they are upset with us), we immediately decided to call a plumber to bypass the underground pipe from the main source to an external piping. So yesterday, the plumber came and did the piping bypass. It took them a whole day to do this and as a consequence, we did almost nothing yesterday. The whole external piping costs us RM1800+ which my other half helped pay. So forget beauty (with hidden wiring and piping), consider practicality instead.

Reflecting on the whole situation with previous problem of internal wiring  (see here) and now the problem of internal piping, it seems that problems come in batches. In this case, there is a natural explanation for this batchy behaviour; we did our renovations arounfd 5 years ago and nothing is build to last forever and perhaps with things deteriorating over time, these two problems come around at the same time. But we did not expect these to come that soon; the thought of our previous contractor might have used substandard materials comes to mind. That is why we prefer to call somebody else.

So today, we clear out things from the store and some of my books were damaged. They were put there ecause we do not have enough space in our book shelves and some of these books I have read and others were on the not-so-high-priority list. Thus, I decided wither to sell them or give them away; the latter is easy for me to do since in Mydin, they have some containers for the purpose of book donations. One immediate decision is to give away these journals that I have subscribed from the Islamic Foundation, name The Muslim World Book Review and their supplementary Index of Islamic Literature. I guess I was ambitious then when I subscribed them but with Part III study being so intense and one is busy with PhD research, these books were left untouched. 

I've put the 'ad' on FB, in case if anyone is interested (so far none). The issues that are with me are as follows:

• Vol. 8 No. 4 (1988)
• Vol. 9 No. 1 (1988)
• Vol. 9 No. 2 (1989)
• Vol. 9 No. 3 (1989)
• Vol. 9 No. 4 (1989)
• Vol. 10 No. 1 (1989)
• Vol. 10 No. 2 (1990)
• Vol. 10 No. 3 (1990)
• Vol. 11 No. 1 (1990)

So, if anyone from Malaysia is interested, just let me know.

Another expense for today is our Malibu car was sent for service as this is the only available day before my other half use it for work next week. The servicing plus a battery cost us RM700+. In th afternoon too, our youngest son told my other half that his money is running out as he had to buy books. With all these, I have to apologize that I will not be able to help others at all.