Seed Bed

(Another post that I had to share due to its importance)

This post is about seminars particularly the institute's weekly seminar. No, it's not about controversies raised around this matter but more on how to resurrect the spirit of scholarly activity and discussions in seminars. Regarding whatever controversy there is (if there is one), my wish is that everyone place some appropriate concern about the institute, beyond own self or own group, solving the (many) problems of the institute. I'm not too much bothered who is more right or who is more wrong but I will be more glad to see someone offering solutions in action (not simply in thoughts).

The institute has religiously conducted its weekly seminars since the early days until now. This is a good tradition to keep. I remember during my PhD days we had this weekly Friday seminars, where members of the Centre for Particle Theory from both Department of Physics and Department of Mathematical Sciences, went to these talks religiously. Besides this, we had also an internal Journal Club lunchtime talks given by both staff and students. In DAMTP, Cambridge, I remember they had several group seminars almost all days in the week and I went to some of them when the topic is highly interesting to me and the seminar rooms were always filled by interested staff and students. I also had the experience of going to String Theory Workshop(s) in DAMTP and LMS Durham Symposia where the lecture halls were filled to the brim. I had the fond memory of attending Spinors, Twistors and Complex Structures in General Relativty in 1988 (chaired by Roger Penrose and Chris Isham) and went to almost all of the talks. Remembered the incident of Claude LeBrun's talk having used index free notation and the audience wanted them with indices. He proceeded with even more notations without indices. Later when Trautman gave his talk, he joked that the audience will now see some index and he was talking about index theorems. The other symposium that I went was on Geometry of Low-Dimensional Manifolds in 1989 and Ed Witten was one of the speakers. In all of these events, the atmosphere was electrifying and the corridor and coffee conversations were about the progress in science. That is why when I go to many of the local events here, it is frustrating and embarrassing to see such an atmosphere is really rare. Our conversations tend to revolve around gossips, politics, holiday-plans and of course, food instead. When we go to parallel sessions of a conference, sometimes the audience is simply the speakers of the session themselves. Once in an international conference held locally, the audience that were left are the international speakers and participants and I heard one of them made the remark, where are all the local people. Once also in the social media, I read a remark of a participant in one of the (local) international conferences made derogatory remarks about the scientific intent of the event. This has to be taken seriously by us local academics - don't let it get any worse.

Going back to our weekly seminars, we noticed the reduced number of participants and the lack of interactions over the years. While I do not think going to all seminars being practical, I have always thought that whenever the topic is on a particular area, the appropriate research group should be there but this is often not the case. We tried different things to have better response for the seminars. We have now announcements on the social media (used to be on twitter too but I guess many of us do not do twitter). The past director had also made the change that the speakers should be from outside or among the academic staff to ensure better attraction and hopefully participation. This is because at one stage, we had too frequently student speakers for the seminars. In principle, there is nothing wrong with this, provided the student is well-prepared for the talk and willing to take up questions professionally. During my student days, we had our own separate student events separate from the official and regular ones. Presently our theoretical physics group is doing just that for the QuEST group meetings (QuEST stands for Quantum Explorations of Science & Technology). Thankfully, this is going well each week (apart from some festive season and conference periods). So the question is why can't we have the weekly seminars highly-spirited like we ought to. When I chaired the talk yesterday and I was about to start the Q&A session, the speaker even made the remark that maybe the audience was too tired for this (?). Perhaps we have hit rock bottom?

When I wanted to write up this post, I tried to search for some history of the seminar tradition. I came across two interesting ones: (i) The academic seminar as emotional community; and (ii) Creative discomfort: The culture of the Gelfand seminar at Moscow University. Let's leave the second one for some remarks at the end and focus on the first. In the first article, it tells us that the word seminar (coming from Latin seminarium) refers to nursery or seed bed. I thought this is fitting since it is from seminars and ensuing discussions, that we often get research ideas. However it was the title emotional community that really caught my attention, particularly the word emotional itself. We all know when we organise seminars, workshops and conference, they are meant to serve some particular community. But having emotional attachments? Perhaps, as discussed in the first paper, it's a spiritual fellowship or brotherhood of equals joining forces in the pursuit of truth, with the seminar (participants as fellows) as a manifestation. I quote in full, the ending sentence of the paper:

"A good seminar, based in a community of shared emotions - and in which the individual can both become part of the collective and at the same time find his or her own unique way to creative self-realisation - is still a guiding academic utopia"

Our weekly seminar should have, over the years, made some form of impact, at least, to the research ecosystem that we have built. If we have not felt it, then there must be some elements that made it ineffective. Perhaps we have not shown the seminar tradition the respect it deserves. If we did not, then it is highly unlikely that anyone else (beyond the fellowship) will. I have already heard someone mention the scepticism in passing that we have been organising the seminars for the ump-teenth time but yet the impact is unknown. On the other hand, I have also heard others being envious of our consistency in organising the weekly seminars when they still find it problematic to get people to give talks regularly. So we have to keep examining ourselves to ensure the spirit of our seminars is not lost. If we feel that our seminars are not worth going, others will probably feel the same way even more. The seminar should bind us together (and not make us fall apart).

In some places, the seminars that the institution conduct, tend to give the unique characteristic or identity that the institution (or generally the fellowship) has. I have already mention a few examples during my student years. In the past, I have always looked at the online talks of KITP, Perimeter Institute and MSRI, knowing how informative they are. Not only they organise seminars regularly but they also put them online for the whole world to see. Perhaps in the (far) future, when we do not have to deal with petty matters, we can do this also (we did try this at some point, with videos, uploaded in our YouTube channel instead of hosting it ourselves - see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4HTVaRqPFA for instance, with the expertise help of Majalah Sains then - apologies for the absence of credit in the video clip).

One exceptional series of seminars that had caught the attention of many in the mathematical world is of course the legendary Gelfand Seminars led by I.M. Gelfand at Moscow State University, which one can read in the second article above. The seminar is held on Monday nights and can last to four hours straight with intimidating questioning. It is not the kind of seminar that may suit many. However, the impact that it made, are felt by mathematicians across the world. One can read the tributes to Gelfand in https://www.ams.org/notices/201301/rnoti-p24.pdf and https://www.ams.org/notices/201302/rnoti-p162.pdf. While we read in awe such exceptional cases, we should put in energy to make our weekly seminar series be impactful to us and respectable to many, the very least. We may or may not see this realised within our lifetime (particularly with the uncertainties ahead - yes, despite what we have heard earlier in Monday afternoon) but at least the future generations will not curse us for not trying.