My Teacher, Szekeres

15 days to go. Today is Teacher's Day and I will post about teaching here. Trying as much to forget admin problems and worse, politics. I rather look elsewhere where the environment is more trust-building and genuine science development.

So the past week or so, been focusing on my course this semester which is on "Special Relativity and Classical Field Theory". This course has only been taught a few times; at best is three times but in recent period, only twice. It is an optional course and being theoretical, it is almost always not being offered since very seldom that students want to take the risk of taking the course. The course itself was designed years ago based on the courses that I took from Department of Mathematical Physics (now no longer exists) in University of Adelaide (see picture below) in 1983.

The courses was taught by Peter Szekeres, a disciple of relativist Felix Pirani. He is the son of a famous mathematician George Szekeres. Peter Szekeres is perhaps best known for his Szekeres solution for inhomogeneous cosmology.

On teaching the Special Relativity and Classical Field Theory course, I do not have a stable set of notes (like I do for Quantum Mechanics). Thus I experiment around with what should be taught but the core of the course is what I have learned from Szekeres himself. So I build some sketchy notes, updated with new materials from books, particularly from Faraoni's Special Relativty book. There are other books of course that I read because my habit when teaching is not to follow a single book but collect the best ideas from several books strung together with my own logic or understanding. Now some may criticise this approach and also for not getting the most current book. I tend to differ from many on this, while I understand the need for current progress, I value very much tradition. Particularly for the subject of special relativity (foundational), there are not many new developments to go through unless one goes into general relativity. By sticking to the core of Szekeres' notes, I, more or less, pay tribute to one of my teachers in Adelaide. I will do so until I have my own set of ideas for the special relativity course - I can see a few different paths now (not yet realised).

Szekeres also taught me General Relativity in the Honours year. But there is one valuable lesson that I got from Szekeres before finishing my study in Adelaide. I was already thinking of doing research and I was attracted to a fashionable topic at the time i.e. supersymmetry and supergravity (a natural extension from my Honours project on Grand Unified Theories). When I told him of this interest, he was telling me that my personality (timid) don't quite fit such a competitive field. I took this as a challenge and immediately started reading Wess & Bagger and Van Nieuwenhuizen. My interest in this continued for a while until I found Witten's "Topological Tools in 10-Dimensional Physics" which blew me away. Note I was one of the early subscribers to International Journal of Modern Physics A, until I could no longer afford them. My dream then was to establish such high-powered theoretical physics in Malaysia (and a dream still) and Szekeres' challenge contributed to this. Hence, my thanks on this Teacher's Day.