End of Ramadhan

We have now reached the end of Ramadhan for this year where one hopes for forgiveness, mercy, acceptance of good deeds and betterment of our character. Have taken leave for the whole week to reflect and to have time for more personal matters. Well, the week has not gone the way I had expected.

I was perturbed by two questions posed to me by my student and my former postdoc. First, given my near retirement, why I would be involved in a project that may outlive my academic career in the current university. Indeed, I ask this question myself. What I have been wanting to do before my retirement is to simply graduate all my students and have peace of mind until I retire. I chose to leave many things so that I can do this. But there will always be many bigger things than what we want personally. One of them is the push for quantum science & technology to be part of our national science agenda. This is something that I have tried to push before and given the present opportunity, I would like to make one last try. I do not wish for any position with respect to this but merely to ensure sustainability of the effort. I will leave when the time comes.

The other question is whether one should be vocal and push what one considers is right at the expense of creating other problems. I tend to frame this question in a bigger setting of how to deal with one's ideals in an environment which is far from perfect. In the first place, I tend to remind myself that one's own ideals do not arise in vacuum and more often than not they tend to be reactionary to some problems in life. Thus, I tend to entertain things in various shades of grey rather than simply just black and white. There will be certain things that are clearly black which one avoids and others (white) which one clearly follows. All else are probably contextual. How does one react then? I have a tendency to follow what Snowden often says in his talks: How do one creates more stories like this (towards ideals) and less stories like that (far from ideals)? This requires the contexts of each person conditions to be fully addressed as well, when charting future course.

All the above might sound too general. Perhaps a better physics analogy is the following. Most physicists will take Newtonian laws are only true within certain limits (the contexts) and in other limits, they are false. Does one abandon Newtonian laws altogether? Of course not; we will certainly use them when they are most effective and where deviations are insignificant (again contexts). When necessary, then one goes into the more general picture.

With respect to the second question above, I normally give my students the freedom to pursue what they consider interesting but later, whatever I consider (possibly) objectionable, I will raise the matter and observe how these objections are addressed in the views of the students. Some, I may agree and some, I may not (to some degree). One of the research directions pursued by my student is the area of noncommutative quantum mechanics (NCQM). Being brought up in a particular quantization school, I have certain views of the subject and there are aspects of it, I find puzzling and I think, it requires deeper understanding. Since this was not my primary research programmes pursued at this moment, I tend to put this of secondary priority relative to my main research programmes (related to geometry of states and symplectic topology). Thus, I have a tendency to leave the subject of NCQM for others to pursue in detail.

Back to the first question, it seems that I will spending my leave to think about some proposal with collaborators from other universities, to be written by the weekend. I was initially hoping for some free time to prepare for my talk at USM during the leave. So busy times ahead. Here is a pic taken from the meeting yesterday.

Hope today I will have some time to prepare for both proposal and the USM talk.