In the talk I gave at the undergraduate conference, I mention something that I did (as the extra mile) in realizing my dreams. I told the audience that I started subscribing to journals that I thought would help my career (paid from my own pocket). The first one would be International Journal of Modern Physics A and the letter version, Modern Physics Letters A, published by World Scientific, both of which I subscribed from the first issue. I roughly remembered that I got excited that World Scientific, based just next door, was about to publish their journals. I wrote to them and asked for a discounted rate for the subscription. The first issue of IJMPA had Witten's article on "Topological Tools in Ten-Dimensional Physics". It is this article that moved my interest away from supersymmetry, supergravity and even superstrings (despite the ten-dimensional physics is alluding to superstrings). The subtle use of abstract technical mathematics in physics (could be just normal physics) seems to attract me. I forgotten to highlight this matter in my talk.
The IJMPA and MPLA subscriptions went on for a few volumes until I found myself not reading a large percentage of the articles that are experimental or phenomenological in nature. So I decided to subscribe to a journal which is closer to my specialization. At the time, World Scientific was about to publish the first issue of Reviews in Mathematical Physics in 1989. My subscription to this journal again went for a few volumes. The next journal that I subscribed to is even more specialised, namely Journal of Geometry and Physics. This went for a few years until I find myself can no longer afford it due to other financial commitments. Besides these journals, I have also subscribed to MAAS Journal of Islamic Science (much earlier) and also to the magazine Afkar Inquiry until both the journal & magazine went out of print. When I was part of administrative team in the institute, I subscribed to Science in order to get a broader view of science, with the idea that when deciding on science, my views will not be lop-sided. This too ended, after a few years.
Personal journal subscriptions are expensive. So why did I make all these subscriptions? Well, I was dead serious about being a good academician and was hoping to be comprehensive and up-to-date with things that I am interested in. Later, this ambitious outlook was humbled by less than ideal reality and by my own limited self. Today, I focus mostly on what I can do within constraints and the outlook has shrunk to a very small percentage of what I had in the beginning.
Sometime last week, I had a virtual chat with a friend from UniMaP on activities to improve our scientific environment. He has been very active in getting scientific luminaries from abroad to speak at local events. He had his impressive International STEM & Innovation Colloquia Series (ISICS) that include Nobel Laureates as speakers. We exchanged ideas on handling such activities. In comparison to what he has done, I must say what we did at UPM, say for EQuaLS, is at a smaller scale, with the modest target of building research ecosystem (as opposed to STEM goals). Knowing full well how much commitment and resources are needed to run the 'smaller' EQuaLS, I can only imagine what immense efforts are needed for him to run ISICS. For our own events, sometimes we need to put in our own 'personal funds' (big or small) to ensure that these events are successful. Even bigger challenge is to sustain the series of events. When we first started our lecture series, the earlier ones were funded well by the Science Ministry. Thereafter, no (dedicated) real funds were made available for us to organise these events. Sometimes we get scornful remarks when we tried to secure some funding for these events e.g. so how many EQuaLS do you want to do; EQuaLS 20? Any benefits? Some expect that we must have quick return of investment, for instance, establishing a research collaboration with the speakers and even producing articles together. This was not our intent in the first place; what we wanted is access to the working minds of reputable scientists through interactions among them and direct discussions with them (usually not available by reading papers alone). Also, it is very rare that collaborations are made within a short time period; normally they are build naturally over time. Indeed, forced collaborations will made us look foolish or scientifically immature.
Another concern is that if we are doing events just for the sake of KPIs, particularly if they are seen as income generating events. Whatever fees that we were charging are often just enough to cover the expenses. With the pandemic last two years, it has become normal to hold these events as online events. This minimizes the cost but not necessarily absolves us from putting some minimal registration fees. The online events reduce the type of interactions that we have alluded earlier, which is rather a pity. I have now stopped chairing EQuaLS event and passed it to my younger colleagues (I also have avoided any other decision-making roles). Once, a friend from a different university, jokingly made the remark to me that I have become an event manager after holding so many EQuaLS event. I did try to get EQuaLS across to other universities but was not very successful partly due to it was seen more as our group's event. Whatever it is, I will let my younger colleagues to decide what they want to do with the future of EQuaLS.
Another topic that came up during my discussion with the UniMaP colleague, is the setting up of an institution that will help take care of these events. This is in fact harder to do. I think I have been part of several different committees that wanted to set up institutions like National Centre(s), National Laboratories, Joint International Labs and even attempted once to consider setting up Institute of Advanced Study, all of which are not realised. The one that we had a slight success of doing was to set up Malaysia-Italy Centre of Excellence for Mathematical Sciences, together with Polito through Prof. Lamberto Rondoni. Here is Prof. Rondoni giving congratulatory wishes to INSPEM for the 20th anniversary.
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