Many times, I remembered getting perturbed by remarks like we are of the third world, mediocre standards or even less severe remarks like cosmetic improvements, taking things on the surface etc. Each time, one gets a sense of revolt internally and the urge of proving critics wrong. On the other hand, being practical & realistic, one knows our scientific ecosystem is less ideal in many cases with the need to strive better and not fall into the trap of being arrogantly stupid or even ignorant. A story of my life ... the stance I tend to take is sort of midway by knowing one's self-worthiness (without the inferiority complex if that is at all possible, given our society's stereotyping) and pushing for (high) international standards (without being swayed too much on popularity of research topic as well as not being trapped by 'lost causes').
When I joined my former university, I (spontaneously) told the interviewers that my goal is to set up theoretical physics group which is respectable at international level, but at heart, I wasn't sure that I could do it. Practically, I was alone then and I realised quickly that I needed to surround myself with students. My first BSc (Hons) student who did a theoretical physics final year project was Loh Pit Mui (the top student in that batch) and this was in 1993.
This was a pretty alien topic for many then (including academics) and fortunately she was able to absorb well the differential geometric techniques for the project. Of course, this is not a new thing (was in Isham's lecture notes) but detailed calculations were made in the thesis. Thereafter, she decided to do her MSc with another supervisor (on magnetic materials). I'm ok with this since I was still grappling to find out what research topic I should be doing then, since I was still a 'fresh' PhD graduate (graduated end of 1990 and thereafter spent 3 semesters in the isolated Bintulu campus in pre-world wide web era). I remembered reading this quote by Ashtekar in his book on Nonperturbative Canonical Gravity and felt troubled by it.
Later, I knew this is just a broad statement and there is still room for research in the topic of geometry in quantization. Not all details are known and there are many interesting cases that have yet to be treated properly. I knew that I should be getting postgraduate students quickly and hence, I accepted a PhD student as early in mid 90's from Algeria by the name of Ahmed Bouketir. From the first conference I attended in Awana Genting, the late Prof. Lay Nam Chang told me there was a connection between the system with external magnetic field (which I had studied) and the phenomena of quantum Hall effect (QHE). There was also a push from colleagues in the department to do something on condensed matter and QHE is a condensed matter phenomena. Thus, I gave the problem of QHE on the sphere to my first PhD student and he graduated in June 2000 (having the same external examiner as me). I seems to have lost my hard copy of his thesis (whoever borrowed it, please return it to me) but one can see partially the thesis here.
I continued to take up postgraduate students and even explored new areas (see pic above for an early group photo with other colleagues from Engineering & Computer Science. In the pic, there is a postdoctoral fellow Dr. Tay Buang Ann, whom I believed was the first postdoc in UPM). At the time, I told myself that I can do these explorations with MSc students (at the time there was no publication requirement for Masters level) and only take on PhD students in quantum areas that I am familiar with. Some (potential) insisted to do PhD in areas beyond my quantum specialization and in these cases, I tend to insist on external supervisors for their supervisory committee. A few even have the cheek to say that I should have more focus in research but yet insisted in doing areas that I don't specialise in. Generally, I would have advised students to do their PhD abroad if they can, since there are bigger theoretical physics groups and these groups can give more stimulating environment for the students to grow. However, at some point, we have to create this environment locally and start to believe in our own research groups even if the atmosphere is only a small fraction of what is available abroad. I am aware some (even students) tend to underestimate our capabilities and even have low respect as if we are doomed to fail. They are entitled to their opinions but at times, I would challenge them back. Sometimes I told my students that researchers abroad can be wrong too (and have pointed a few cases from my personal experiences) and thus, wished that students not to take their opinions wholesale uncritically. On the other hand, we have to be more critical of ourselves without thinking that we are less talented than the foreigners. What I do see is that we have less opportunities (coupled with skewed local tendencies to work on easier problems) but not less talent. We do have to live with these stereotypes and we should try to reduce this as much as possible.
When I was in the administration of the institute, I do try to show our international visitors that we know something about frontier scientific problems, that we have respectable understanding (this actually requires a lot of effort) and we can work as hard as they do. This is in no way a show of pride but merely an expression of available talent in us if opportunity comes by. More importantly, is the lessening of stereotypes that we might be associated with. To get such respectable understanding, our group were fortunate to know Kwek Leong Chuan who open up opportunities for our theory group to attend scientific events in Singapore. I first met Kwek in a KOSEF-JSPS winter school in Seoul (and also Freddy Permana Zen who was my room mate there),
From then on, I maintained contact with both of them, Our theory group went to Singapore many times as they regularly host scientific events and in these events, we got to hear distinguished scientists speak. Below are some pics.
With Nobel laureates:
The last one is when I braved myself to be part of a panel discussion, together with Nobel Laureate David Gross (see paragraph below on collaboration).
Another person who helped me get acquainted with international scientists is Prof. S. Twareque Ali (see photo below when we had our last photo together before his departure),
It has always been in my thoughts to get internationally known researchers to Malaysia so that more can get the benefit of listening to them. Even before joining INSPEM, I was already organizing a lecture series (before anyone else did) in ITMA.
That lecture series called TSL Expository Lecture Series was named after the lab Theoretical Studies Laboratory in ITMA. When the institutes were being restructured, I learned my lesson not to name lecture series with a lab's name that may not be there in the future. So, while in INSPEM, I renamed the organized lecture series to EQuaLS which stands for Expository Quantum Lecture Series. It was for the first EQuaLS that I had invited Prof. Twareque Ali. At the time he just got his review article published "Quantization Methods: A Guide for Physicists and Analysts", coauthored with Miroslav Englis. Of course, I knew of his work much earlier than that (e.g. with E. Prugovecki). Prof. Twareque kept coming to almost all of our EQuaLS events. His collaborator Englis came for EQuaLS6 (with joint conference) and EQuaLS8.
Last point on collaboration: it is quite interesting that within mathematical sciences, collaboration in scientific work is not quite the norm in the past. Unlike some experimental sciences (e.g. physics) where collaboration is more natural as scientific progress might need different laboratories or pieces of different lab equipment or in some cases different environments (e.g. parts of the sky). In a piece of speech I gave in India, I mentioned the fact that the work mathematical scientists do (traditionally) occurs in the mind of individuals (computers today became an extension of the mind), which is not directly accessible by others and hence works of mathematical nature tend to be individualistic in nature. Collaboration then requires some form of political will. It is interesting to observe for local theoretical physics community (including pure mathematics), there is minimal interaction or collaboration and we tend to work in silos with collaboration network coloured by the relationship with the former supervisor. I pointed this out in the panel discussion with David Gross above. Some disagreed with this point but one can merely check the facts available (and I'm only referring to Malaysian situation and certainly I do not agree with prolonging such situation).
As time goes on, the scientific problems are getting harder and sometimes requiring different mathematical skills, thus needing collaboration. The pattern of collaboration among mathematical scientists is indeed changing over time (see this article and table below). One clearly sees there is an increasing collaboration, though it may not be because of increasing difficulty of scientific problems but there could be compounding factors like ease of global communications, converging trends and even simply the number of publications (for the case of ASEAN countries, see this publication and the other table below). Suffice to say that increase in collaboration is a natural tendency irrespective of what the causes are.
So how much we have achieved so far? I would like to reiterate things that I have said several times to my students, and also was mentioned in my speech here. We have now gone into a phase of being able to converse with international researchers at a technical level with certain amount of confidence. The next phase is where international researchers begin to recognize the unique skills we have (known for certain flavour of theoretical physics). We have certainly not reached this phase (despite some international researchers outside our network are interested in our work) and even the phase before requires strengthening. EQuaLS has contributed to our technical sophistication substantially (with us witnessing speakers bouncing questions between themselves) but my concern is its sustainability as we have limited funding (and networking). We also have our (almost) weekly meetings (still going on) for which we ourselves practice bouncing questions off each other. There is a danger of ourselves drifting off into our own silos and no longer emotionally attached to the group (a good read for this is the article by Karlsohn, "The academic seminar as emotional community"). I hope this activity can be revitalised. With us now working with different institutions, a common free time has become problematic. Perhaps one can try to do Gelfand-type of seminars (at odd hours) but so far we are still ok with near lunch hour weekly. Finally, I hope this group stick together and I end this post with a picture taken during my retirement.
No comments:
Post a Comment