On August 14, I received a message from Dr. Nurisya that she, Faizal & her kids are around the corner and they wanted to drop off a gift that they have bought for me sometime much earlier. The gift is a tribute book to KK Phua in conjunction with his 80th birthday (see pic below).
Ever since, I have brought this book along whenever I travel so that I can read it whenever possible. The pic below is taken when I was travelling to Tambun.
Yesterday when I brought this book to the car service centre, I thought that maybe I should blog something about it, but it will not be a review or add anything to the lovely tributes found in the book. Instead I will write on how he has influenced me in many ways and make parallels (without being presumptuous) of whatever tiny fraction of what he has done with the things that we did. Note added: I did not quite dwell too much of the latter in the end.
While I have met KK Phua in conferences and have corresponded with him a few times, I do not quite know him personally. I do know that he is a gigantic and influential figure in Singapore and is well-known internationally (and because of this, I tend to shy away). He is better known as the chairman for World Scientific. I do remember when it was founded, I was excited about having a scientific publishing company just next door to us and indeed followed closely the publisher in the early years. I have bought many books from them. The ones below are the early ones that I had and was used during my undergraduate years. The one on Grand Unified Theory (I think it is out of print) was used for my final year project.
The most recent book from them is the following book of which I will use to teach at Xiamen University.
Of course, there are many more books in my collection from World Scientific such as this huge volume of reprints co-published with North-Holland (articles from Physics Reports). This is when I was thinking of doing supergravity for my research (also had the reprint volume on supersymmetry and superstrings).
They had many book series which are interesting. One series that I was hoping to follow is the Advanced Series in Mathematical Physics (see pic below - can't find my volume 1 of the series). After several volumes, I told myself to tone down my 'fantasies' and buy only what I need (in other words, it goes beyond my budget). At the time, I was already honing down my interest to more on mathematical aspects of theoretical physics. Perhaps my early years of interest on high energy physics also led to colleagues at the department identify me as high energy physicist in the beginning but really I was into the mathematical structures that underlie physics in general.
Having said this, I also did subscribe to journals published by World Scientific. Here is a picture of the first volume of International Journal of Modern Physics A. It was here that I got interested in Witten's way of looking at physics (see link here) using abstract mathematical tools. I believe a more condensed version appeared on the Argonne symposium proceedings. Note: Perhaps not noticed by many is that my own research interest for PhD was spurred by the failure of classical symmetries in quantum theory of a different kind.
Besides IJMPA, I also had subscription of Modern Physics Letters A. After awhile, I found myself not reading most of the articles (and also of because of limited budget), and hence I discontinued my subscription to these two journals. I subscribed instead Reviews of Mathematical Physics, given my refined interest then. Even this got discontinued later. Most of the subscribed issues of these journals have been donated to the theoretical physics group in UPM (hope they get to be useful).
Back to the tribute of KK Phua, the first half of the book was mainly tributes to KK by many well-known scientists. While the second half contains technical articles dedicated to KK. There are some interesting facts that was written in the book on KK's influence. One is on his generosity. Below is a snapshot of ICTP's receiving of 23,000 book donation from World Scientific.
Perhaps less visible, much of the stay in IAS for visitors like our group (see here) were made possible due to some sponsorship sought by the organizer in IAS of which he was the director (and Kwek his deputy). Kwek cleverly disguised his tribute write-up in the technical second half of the book (see footnote a in his article). Another interesting article is that of the late Lars Brink concerning KK's retirement and changes made in IAS (relatable in many ways of what I have seen locally here). This is why I hesitated to consider Prof. Twareque's suggestion in developing the idea of a Centre of Mathematical Physics as stated in this post, since I believe in first, continuing tradition set by the past director of our maths institute (a cautionary note I reiterated to the management members when our first director retired) and that we (or maybe just me) have less influence on the Malaysian theoretical and mathematical scientists on the whole (as well as decision makers). Returning to IAS, in some way, there are documents I've wished I could have saved for my own keeping or better, would still be made available to the public. In any case, World Scientific publishing of conference proceedings and memorial volumes has surely kept these memories in circulation.
Perhaps the fondest memory I had was when KK wrote to me about a Malaysian representative for the roundtable discussion in YM60 conference. To set the record straight, I did not just volunteer myself for that and I gave a few other names (professors) to be considered. But the following pic shows the organizer's reply.
Perhaps another interesting matter mentioned in KK's tribute book was his role in establishing the Overseas Chinese Physics Association (OCPA) and their conferences/activities. I was curious if one could have done the same (despite that we had very little influence as mentioned above). Could we have something like Nusantara label for it? I'm aware that Uzbekistan has something similar drawing talents of Uzbek origin from abroad. For us, I don't think we have that many Malay talents exported abroad on the subject of physics and mathematics (I may be wrong). Thus, if it does happen, it would be regional in flavour. In any case, with the current political environment and stereotypes, it will probably draw much criticism. Just a thought and they say, dreams are free.
No comments:
Post a Comment