Recently I publicise a post in my Malay blog and also reactivating my social media posts. Somehow, I can't help feeling 'dirty' doing it, making me guilty of being perceived as an attention seeker. The intentional dynamics can change very quickly from hoping to educate others to something that pushes one's ego. I would like to keep that under control.
The post mentioned above was intended to be a 'review' of the book "Reduction, Emergence & Levels of Reality" for which one of its authors, Lamberto Rondoni had several times been to UPM. The post became more of my attempt to understand the ideas of what the authors wrote on, rather than being a review. As the title of the book suggests, it focuses on the themes of reductionism and emergence (behaving like opposites); reductionism is perhaps familiar to the way physicists think but emergence is somewhat nebulous and the book expounds on where this arises. Any good student of science will benefit on reading this book since it gives an idea of how science is patched up between the different areas. An important lesson here is that it is not enough to work on an idea in science without knowing how it fits into a bigger scheme of the larger body of knowledge. This is why I told my students that it is not enough to do some calculations without understanding their implications in other parts of the science that one wants to build.
I did not know Prof. Rondoni until I was introduced to him during his first visit. Note that his earlier visits are essentially hosted by other members of the institute that I was part of. As usual, I do look up into his research areas just like other visitors to the institute, and to my surprise, he happens to be a theoretical physicist working in the area of statistical mechanics and dynamical systems. He gave several talks at the institute and naturally, I had some conversations with him, perhaps exploring areas where one could collaborate. It was during his later visits, our conversations turned to the possibility of setting up an ICTP-like institute, which had several versions. Finally, we thought of having a centre within the institute, partly to avoid some administrative issues and this was agreed upon from both Malaysian and Italian sides.
I tried to encourage others to get involved in this collaboration because it takes more than just a few individuals to make it happen. Visits from both sides were made possible under the Erasmus+ programme. Many students had the opportunity to visit Polito then, including two students of mine. One of them had a joint publication with a Polito researcher; see arXiv version here and published version here. I too, had the opportunity to visit Polito during my final days with the institute.
During the visit, I was desperate to find an area where we (Santo, Syed and me) can work with Prof. Rondoni. It was rather a difficult mix; both Syed and I have interest in geometric ideas while Santo and Prof. Rondoni work on chaos, which tends to be numerical. There is this idea of Nambu brackets which have applications to chaos that we wanted to explore and they can have geometric origins. However, without specific problems being solved and I failed to convince them to pursue this direction. The other problem I suggested is hyperbolic billiards, their symmetries and the quantum versions. There is some interest in this though we did not continue.
I gather that now the centre is no longer being pursued as interests fizzled, which is rather unfortunate. For me, I always consider having a good mix of international researchers and local ones is good for our scientific development. Like the title of Dyson's paper, it is one of the great missed opportunities. We need to learn some lessons from this.
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