I Dream of Gibbons

In my last post, I mention about the honorary fellowship conferred to me last Saturday. I also posted the news on FB but I hope it is not viewed as braggery and me being full of myself. I would like to consider it posting more on positive matters as opposed to negative ones that seem to flood the social media. In fact, I'm more comfortable to post things on my blog than social media that pushes content to people's face. Blogs are often read only by those who are interested in them.

By saying the above, I would like to project my views about myself as being an average person who had opportunities to go abroad learning theoretical physics and the motivation to improve oneself on and on until I guess I'm on my deathbed. There will be ups and downs but the general direction is improvement. I would also like to push back the idea of mediocrity that some might want to paint. In the past, I would be obsessive of such a push-back but at this age and tiredness, I take things in a stride and be contented with what Allah have ordained for me.

Just to get a glimpse the subconscious psyche in me, some weeks back, I dreamt of talking to Gary Gibbons and I woke up, questioning why did I dream of him (note that I had other researchers who have influenced me more). Gibbons was there in DAMTP when I did Part III but I had never met him up close. I did meet his collaborator, Malcolm Perry (Gibbons & Perry collaborated on the seminal paper of Positive Mass Theorems for Black Holes together with Hawking and Horowitz) face-to-face asking if he has Witten's Holomorphic Morse Inequalities paper (since he had been to Princeton) just for me to get a copy (and he gave me one). Researchwise, I have not being reading papers of Gibbons recently and influencewise, the papers of Gibbons that attracted me more are not the usual ones that people refer to (e.g. Traffic Noise and the Hyperbolic Plane). Just a few days later, then I saw the news of Gibbons as one of the recipients of the 2025 Dirac Medal.

No, I'm not telling you this story as if I've been granted Divine secrets or that I have clairvoyant capabilities (far from it!). The real reason is perhaps how the story went in this dream. In the dream, I put up the courage to talk to Gibbons who had expounded on an idea that I had publicised (yes, it's only a dream) and tried to sound intelligent. On hearing my points/questions, he was telling me how shallow they are and I was taken aback and felt embarrassed. The story actually reflects the reality of what we have been facing and tried to overcome. Most of the time, we explore ideas of theoretical physics but found difficulty in getting their technical details, much due to our less exposure or really the lesser experience of technical depth in researching them. The inferiority complex and the insecurity is somewhat ingrained in us and it is a real challenge to overcome this. Part of the motivation in organizing schools like EQuaLS is to overcome this challenge. The fact I'm still dreaming this shows that we have yet to do this successfully, despite the many EQuaLS we have organized. We need something more. In the past, we had QuEST almost weekly meetings and incorporate the Gelfand (seminar) mentality in the meetings. However, it is difficult to maintain such meetings given our commitments. Again, having activities is only part of the story; we need the right environment that can nurture our curiosities and technical capabilities. We need to reflect on our priorities, I guess,

When I told my wife about the dream, she told me I was thinking too much about work and reminded me that I am now a retiree. But that doesn't mean I should stop thinking about science, right?

Honorary Fellow and Failed Visits

Yesterday, the Malaysian Institute of Physics (IFM) conferred to me the Honorary Fellowhip of the organization. I knew about the matter actually weeks ago when the Secretary of the organization; I was surprised but felt honoured. I kept mum about it until it was officially given to me yesterday.

 

Perhaps what is not known to many is that I was already a fellow of the Institute before, since 1998. This was before I got my associate professorship in the year 2000.

So what is the difference between a fellow and an honorary fellow? Unsure myself, I searche this on Google and Gemini gave me this summary:

When I read this, I was wondering what has been 'outstanding' about me, particularly towards IFM. I only served as a council member of IFM for only several years (in 1994). At the time, I had just came back from Bintulu Campus of UPM (now rebranded as Universiti Putra Malaysia Sarawak - UPMS) and I was trying to be active through IFM and various other committees at the university and at the national level. However after, I received my first administrative position in UPM as head of laboratory in 2002, I had to focus on development of the labs at the institutes (then ITMA and INSPEM). My last administrative position is as Deputy Director at INSPEM. Before landing at this position, I started off Expository Quantum Lecture Series (EQuaLS) in 2007 and later had IFM coorganized some of these events. The pictures below are from EQuaLS5 with the late IFM president Prof. Chia Swee Ping and John Baez is among the invited speakers.

Actually even before INSPEM, there were activities in ITMA involving IFM.

I think these lecture series are among my accomplishments and these event triggered research directions that our group has pursued. The main aim was really to get our theorists acquainted with the technical level of the distinguished speakers. Some indeed questioned why our group has not collaborated or co-wrote papers with these speakers but that was not the aim. Proper progress requires an organic growth of our talents and usually this is a slow process. Among the results is that one of EQuaLS1 speaker, the late Prof S.T. Ali became the supervisor of my younger colleague Assoc. Prof. Dr. Nurisya Mohd Shah who is now a Fellow of IFM, appointed in the same ceremony (congrats to her),

So what is the responsibilities of an honorary fellow? I had Gemini giving me this answer: 

I will try my best to do so and may Allah help me with my duties.

While we were in UM for the above conferring, we thought that we should just cross over to Shah Alam to visit our son Izhar whom we have not seen for quite some time. Unfortunately he was not there when we arrived.

So instead, we went to a mall to get our lunch and we went to Masjid Denai Alam to perform our prayers.

This morning, we made another visit to his place in DK Impian to see him but again, unfortunately he was not around to see us.

We left some goods at his door and hoped that he is alright wherever he is (may Allah grant him safety, peace and tranquility in performing his duties). I told my other half, we should not do anymore unplanned visits since the travels have their costs. Back home, we took back our sick cat Yaya from a clinic costing us about RM500+. Here is a video of Yaya recuperating.

Green & In(ter)dependence

One of the things that I've been doing is the past several days is to update my website Resonant Frequencies. Just before I retired, I had plans to do this website so that I could actually put up my own contents. Perhaps I was trying to resurrect my earlier Qfizik website hosted within UPM campus. The Qfizik site in the beginning was built on a PC with Microsoft Personal Webserver. Later I got ambitious (during the days of Multimedia Super Corridor rave), and I applied for a research grant so that I can have a proper server hosting my content using IIS (and also for running Visual C++ and WebMathematica). This is way before UPM had PutraBlast hosting course materials. In 2015, the server died and my interest in web development died with it. In 2022, before retiring, I had to be in charge of the departmental seminars and thought that I should be recording them. Finally, I decided to get my own domain and hence with it the webhosting of Resonant Frequencies. After retiring, I thought I would just maintain the domain and continue paying for the subscription.

It was later after retirement, that I thought I should add more materials (some wanted my lecture notes) particularly the notes of H.S. Green's lectures, which I thought needs saving. Green has been quite an influential figure for me due to his original ideas. I wrote about him in this post. Since the conditions of Green's lecture notes is getting poorer, I started retyping the notes in LaTeX sometime ago but could not sustain it due to heavy teaching load. Now that I'm "free", I could now continue.

So far, the first six lectures of Mathematical Methods are now available on the webpage. I wish to finish all the 22 lectures and continue to do the same for his Statistical Mechanics and Elementary Field Theory lectures. I hope I have enough energy to do this. The other concern is the expenses that come with the domain subscription. Without additional income, at some point, I guess I will have to discontinue the subscription.

So today is our Independence Day. My son Ihsan had just came back the day before. Together with him, we decided to spend this Independence Day by paying a visit to my sister in KL given that her husband had just went for a pacemaker procedure. Also met with my brother Nordin there. Learned about the health problem of my musician brother Dzafa and it sounds worrying. My prayers for him and others in the family. Given my limited resources for now (preparing for my youngest forthcoming studies), this is the least I can do.

While we celebrate independence day, above all the things that one can discuss & contemplate on, is basically interdependence. No one can survive alone and it is much more difficult to put in actions (over words) for whatever we desire. Sometime we fail to realise this, thinking solely only on what we want, not realizing this is rarely the way of the world. May Allah grant us wisdom and ease in this world and the hereafter.

Varia: The Week Leading to Anniversary

Yesterday was our 32nd wedding anniversary and we celebrated it rather modestly. Let us backtrack for a few days more.

Given that I have 'more time' these days, I spent a little bit more on social media looking at all the viral issues being discussed, only to be depressed. There are many more educational materials in the internet but there seems to be more gravitation to dubious sources. Even with AI, I do think we need to read real books and reflect more. I do give such advices to my own family. I shared the following video to my family: key phrase - question everything. When I look at my book collection, I realised that my family rarely touch them. Of course, most of these are on maths and physics, which they will not be interested in. But I do have plenty of religious books and self-help books too. A large percentage of them is in English and the non-English ones many are written by Indonesian authors. In a way, I saw that people only read what is familiar and understandable. I worry about where these books should go, once I'm gone. At the same time, I rushed my writing on my Malay blog to post this, so that more could benefit from what I have been thinking.

The weekend also saw some mild earthquake happened in Segamat. Rather unexpected. I post the following to my family WhatsApp.

While not trying to be alarmist, one should always be aware of such news. In fact, this morning, another earthquake was felt and posted the news in my family's WhatsApp. I will keep posting things that I feel important.

During the weekend, we went to UiTM Shah Alam for my youngest son to collect his convocation gown. The convocation will be in mid September.

After collecting the convocation gown, he took some photos there after donning it.

Just two days before, he collected his new pair of glasses after a visit to our local opthamologist (it was detected that he had high astigmatism in one eye). 

To add, I also bought myself a new pair of leather shoes just for his convocation to conform to the dress code during the convocation. I was not sure if my Skecher shoes is allowed (wore these because of my back problem). Soon I hope, he will register for his BSc degree. By then, I hope I could manage with the extra expenses if he stays far away. I pray that everything will be well.

Last night, my other half and I decided to go out and have dinner at the local Middle Eastern restaurant.

I thought that I wore a smile when the pics were taken. I guess these were the best that I can do with many things on my mind. Don't worry, be happy.

Unplanned and Funerals

The day before yesterday, we took an unplanned visit to sister-in-law's place in Segamat for personal matters and the hope then was to continue the journey to Rompin. We waited for my other half to come back from work in Mantin. We reached Segamat during Maghrib time and we realized that we did not switch any lights and our cats will be left in the dark.

The next day (yesterday), the planned journey to Rompin was cancelled and at the same time, my eldest son received the call for a job interview. In a way, the coincidence of Rompin's cancelled visit allow us to go back to Seremban for my son's interview. While we were on our way back to Seremban, we received the news that the daughter of my niece, Nur Malihah Maisarah, has passed away. Just two days before, she was admitted to the hospital for lung infection. Given the flurry of activities, we thought of deferring our visit at a later time. Fate has it in a different way.

Thus, while we were still on the way back to Seremban, we decided to go to her funeral in Kuala Lumpur as soon as we take a stop at home and let our eldest son take some rest for the next day's interview. On reaching Seremban, we saw a slight traffic congestion due to a bush fire left to the flyover heading to our home.

This had never happened before and we were curious on how it started. After a slight rest and refreshing ourselves, we began our journey to Kuala Lumpur. We initially set our journey to Imam Al-Tirmidzi Sri Sentosa Mosque where the funeral prayers will take place. Since we are rather late, we decided to head straight to the burial place in Bukit Jalil Muslim Graveyard. Since the burial will be after Maghrib, we prayed Maghrib at a nearby surau.

Before the burial, the father gave us the opportunity to see Maisarah for the last time (since we did not get to see her before the funeral prayers). There is a photo shared among family members only and we will not share it out of respect. Instead, I will share her photo in the way we would like to remember her.

Among muslim community, we called those children who passed away while they are still very young as 'anak syurga' literally translated as children of the heaven or jannah. May Allah grant us to meet her in Jannah.

Today, again my other half received another sad news that her cousin just passed away in Muar. Her cousin has a similar name to mine and slightly older than me. Life is fragile and the grim reminder that we can go at any time. My other half is now travelling to Muar with my eldest son. My youngest son and I stayed home to settle some domestic chores.

Putting Books Away

Yesterday was the last day of my teaching contract with XMUM. I rushed myself to finish whatever tasks left for me to complete my teaching portfolio (plenty of documents to prepare, more than what I was used to in my former university). In the previous semester, the coordinators for the courses I taught had took the initiative to complete the teaching portfolio themselves and saved me from all the details needed to fill up the course portfolio. This time round, I had one course that had me as the sole lecturer (hence coordinator) and for the other shared course, I had to look into parts of the teaching portfolio. Thus, my past weekdays have been really busy with me filling the teaching portfolio. At several stages, my eyes teared up, out of all the strain looking at all the numbers.

It was only on Thursday night that I was able to complete the course portfolio and got the endorsement from the Head of Department. What a relief. Many of the repetitive things (e.g. marking) become chores but these are part of what I have been paid to do. To add, me being old-fashioned, I tend to do some things manually, even if easier automated ways are available. But that is my choice of making things relatively harder but to my satisfaction.

So now, I can put these books away.

The main textbook is the one on the right (really expensive) to which we refer to a lot. The book on the left is a book of my eldest son during his BSc course; I did not quite use this since it is meant for maths students, but just took it out for reference.

The other books that I will put away are the following.

I thought of reading them to give me a sense of what mathamtical tools would be of interest to the students. I had also took out another book on econometrics by Maddala,which I did not read at all (not in the ucture). The book on the right by Takayama is more rigorous and it covers topics on equilibrium. Some might wonder why I have these books. I have always considered mathematics as a more precise language that scientists use and I had the curiosity of how maths are being used in economics. I really wanted to read Takayama's book (appropriate for research level) but now, I will have to put this off perhaps indefinitely. So before putting it back, had a quick read of the foreword and introductory pages. I was surprised that it mentioned Planck:

Commenting on Max Planck's decision not to study economics, J.M. Keynes remarked that economics involves the "amalgam of logic and intuition and wide knowledge of facts, most of which are not precise." (Takayama, p. xv)

If Planck had decided otherwise, perhaps quantum theory will only be discovered much later. To have Planck to even consider economics is perhaps not much of a surprise. Another giant of quantum theory, John von Neumann later make contributions to game theory. This is another subject which I knew very little but wished that I know something about and it extrapolates the 'continuum' in economics (a thing of interest in quantum theory). Indeed I highlighted this matter in my classes though was not really appreciated. I even mentioned in class, that when dealing with economics, one ought to think more like physicists than mathematicians as many variables carry dimensions (not pure numbers) and that there are hidden assumptions all the while that one has to be aware of. I was trying to make the class more interesting to students. In fact, I use WolframAlpha extensively to help students build intuition often not found in books. I mention this in a document of the course portfolio to show that I make extraneous efforts to help students understand. In the course that I was handling alone, the course contents had two strands in it namely the linear algebra strand (matrices) and the applied calculus strand. To a certain extent, this seems 'disconnected', but they can be made more unified if the multivariable calculus (the last part of the course) makes use of the matrix structure. However the difficulty is to find a suitable introductory textbook that approach it as such. I did mention this in the course review document and hopefully it will be helpful for future versions of the course.

Now, back to my beloved quantum stuff ....

Making A Transition

Currently I'm doing a lot of reading in topics which I have plenty of interest in, making notes (including exercises and proofs) wherever possible. I still do my daily survey of arXiv to have some notion of what is of interest to others. I'm doing a lot of listening to a lot technology podcasts to understand where industries are going. Note that I've been doing these all the while, irrespective of how busy I am with my teaching duties (the priority, of course, being paid for this). With my teaching contract is coming to an end, I will be doing more of these. I still owe the university, filing up my teaching portfolion. Sometime last week, I thought of finishing my duties by sending the exam scripts to the exam unit of the university but unfortunately I found out that there are more things to do. Thus, I figure that I can only end my duties later this week.

From listening to technology podcasts, I'm learning about new tools in the hope of it will help me in research. One that I saw is Google's Notebook LM. I found out that it could summarize Riemann's 1851 thesis, which is in German, and I do find that is of value. Another feature that I saw was the mind map tool that could be very useful (see picture)

I do hope to toy with it more when I find the time is suitable. I have tried other tools that help summarize papers but I do not want it to replace totally my own reading of the paper, which is needed for proper understanding (the devil is in the details). Perhaps, I can use such summaries to see whether I should proceed reading a particular paper.

In anticipation of forthcoming duties (formal or not), I hope to reread my books on quantum field theory and quantum many body theory. Let's see what happens.

Marking Mania Stressful Week

Ever since the final exams on Friday, 25 July 2025, I was only able to begin marking on the following Sunday, since on Saturday, I was in a wedding (as mentioned in the last post). As usual, the initial marking began quite slowly as one is getting used with the way students answer the exam. At the time, I had one bundle of SEM101 scripts (the subject shared with Dr. Athirah) and another bundle of scripts for the subject SEM112 that I teach alone. For the shared subject, I have three questions to mark, which accounts for 50% of the marks, and Dr. Athirah marks the other four questions. I thought I could finish the SEM102 bundle on Monday, so that I can exchange scripts with Dr. Athirah. But alas, I could only finish the bundle on Tuesday and made the exchange then. On exchanging, I had another five bundles to mark, totalling around 300 scripts for SEM102. The rest of the week was spent on these remaining five SEM102 bundles, focusing more on groups under her. I started marking for my own SEM102 group only on Friday evening (after returning four bundles of scripts back to Dr. Athirah). Noting I have the other subject SEM112 to look into and that the deadline for uploading the marks by Monday noon, I panicked. I told my other half, I should have cancelled the physiotherapy session last Saturday because that 'wasted' half a day.

That last weekend also saw all my sons back at home but I could not spend much time with them, for me to focus on marking. Also two problems came up then, that put me in a lot of distress - the kind of emotional disturbance that I was experiencing, I can say, would be equivalent to the recent 8.8 Richter earthquake. I had to make myself physically, emotionally and mentally strong, relying on whatever religious strength that I had with me. It was also unfortunate that I had left my usual Qur'an reading for the whole marking week, for it would have helped me better.

Come Sunday, I did not sleep to make sure I finished all my marking. Did some discussions with Dr. Athirah and the Head of Department, that went way after midnight, to settle and finalise the marks. The finalising carried on up to the Monday, when I am supposed to upload the marks. Naturally, I had to ask the Head to help get the extension and the deadline for me was extended to 6pm that day. I did what I could and the following Tuesday (after making sure that I rested, having not slept since Sunday), I still have to resolve some issues. Hopefully that will be the end of it. So today, I went to UPM to collect new stock of medicine as the ones I have are almost finished. Met Dr. Nurisya and Dr. Chan to talk about future plans.

Thus, it has been a stressful week for me. My prayer that Allah grant me ease in the near future. Perhaps the only happy news that I had received was the paper acceptance by the journal Quantum Information & Computation. The paper contains parts of what I have presented in the Siam conference (see this post - I'm still paying the expenses of this). Other than that, prior to the marking mania week, I met up with another theorist, hoping to help a cosmology research project that he is doing - I have not done anything just yet. 

July End Varia

Last Friday was the final exam of both subjects that I have taught. The exam was held in the LY3 Exam Hall, a distant away from the five faculty and admin blocks. In the week before up to the exam day, I was struggling to finish the assignment marking. Serves me right for earlier procrastination and making each assignment lengthy; during the teaching week, I had to prioritise teaching preparation and we had the midterm exam scripts to mark and thus, I put less priority to the assignment. The lengthier assignment is mainly because I would like to get the students to do a variety of problems from each main topic. With no tutors to help (unlike the other subject) and the marking has to be made electronically on my laptop (assignments being submitted through Moodle), te marking was terribly slow.

Feeling very tired from all the work, I had my other half and son to drive me to campus on the exam day. After the exam, I waited for them to pick me up. While waiting, took the photos below for memories sake.

The largest block is where the President's office (admin building together with the library) is. All the five blocks are connected through the basement parkin and the ground floor.

The day after, we have a wedding to attend in KL. Here are some photos

I was not that well that day and had dozed off several times during the event probably due to the drowsy pain killer. We were there quite early hoping to beat the possible massive jam, since the day coincided with a planned demonstration by the opposition party. Despite the country's economy is improving, the political atmosphere does not seem to mature as it should, driven by distrust and emotive hate politics, which is rather disappointing. As religious scholars remind us, we are living in the age of fitan.

Final Classes

Last week was the final week of the semester. I had scheduled many replacement classes during the week and had a 5-day working week (note: I'm part-time and I don't have to be in campus if there are no classes). Last Thursday, was in fact a full day for me, stretching from 9 am in the morning for a replacement lecture until 6 pm for a replacement tutorial, extending an hour after the final tutorial that day. Had to bring my youngest son (together with my other half and eldest son) that day to help me carry exam scripts for the students to look at. They left me in campus thereafter and picked me up after 6 pm. While I was there, I stayed mainly in the library, the surau and public spaces near the class venue.

Being the final week, I decided to take photos after my final class for each lecture or tutorial. It probably looked silly to the students but in my mind, it would probably be final semester there (que sera sera). So here are the photos.

That Friday (the last day of the semester before the study week), I have my replacement tutorial classes. When I arrived at the venue, I was surprised that they had given me a large lecture theatre.

Perhaps everyone else had finished their classes and that most venue are free. Unfortunately, only four students came, probably they have gone 'home'. In the photo below are three of the students (one left midway).

Actually, sometimes I do feel one goes unappreciated when we do all the teaching. I don't pretend to be an ideal teacher (in fact I apologize for any shortcomings to the students). Preparing for teaching often goes invisible; the long hours that goes into it (even for basic subjects) is largely unknown to many. My other half can attest to the number of hours I put into preparing the lecture and particularly tutorials (with scores of problems to solve). At times, I can feel the jeer or cheekiness of students, thinking probably that I don't know things until I had to say something beyond what they see in the notes or books. In any case, it is fine for me if I've been looked down upon or even despised; I have been there many times before. I still have 'nightmares' how many looked at me with such despise body language. Nevertheless, I still work and do what I know best.

Having aged, I tire easily nowadays. Withstanding the almost constant backpain, saps my energy. Occasionally, I will take up pain killers like Tramadol. I was also given Gabapentin and Pregabalin for neuropathic pain. Perhaps being concerned about my kidneys or simply tired of me complaining about my pain, my other half signed me up for physiotherapy sessions in Senawang. So far, I've been avoiding this since I know it can cost substantially and I would prefer to save that money for food of my family etc. Anyway, I have gone through three sessions already and tomorrow will be the fourth one.