2025 in review

I was sad to hear that my former workplace, the Center for Theoretical Physics of Complex Systems, is winding down. It was such a great academic environment with time to think and ample opportunities to learn from colleagues and the regular seminars and international workshops. From the Center's last Scientific Report:

Outlook: The center counts 492 publications, a total of 12813 citations, and an h-index h = 56 on Google Scholar. Despite its tremendous success, a continuation with a new division headed by a new director could not be realized by IBS, which is a pity and raises other IBS related questions which are not part of the current report. As a result of the foreseeable retirement of the current director, the PCS is winding down by the end of 2025. Practically all members of the PCS quickly found or are successfully securing new positions in research institutes and universities worldwide. The successful concept of the PCS will continue to exist through its alumni who carry the message into the world. These include twenty three (23!) faculties worldwide, including eight (8!) in Korea, six (6!) in China, and five (5!) in India, but also in Singapore, Vietnam, Brazil, USA, and the Philippines.

It's a real shame, especially since support for similar theory-focused research centers is so limited. Short term grants promote "safe" topics rather than giving researchers the time and freedom to follow their curiosity and try new ideas.

Looking back, memorable moments at PCS include:

• A visit and seminar in 2018 by J. Michael Kosterlitz in which he recounted his unusual journey to his Nobel Prize-winning work, including the important role played by job rejections and rock climbing. We didn't record his talk, but what seems to be a similar version can be found here.
• Workshop weeks, particularly the ability to sit in on workshops beyond one's own areas of expertise and get a first-hand glimpse of how informal interactions differ between different fields. Sometimes the welcome reception and evening activities would wind down within an hour or so, other times they would continue into the early morning, prime time for forging new collaborations and hearing important gossip. This is also why online conferences are a poor substitute for in-person events. 
• We went through a period where we were required (as a government institute) to have personal identifying information in all job applications be anonymised, to eliminate bias in their evaluation. Whoever came up with this didn't understand you cannot anonymise academic CVs - the publication list will inevitably give the name away!

 ---

Physical Review A saw a significant increase in submissions, including some LLM-written papers. When used properly, LLMs can be a great productivity enhancer, particularly for non-native English speakers. On the other hand, if one uses the LLM to "cheat" and write the paper entirely, it is really easy to spot. Some dead giveaways: formatting, em-dashes, fake references, overly wordy text that doesn't say much (or makes no sense at all). 

For similar reasons it is easy to spot when a referee report (or student homework assignment) has been prepared using an LLM instead of real intelligence! During one of my classes this year, I was sad to see some students completing their hand-written humanities assignment by directly copying the output from ChatGPT. At the end of the day, tedious "homework" like unpaid reviews are not just a box to tick off, they are exercise for your mind. By looking carefully for flaws and inconsistencies in someone else's work, you are also developing the critical thinking skills that will improve your own writing and research. Don't short-change yourself by delegating to an LLM!

--- 

My own research is going at a slower pace. A lot of thinking time has been replaced with grant-writing. I hope to see some payoff for this substantial effort in 2026! 

2024 in review

It was a busy year for me, hence the substantially lower posting frequency.

I became a dad in February. It really puts the insignificance of the academic rat race in perspective. I had a lot less sleep and less uninterrupted time for deep work, but thankfully as of mid-December we are finally able to sleep more than 4 hours uninterrupted.

After a tough 9 years as a postdoc I started at tenure track position at SUTD in July. I have had a bit of a breather before research students join next year. I'm looking forward towards starting some research with a more longer term horizon than "get something publishable out within a year" as is typical for postdoc positions. And teaching undergraduates for the first time has also been highly rewarding even if it does take up a lot of time.

Before joining SUTD I was encouraged to apply for a start-up grant. Proposal writing really was a struggle with a newborn. My proposal was extremely rushed and unpolished - my aim was to just get out something that met the requirements. And thankfully it was funded. Take-home message: your grant proposal doesn't need to be perfect, sometimes the topic and the timing are more important than getting everything just right. The only certainty we have is that a proposal that is not submitted will never be funded.

On the research side, I was a collaborator on 8 papers submitted or published, with a few more promising ideas in the pipeline. I also managed to give 8 conference/seminar presentations, including at a graduate school in Indonesia. While I didn't participate in any big international conferences or workshops, I did enjoy attending a few meetings in Singapore.

On the editorial side, I've already finished 3 years of work with Physical Review A and will continue for another term. Since June I have also been serving temporarily as an editor for Physical Review Letters, handling more than 100 submissions. While there is a lot wrong with academic publishing today, one shouldn't lump journals of academic societies such as the American Physical Society with profit-driven publishers.

Happy 2025 to all readers! And if there's anything you'd like to see more of next year, let me know in the comments or drop me an email.

Looking back on 2023

The end of the year is good time to reflect on what went well and what didn't over the past twelve months, and what changes we hope to make in the year to come. Here's my list:

1. Presentations. I gave 11 talks this year to a variety of audiences (conferences, workshops, internal presentations, external seminars). Some went better than others. The main culprits for my bad talks are (still) trying to say too much in the time allotted, and failing to pitch well to the specific audience. It is particularly challenging to convey the broad strokes of the research to everyone present at a level that interests them while still going into enough depth to satisfy the few experts in the audience. The best presentations I gave involved audience participation using QR code polls - even including one or two over the course of an hour-long talk is a great way to get the audience to stop, think, and start paying attention again. The best talks I attended spent most of the time explaining the problem set up and broader context and very little time on the speaker's own contribution.

2. Publications. Midway through the year it seemed like I was going to put out fewer papers than usual. Then in November and December I ended up being swamped with finalising several manuscripts all at once (hence a reduced blogging frequency). The final tally is nine original manuscripts completed this year. Is this too many? Many decry the publish or perish culture, the endlessly increasing rate at which papers are being published, courtesy coauthorships, salami publishing, and whatnot. At least in my case, I think I have made a meaningful contribution to every paper I have coauthored this year, but I need to strike a better balance between deep work on new research directions and easier (but still time-consuming) work on existing areas of expertise.

3. Upskilling. I played around with using AI tools like StableDiffusion (text to image), LLama (text generation), whisper (speech to text), and a few different web-based academic paper summarisation / recommendation tools. Given the tendency of large language models to hallucinate and spit out falsehoods, it's hard to trust them when seeking new knowledge (e.g. summarising or suggesting new papers to read), but I've found them quite useful for rephrasing ideas in an amusing way or making cool images for talks (see below).

Happy 2024!

Beyond "Oppenheimer"

Some reading for those who found the events of the film "Oppenheimer" interesting:

The Manhattan Project (and Before)

This is a concise timeline of the Manhattan project, from the initial atomic bomb patent (!) to the test of the Gadget. Beyond the science and the scientists at Los Alamos, the Manhattan Project was an incredible feat of engineering involving 129,000 workers at its peak, requiring the development of the first industrial-scale processes for the enrichment of uranium, generation of plutonium in nuclear reactors, and extraction and processing of enough fissile material required to build the bombs, all in less than 3 years! In wartime delays are much harder to stomach (compare with the case of ITER today).

The Taming of Plutonium: Pu Metallurgy and the Manhattan Project

This arXiv preprint outlines one of the unanticipated challenges arising during the Manhattan Project, that "plutonium would prove to be the most complex
element on the periodic table." At ambient pressure, plutonium exhibits six distinct solid allotropes (crystalline structures), more than any other element! The differing densities of the allotropes greatly complicated the processing of the plutonium into a bomb core, requiring the development of a suitable alloy to stabilize the plutonium into a single phase.

Trinity, by K. T. Bainbridge

A technical report outlining the organization of the first nuclear weapon test, practical challenges that emerged, and the data that was obtained.

Los Alamos and ‘‘Los Arzamas’’

A brief comparison between the American and Soviet nuclear weapons programs, the latter headed by Yulii Khariton who was sometimes called the Soviet Oppenheimer by his colleagues. But unlike Oppenheimer he remained the scientific director of the institute for more than 40 years.

2022 in review

Quite a lot happened this year:

1. Travel has returned to pre-covid normalcy, and I even had the chance to attend an in-person conference in Korea. Online is no substitute for the discussions that take place in the breaks between talks. I am glad that our students have also had the chance to travel abroad for inspiring conferences (ICOAM and QTML).

2. In academia it is hard to say no - we are always enticed by opportunities to get another paper, get more citations, increase our h-index. In the first half of the year I was incredibly overworked, supervising several PhD students while trying to find time to finish my own projects. After finishing my two overdue review articles in July I decided to cut back on commitments so I would have time to properly supervise students. This was a great success, and it's quite liberating not having to care about getting just one more paper in PRL/Nature/whatever.

3. I have now worked a full year as a remote editor for Physical Review A, handling over 300 submissions. This has been a great learning experience and has given me a better appreciation for how peer review can improve the quality and rigor of research articles. Sadly it is a minority of researchers who are willing to offer their time to provide well-crafted, thoughtful reports. It is promising to see that publishers including APS and Optica are providing more resources for referees, particularly early career researchers. It would be good to see referee training integrated directly into graduate research programs.

4. Machine learning models for image generation (such as Stable Diffusion) and text generation (ChatGPT) are going to change the world. There's no putting the genie back into the bottle now that anyone can download the trained model weights in a few minutes and run them on their own personal computer (InvokeAI doesn't even require a high end GPU!). Some professions such as graphic artists will be irrevocably changed. Still, the models are not perfect and they often fail in subtle and unpredictable ways, requiring human vetting. Thus, at least in the near term they will be primarily used to enhance productivity, not destroy entire professions.

5. In quantum computing, the most exciting developments for me were several groups proposing efficient classical algorithms for spoofing the results of random quantum circuit sampling experiments and debates over quantum supremacy using quantum topological data analysis.

Stay tuned next year for more on flat bands, Weyl semimetals, (quantum) machine learning, quantum scars, and more blogging. Happy 2023!

The year in review

Some thoughts to end 2021:

1. The scientific impacts of covid have become more noticeable to me. Last year many theorists used the lockdowns to finish their ongoing projects. This year, the increased isolation and lack of in-person discussions has stymied creativity and new ideas. Last year in Singapore (and Korea) we were able to come to the office all the time without much disruption, the main limitation being that seminars were held online. This year we've had to work from home for about 4 months. The impact of this is worse for newer graduate students - for them this is the sad normal. I appreciate the in-person discussions since returning to the office last week.

2. Despite optimistic claims by conference organisers, in-person international conferences still seem to be a long way off. The killer is the need for pre-departure covid testing and with it the prospect of having your trip extended or delayed by weeks. Domestic conferences will need to fill the gap in the interim.

3. I applied for some grants but was not successful. This might be a blessing in disguise; with the covid restrictions it's hard to bring new hires into Singapore, and apart from conference travel research expenses for theorists are minimal. However, the lack of job security that comes with ongoing grants is a bummer. One big issue for senior postdocs in Singapore is that more permanent positions require a track record of successful grants, while to apply for most grants here you need a permanent position...

4. Science-wise, this year I've learnt a lot about (quantum) machine learning, quantum computing on the cloud, topological (Jackiw-Rossi) defect modes, applications of topological data analysis to physics (review article coming!), and classical shadows of quantum states. I have quite a few works in progress which will hopefully come to fruition next year.

5. Delegation is still a challenge, but I am slowly improving. Apologies to all my collaborators whose projects I've held up.

6. I started blogging. Writing posts was hard at first but has become a lot easier as the year progressed. Thanks to everyone who keeps reading and I hope the material is useful in some way. Comments on posts are always welcome.

Happy 2022!