A meeting

Today my supervisor talked with me for about 1.5-2 hrs. I feel dizzy. A lot of things to do in such limited time...

Some thoughts on science and Chinese traditional culture

It is fun and exiting to find some similarities between the precise science world and mysterious Chinese traditional culture.

Newtonian science believed that “God does not play dice with the universe”, meaning that nature is a deterministic system which can be predicted and traced back if the initial state is well known. It is like those problems in our high school examination papers-calculate the situation of a particle at some point of time, given its initial position, velocity together with the forces acting on it. Since we can break a system into particles (reductionism), we can forecast its further evolution  or reconstruct its earlier state. Thus Newtonian science believes everything is "planned", everything has its cause and will have its effect. It is called causality, the relationship between cause and effect.

This reminds me of the causality, or karma, in Buddhism. Chinese Buddhists believe in the relationship between cause and effect. Everything at present is the cause of the future, as well as the effect of the past.  All the creatures struggle painfully and endlessly in the karmic cycle of transmigration. They also believe that everything is determined because of the karma.

The development of quantum physics, chaos theory, system science and complexity science casts doubt on Newtonian science. There are uncertainty, like the state of a particle in quantum physics. There are relationships, meaning the whole is more than the sum of parts. Thus scientists realized that they should treat system as a whole instead of breaking it into increasingly small particles. Particles are homogeneous, but when being together in different ways, they could show various phenomena, that's why we have such beautiful world. And just by learning the particles we cannot explain the diversity at all.
This reminds me of the difference between the western medicine and Chinese medicine. In western medicine, doctors treat a patient's feet if he feels pain in feet, and treat his face if he has pimples on the face. Western medicine is really focused on "parts". In contrast, a doctor learning Chinese medicine will condition the entire body of the patient. So after some time, the patient not only recovers from the disease but also finds himself aglow with health. Not just the body, Chinese medicine even takes into consideration of the season, the time and the location. So we can see Chinese medicine actually regards the patient as a part of the entire system of the world, and adopts a systematic view when curing diseases. So can we say Chinese medicine also belongs to system science? :-D

Learning and thinking is so much fun! :)

The phD defense

I went to Keyvan's phD defense today. His research is on computerized interface control documents.

There were 3 internal examiners (1 supervisor included) all from our department, 1 external examiner coming from the department of architecture (there is another one who did not show up), the Dean of our department and a facilitator coming from the department of music. Some students were also there.

The defense started with a 20-minute presentation. He did well, but the presentation could have been more fun and appealing if he had added some pictures or colors instead of a lot of text. If it was me, I would just use a few words in large size to show the outline, and try to illustrate my work using graphs and charts.

Questions from committee followed. There were at least two rounds of questions (coz I left at the end of the second round). The order is External-> Internal (Peter)-> Dean-> Internal (my dynamics teacher) ->supervisor (with questions from the absent external).
Peter is very concerned about the application of the research in other areas. He asked whether this can be used in systems like engineering education, manufacturing system,  and mechanical components instead of electronic components. I remembered he, when reviewing my master thesis, also asked whether my research on value optimization can be used in other fields other than aerospace.
My dynamics teacher acted kind of aggressive as I see. His questions are more about concepts coz he did not have the same understanding of some words like "model", "interface" with the presenter. And he interrupted the presenter's explanation, like "Yeah, yeah, yeah I know that,...", to further ask his question. Keyvan told me it's because the professor did not read his thesis. He also told me that is fine and normal, the teacher did that to everyone and he's just asking questions. (The professor is probably very strict coz I remember I got a B from him. I always get A and I did well on dynamics..). One lesson should be learnt: Give clear definitions of basic concept, reach a consensus with audience on concepts.
When the presenter explained, the committee members often asked him to give examples. Thus another lesson is that you should always prepare and look for good examples to illustrate your theory.


It is a little bit sad that Keyvan is leaving the lab and research team. He is a nice gentleman and gave me suggestions on my thesis. Good wishes for him.


I am starting my phD soon. It will be a challenging and fun adventure.