Well, here I am in Hong Kong. I am living here for two months, working in the Department of Mathematics at the City University of Hong Kong. My host here is Jonathan Wylie, who, as you no doubt recall, gave a colloquium in our department at Western a couple of years ago. I’ve known Jonathan for several years, and our research areas have intertwined several times, so I am looking forward to working with him for a while. I will have to pretend to be a theorist – perhaps even a mathematician – for a while, but I can probably handle that.
Hong Kong, like New York, is a city that never sleeps. I now understand why: we are staying in an apartment in the university residences, and the mattresses are about as soft as a slab of concrete. Apparently this is the local standard. I suppose it encourages people to get up and do something constructive rather than spend a little while longer snuggled under the covers.
The food here is great, of course, and usually cheap. There are lots of neighborhoods full of bustling markets and streets lined with restaurants where not a word of English is spoken (or written on the menus!). Last night we walked into a randomly chosen restaurant where, after some gesticulation, we feasted on fresh-out-of-the-tank seafood. We blew the budget, coming in at about 13 Canadian dollars each, including beer and tip.
I was surprised to learn that there is a lot of Hong Kong that is not crowded and in fact not even urban. Last weekend, Jonathan took us for hike in a nice woodsy park just outside of the city, where we hiked for a couple of hours. About 40% of Hong Kong is national parkland. We intend to explore this aspect of the territory more fully!
I suppose I should insert a bit of physics into this post. On my first day here I ran into Igor Bello, who has oscillated between City U and Surface Science Western a few times. Yesterday he gave me a tour of some of the Physics Department’s research labs. I was quite impressed. At a university that is extremely cramped for space (it’s surrounded by residential neighborhoods and a shopping mall, and has essentially no vacant land left to build on), one physics prof has 6000 square feet of lab space. He uses plasmas to modify the surface properties of materials to reduce corrosion, to make them harder, and so on. He has a lot of industrial contracts, and also does a lot of biomedical research. For example, he and his collaborators have developed a spinal implant to fixes spinal curvature; the plasma treatment makes the metal implant more biocompatible. Igor himself has quite an empire devoted to surface science and making super-hard materials. (Did you know that diamond could be made with a cubic crystal lattice? hexagonal? It was certainly news to me!) I also saw a lab where they made organic LEDs which they were developing for use as room lighting. All of this was very impressive. In each case, the government had invested millions of dollars (C$ – that’s tens of millions of HK$) in equipment and lab space, as well as in the large number of grad students and postdocs I saw in each of these labs. I was left wondering if labs like this could even exist in a Canadian physics department.
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