28 June 2011

Monash Physicist Awarded Competitive Associate-ship

Story by Shamini Darshni

Albert Einstein is widely regarded as a brilliant physicist, if not the most brilliant. However, like all geniuses, he was not immune to making mistakes – many of these have been chronicled over the years.

Five years ago, a Monash University physicist, Associate Professor Dr Lan Boon Leong, found that Einstein’s belief about the relationship between the theory of special relativity and Newton’s non-relativistic theory at low speed, was wrong.

Recently, Dr Lan, of the School of Science at Monash University Sunway campus, was awarded the competitive TWAS-Unesco Associate-ship to dig deeper into his initial findings at the Institute of Physics at the University of the Republic in Uruguay.

As an Associate at the institute, he intends to extend the comparison of non-relativistic and relativistic predictions for the motion of a dynamical system to other theories.

The purpose of the research, he said, is to determine whether the more-encompassing relativistic predictions are always well-approximated by the non-relativistic predictions in situations where the non-relativistic theory is applicable.

“It is conventionally expected that the two predictions will always agree. Einstein, for example, believed so. If conventional wisdom is wrong, physicists and engineers would have to use relativistic theory, instead of the standard practice of using non-relativistic theory, to correctly study the motion of dynamical systems,” Dr Lan explained.

The paradigm shift, he added, could lead to new discoveries in physics and engineering.

The Associate-ship is a three-year appointment introduced by the academy of sciences for the developing world, or TWAS.

TWAS is an autonomous international organisation based in Italy that promotes scientific capacity and excellence for sustainable development in the South.

The Associate-ship Scheme was established in 1994 jointly with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) to help counteract the brain drain affecting many developing countries.

Over 100 centres of excellence in the South have agreed to participate in the scheme, which is supported with funds from Unesco, the Government of Italy, and the OPEC Fund for International Development.

Under the scheme, researchers from the South will visit a centre of excellence twice for research collaboration.

“I am honoured to be appointed an Associate of the Institute of Physics. The discussions and collaborations with members of the Institute will be greatly beneficial to my research.”

Dr Lan added that the success of the research program would lay a foundation to build a research strength at Monash University in Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos, a field which is still in infancy in Malaysia.