Open University

English people are innovative and courageous. Several years ago they saw the opportunities the Internet offered for higher education, and started a project that may change the way Humanity deals with knowledge.

The Open University

I bring this to the fore because I am a user of the arXiv, and now a Twitter follower of Erik Verlinde. In the past I've written little emails to several thinkers of our time, that have graciously taken the time to answer me. Some people read this stone-soup-like blog I keep, to enrich my knowledge on the subjects I treat here. I have a modest presence in the Internet.

I am fortunate enough to work for an institution of higher learning in Mexico. Right now two opposing forces are democratically competing to lead the University, Dr. Arrizon, and Dr. Rogelio Ortega.

If you can read Spanish, you can follow their facebook pages linked above.

I am new here so I cannot vote, actually part of the reason that after more than a year here I cannot do so, is because of the political infighting forces inside this democratic institution. I don't agree with that, politics should be separate from academia, but then again, I am in the Third World.

From the little I've seen, I lean towards Rogelio, for whatever is worth, I state this here.

The Open University spares us a little, of all that political infighting, that I am sure also happens in their midst. I am also a strong supporter of the MITOPENCOURSEWARE initiative at MIT, and similar efforts in other high caliber institutions in the First World.

I can sense a new university structure slowly materializing. One where the only currency is scholarship, discipline, and a love for the pursuit of knowledge.

I have an anarchist bent.If I could go to Haiti and help right now, I'll rather be with Doctors Without Borders, than with the US Marine Corps.

Maybe we could start a Professors Without Borders movement. I vividly remember Prof. Jean Pestiau coming to CINVESTAV in the early seventies.  He told us, "I rather teach the children of the working class than rich kids at Cornell". He had had a postdoc stay there in New York State, in the town of Athica; there he met  the now Profesors: Hidezumi Terazawa and Probir Roy.

Jean has taken care of several of my Mexican friends that went to work with him at the Catholic University of Louvain:

I just got this from their Webpage:

Elementary particle physics and fundamental interactions (J.-M. Gérard, F. Maltoni, J. Pestieau, C. Ringeval, J. Weyers)

• Non-perturbative effects: We study non-perturbative effects induced by strong interactions in electroweak processes to understand CP violation. The tools include 1/N expansion, chiral perturbation, vector dominance, dispersion relations, operator product expansion and sum rules. We consider both light and heavy hadron decays.
• Physics at LHC: We focus on the Higgs sector, the most controversial part of the standard model, and study various extensions to understand the mass spectrum of quarks and leptons.
• General relativity and cosmology: We study the possibility of testing Einstein's theory of gravity at cosmological scales. 

If I ever get something done, and Jean still has the energy, I'm sure he'll join me in an effort to invite poor Third World kids to work on an Open Theoretical Physics Group online.