3. One of the advantages of starting teaching IIT students at the young age of 21 is that you learn with the students since there is hardly any Teacher-Student Divide at that age.
And, as the Pawnbroker of the Red-Headed League said: "My business comes to me". Physics being such a tough subject, IIT students keep asking interesting questions if one is willing to listen.
After my first decade at KGP I stopped attending Physics Seminars for the simple reason that most of the Speakers were from Solid State Physics of which there was an active group in our Department. And, although I started publishing with a couple of rather high-sounding Papers in SSP, I found the subject too involved and forbidding.
A few years before I quit, however, Prof B of IEM, who holds a B Sc (Hons) Degree from our Dept and kept his interest in the subject alive, requested me to attend a Seminar that his nephew was giving in our H N Bose Seminar Room. This young man was with a University in England and was staying with his Uncle in the Campus. He had developed and was marketing a Software in QM. I told Prof B that not only will I make an exception and attend the Seminar but also shepherd my entire 4th Year Class after my last Period with the inducement of Free Tea and some Knowledge.
As usual I sat in the last row with the students while the first row was occupied by our HoD and Senior Professors.
Very soon I found that the young man wrote some Programs for getting the single-particle Wave Functions of the one-dimensional Schrodinger Equation in Potential Wells by curve-fitting. Nice, but I soon lost interest since the topic was dealt with wonderfully by Schwabl in his excellent Text Book; and I started gathering my own wool pleasantly.
Somewhere down the line after about 45 minutes the young man halted his Talk and asked: "Any questions?"; but found no hands raised, for some reason or the other.
He then smirked and blurted: "Good Class!".
I woke up with the exclamation: "Pudding!" on my lips and raised my hand from the backmost bench. And he was all condescension.
I asked him to draw a Half-Parabolic Well with an infinite Wall at the origin and get its Wave Functions. This is the advantage I was talking about: this question started appearing in Physics GRE at that time and students brought it to me and we found it very diverting (later on it became cheap).
The young man was not aware of it and lost his bearings and was staring at the black board and a couple of our students prompted hints but to no avail. The Talk fizzled out soon.
4. A similar Pudding was once giving a Seminar starting with as simple a thing as Hartree-Fock so flamboyantly that I got unusually negative.
He started saying, shrugging his shoulders: "All of you must be knowing that we start with the famous assumption that the ground states of all atoms are spherically symmetric".
I stopped him and asked: "How come? We use all those famous Hund's Rules to find that most of them are p, d, and f states which are anything but spherically symmetric".
And a couple of students echoed: "True, True!"
And as the Speaker was fumbling, I slipped out to Harry's.
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Every Speaker must remember the Golden Rule:
"Any fool can ask a question no wise man can answer"
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