A Sense of Proportion

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"Give me the luxuries of life and I will dispense with its necessities"

...........Oliver Wendell Holmes

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In my boyhood, what is now hailed a Sense of Proportion was called Common Sense (CS).

In worldly matters, unlike in the scientific, CS is a hazy thing. One man's CS is another's Craziness.

However, all scientific 'revolutions' starting from the Heliocentric System to Relativity and Quantum Mechanics go directly against CS.

In bread and butter Physics too, a robust Sense of Proportion is not easy to achieve.

In the roaring 1960s, when you were regarded with awe as a wizard if you have a Physical Review Paper in the fashionable Particle Physics Theory under your belt, my friend DB ran away from Delhi to KGP forsaking a budding career in Particle Theory to join SDM who did Pure Group Theory tangential to Particle Physics.

I asked him why.

He replied honestly that all his colleagues were waving their hands like magicians and proclaiming:

"This diagram contributes in the second order, that term in the fourth order while this other one in third order",

while such consummate understanding of 'orders of importance' totally escaped him and he felt miserable...while under SDM there were no 'orders'...and no dropping of inconvenient terms under one pretext or the other.

Well, I guess, he made the right choice for himself,...he wrote up a comprehensive book dealing with 'exact' stuff, unlike his erstwhile colleagues at Delhi who were happy enough otherwise, I believe.

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Fortunately for me, I never had to make such drastic choices: my 'research' and the few publications gave me no heartburn.

But I did face a couple of unpleasant situations nevertheless.

1. The seniormost and highly respected Professor of ECE was ringing me up asking if I could spend some time with him to vet a manuscript of his that dealt with the theoretical explanation of some of his school's experimental results on milliwatt lasers.

I used to escape on one pretext or the other rather successfully till one fine evening he invited himself to my Qrs (a KGPian's Qrs is not his castle...) with his file. I told my wife to make some dal vadas and join the chitchat to avoid the 'issue' under consideration.

But he was made of sterner stuff and pushed me to read his manuscript.

There was no way I could evade telling him that 'photon-photon scattering' can't be achieved by bombarding two milliwatt laser beams on each other; and what they were looking at was good old Interference.

He didn't believe it till I opened my copy of Sakurai's AQM where it said that it happens in the fourth order and so requires such powerful mega-tera-giga Watt beams which wouldn't be available at our poor KGP, at least in our lifetimes.

To my great surprise, he tore the manuscript but remained my good friend.

2. Not so the other chap, who was an RS in Experiments under the joint guidance of Prof HNB and Prof X.

One noon, I was summoned by HNB to his Office. He pushed a manuscript written up by his 'joint scholar' and asked me to read it then and there and give my opinion on it, because it had Electrodynamics Theory in it and I was teaching that subject then.

I was reluctant and hesitant but HNB promised that he wouldn't divulge my name.

So, I had to read it and tell him that to the best of my knowledge no one has ever succeeded solving a practical problem by using Maxwell's Equations in media with neither boundary conditions nor initial conditions nor a mixture of the two and predicted 'exactly' a new experimental curve.

HNB took back the manuscript and tossed it in his cupboard and let me go.

But next evening I had a ruffled visitor claiming to be the author whom I trashed threatening me with dire consequences like sending me in the near future a Physical Review Reprint in his own name with his 'Theoretical Explanation' of his experimental result.

It is now 35 years and I have but little hope.

It turned out that Prof X was the culprit who disclosed my 'mischief'.

But hope never dies...

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