Argumentative KGPian

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In all these seven decades, I never lost an argument. Nor won any.

That is because my life centered around Physics, and it is a hard science. There is little scope for arguments in it. Things are settled by recourse to experiments and not lung power or vote or semantics.

Arguments belong to the Courts of Law.

But, Physicists also are human beings...and at times they resort to arguments on matters besides Physics.

This "I am also a human being" appeal was made the other day by a Bollywood Director when confronted with his Casting Couch.

But most Physicists have a keen sense of humor and that subverts all arguments outside Physics.

Take for instance Theology...a topic on which debates raged for centuries as to how many fairies can be accommodated on the tip of a needle.

For a man famous for his laconic remarks, Dirac spoke up, on the sidelines of a Conference, that there is no need for invoking a subjective God, now that Physics explains everything in the Universe in an objective way.

And Pauli, the naughty, came up with his quip:

"There is no God and Dirac is His Prophet."

Physics has to do with understanding and not argument.

This reminds me of the quip by Churchill or someone equally clever to his Opposition MP:

"I am obliged to give you an argument but not an understanding."

Well, I was never happy with my understanding of Physics...but so was Feynman with his...

When I was in my First Year B Sc (Hons) at AU, on a Sunday morning, I was troubled by this foolish question in Elasticity which topic was being taught by a good Teacher (Again, as Jeeves said of Bertie's tailor: "I have nothing against his morals"):

"Take a metallic wire hanging from the ceiling. Apply a load of 1 kilogram. Because of the stress, there will be a strain and the wire extends. But because of the linear extension, there would be a lateral contraction and the diameter of the wire decreases. But because of this reduction in the area of cross section, the stress increases...so does the strain...and the extension increases...and so does the contraction...ad infinitum...and the wire should break...but it doesn't...why not?"

I walked 5 miles to my Teacher's Lab (they used to work on Sundays too) and confronted him with this puzzle of mine. He hummed and hawed and talked about this and that for an hour and I returned home no wiser than before.

I then decided that there is no use asking questions to Teachers and it is best to struggle by myself and understand things my own way to my satisfaction with the help of books. Some questions took years, others like 'localization of fringes' decades.

But there were a few arguments I was witness to that remain etched in my memory.

There was this Hiralal Yadav who once happened to enter our room for a chitchat with DB, who was well known for his understanding of Quantum Field Theory. They spoke of this and that pleasantly while I was reading my Ukridge. Suddenly I heard voices being raised, the two bulls rushing to the blackboard and tempers turning nasty; till I raised my voice and shouted: "TEA TIME!"

In all those 40 years I had never any arguments with my hundreds of students. This is because IIT KGP gave me the liberty to teach what I understood (somewhat) and omit what I didn't.

And since I never interacted with colleagues other than DB (our interests were complementary and mutually exclusive...we never published anything together), I was at peace with myself.

Till the JEE Picnic started.

Once a Senior Professor (with a lab under his 'occupancy') rushed to the Table where myself, DB, CLR and RSS were merrily chatting away, and collared me and said I was talking nonsense when I had defended the Model Answer for one simple question on Electronics.

And I was enraged and gave him several arguments which didn't convince him.

I had to then tell him off to go at once to his Lab, rig up the circuit and tell me the result.

He went away and never returned to me...to this day...


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