Simpleton Physics

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Let me confess: I was born a simpleton in Physics and will die one. But students called me a good teacher.

Moral: One can teach well without understanding the subject.

I have seen and met quite a few (like SDM) who have an amazing grasp of math but till date I have yet to meet one with an equal intuition in bread 'n' butter Physics. That simply may mean I have not mingled with as many as I ought to. Staying put in a colonial place like Hijli might not have done much good to me. There was no Fermi, Purcell or Feynman at KGP. Not my fault.

There was a book titled: The Flying Circus of Physics by Jearl Walker. If you had bought it and started reading, you would discover that you know very little Physics after so many years of dabbling in it. And get depressed. There is only one way of getting out of your blues. Pick up at random ten samples from that book and confront your most hi-fi colleague with them.

Anyway, here are a few goofy quizzes (I am sure you met all of these in your Prep Physics) that puzzled all 12 of us classmates at AU, Waltair; and some of our poor teachers too:

1. Inertia: All you have to do to go to America is to simply go vertically up in a helicopter for a hundred feet or so, hover there for 12 hours, and drop vertically down.

2. Antipodes: Dig a tunnel (with steps) from North Pole and keep going down towards the center of the earth and away and you will emerge at the South Pole with your feet first.

3. Bugbear: A sportsman (who forgot to bring his rifle) walks 1 km East and then 1 km North and finds a bear sitting on a rock. He runs back 1 km South, walks another 1 km East and then 1 km North and sees the same bear sitting on the same rock. And runs back....and repeats the drill seeing the same rock and the same bear. What is the color of the bear?

4. Fish in the Water Bucket: Where does the weight lost by the fish go and how?

5. Color TV?: Spin fast a disk with black and white alternate dots on concentric circles around the center of the disk. And you see colored streaks. Why?

6. Free Electron: Shine an alternating em field, say, in the rf range, on a free electron. In the steady state the electron's displacement will be out of phase with the field. Why?

7. Loony Affair: The size of the moon as seen from the earth is the same as that of the sun. Why?

8. Tippe Top: Watch it and keep wondering why.

9. Tides: Why does the sea bulge on both the (opposite) sides of the earth during a high tide instead of the just the side closest to the moon?

10. Feynman's Candles: Stick a dozen candles on the periphery of a disk and light them. And spin the disk.The flames turn inwards defying the centrifugal force.

Note: Don't bother about Q7: Loony Affair...it has no valid answer except that God wanted us to watch the terrifying spectacle of total eclipses...all temple gates were closed for six hours during last week's total lunar eclipse.


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