Missing Stair Gambit

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'Don't you like this suit, Jeeves?' I said coldly.

'Oh, yes, sir.'

'Well, what don't you like about it?'

'It is a very nice suit, sir.'

'Well, what's wrong with it? Out with it, dash it!'

'If I might make the suggestion, sir, a simple brown or blue, with a hint of some quiet twill -'

'What absolute rot!'

'Very good, sir.'

'Perfectly blithering, my dear man!'

'As you say, sir.'

I felt as if I stepped on the place where the last stair ought to have been, but wasn't. I felt defiant, if you know what I mean, and there didn't seem anything to defy.

......PGW in Carry on, Jeeves

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That is a lovely example of what I learned the hard way to practice with everyone around... family, friends, colleagues, bosses...and...yes, wife.

Nowadays no one seems to like being contradicted. And no one likes to appear to lose an argument in public.

So it is always a better bet to put forward your view and keep shut. Let them who oppose you win the argument for the day. After a good night's sleep, they would come back and put forward your argument with a spin on it with ifs and buts to make it look as if it were their own.

Let them have their pleasure...you may lose face for a day but you will win peace; and they know they lost the argument.

Talking of ifs and buts, Physics is replete with them. So, any blunt statement in Physics can be contradicted immediately if you wish to do so perversely.

Suppose someone says: "Energy is always conserved," rightly in the given context. You can always say: "Not in virtual processes." Or, "EM energy flows in the direction of the Poynting Vector"; "Not in left-handed materials." Or, "It happens in all crystals."; "Not in quasicrystals." Or, "It is true in all geometries"; "Not in fractal geometries."

The list is endless.

I had to often defend well-meaning HoDs in their arguments with first-year students...after their first year, they never argue ;-)

As I said in some earlier post, Prof KVR was once chased by a freshman in the Phy corridor and Prof KVR stopped me and said accusingly:

"This fellow is saying that the electric field outside an infinite uniformly charged conducting plate is constant everywhere!!!"

I had to save his face by asking the student to first bring an infinite conducting plate to the lab and then we will see. The student caught the glint in my eye and became one of my best Project Students five years later.

I had to somewhat save my own face in a long-distance telephonic argument I had picked up with Pratik five good years after I retired. Pratik said, rightly in the context of the diagram which showed a string wound around a cylinder, "No cylinder of mass M and radius R can have a moment of inertia more than MR^2, whatever its mass distribution." But then I had my ego to salvage and rang him up 3 minutes later and asked him, "What if the string is wound around a groovy cylinder like a pulley or a spool or a yo-yo?" Pratik laughed and was sportive enough to agree.

Everyone at KGP knew that I was the local expert in obfuscation, prevarication, modification, manipulation, equivocation and justification...Pratik was new and honest.

Not only in Physics, but the game can also be played, I am told, in Pure Mathematics. Ask Feynman and his Princeton Math grad colleagues.

Returning from Vishwabharati, where SDM was HoD of the Math Dept after his retirement from KGP, DB told me exploding with laughter that SDM was complaining to him that the young faculty there were always contradicting whatever he asserts, say, about the Point of Accumulation, one of his favorite topics, by saying:

"It doesn't happen so in Topology"

They had quickly discovered that SDM knew no Topology...

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