My Computing - 9

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My Guru SDM belonged to the Whittaker school of thought deeming figures and numbers as infra dig in their publications. Equations, Equations and more Equations. I on the other hand loved Sears' books having as many figures as possible.

I bought SDM's book on QM and, as expected, didn't find many figures in any of its 250 odd pages. On the other hand, I was then reading and enjoying the book Quantics by Levy-Leblond and Balibar. Most every other page of the book had a cute figure picked up from the latest research journals showing one graph or the other using bread and butter QM in their Labs. If I remember right, It is the only QM book I referred to in my Paper with VS and AVM:

http://iopscience.iop.org/0143-0807/17/5/005;jsessionid=40A4970AE534FCD9937D153AB75F7C8D.c1


SDM's ideal was a path-breaking Paper (like his famous 1947 Paper on GR) every step of which has to be cracked by the earnest reader with pen and paper, teasing out the naughty missing steps. One morning when I went to his Qrs, he read out the Referee's Report on one of his Papers...the Referee was fairly irritated by the suppressed steps, while SDM was enjoying the Referee's discomfiture.

My ideal (which I sort of achieved in 1990) was a Paper so full of figures with detailed captions that a casual reader doesn't have to go through the text at all to get the gist...just see the figures and browse their captions...

And SDM & I had to 'collaborate' and write Joint Papers. Our first two Papers were written in his style devoid of figures. By the time we came to the third Paper, I took over and insisted that a figure would do a lot of talking. And I explained to him that the Figure I had drawn is as powerful as the Universal Resonance Curve. He was curious and asked: "What is that?" And he was so charmed that it went in.

But all I had to do for drawing that curve was to consult Tables of Bessel Functions that didn't require any massive computation.

I don't recall any subsequent Paper of mine that didn't have a figure or two. And none needed anything but a pocket calculator.

So, for about twenty years after my first fling with IBM 1620, I lost touch with computers, programs and data structures. And those two decades saw the operation of Moore's Law in its full swing.

One morning around 1985, I was 'employed' as the Chief Invigilator in F-134. As usual I was gathering wool while the youngster helping me suddenly rushed to a student in the back benches happily working with a pocket calculator (which was allowed). And snatched his device and brought it to me saying it is a 'programmable calculator' packing the punch of an IBM 1620. And perhaps can store a whole lecture notes ;-) And then on, there was a ban on 'programmable calculators' in the Exam Halls...ha!!! 99% of the Invigilators were like me who wouldn't know if a calculator was programmable or not...we just read out the Big Ban aloud and threatened anyone flouting the rule with expulsion from the Exam Hall forthwith.

This reminded me of the Chandamama story where a goldsmith boy falls in love with a Brahmin girl and convinces her father that he too is a Brahmin. And one day before the wedding when the prospective F-i-L was getting ornaments made in his courtyard, the faking bridegroom arrives, listens for a second, and warns his would be pop-in-law that his goldsmith was cheating him and passing off 14 carat gold as 22 carat. And confronts the goldsmith and exposes him. The cheat then gets up and, before leaving, warns the bride's father that his 'Brahmin' bridegroom is a cheat too, since none else than a born-goldsmith can figure out the difference in sound made by a 14 carat ornament and the 24 carat one...the wedding is canceled forthwith...thief catching thief...geek catching geek.

I didn't then know that another long spell of flirting with computers was indicated in my lifeline.

In 1976, when I started teaching SR to fourth year physics students, it occurred to me that an electrical version of the Pole-Barn Paradox that can be completely resolved would be worth attempting. And I mentioned it to DB. It took a decade for it to materialize. Finally one evening I saw the best way it could be done. And in a couple of days I did the algebra and sent the manuscript: "Is Length Contraction Really Paradoxical?" to the Editor of AJP.

And soon I got a warm Referee Report recommending publication of the manuscript and asking me to add a bibliography of all the earlier paradoxes in SR. The revised version appeared in Oct 1987.

And very soon I got a gracious letter datelined Oct 20, 1987 on an MIT letter-head reading:

"I was a reviewer of your wonderful article 'Is length contraction really paradoxical?' published this month in the American Journal of Physics. Enclosed is a take-home project assigned this week to my relativity class at MIT. The students are asked to solve your paradox using an outline that gives them some hints....

The students in this class make use of computer graphics utility programs that help them to visualize and develop their intuition for relativity. These programs can be run on either an IBM personal computer or the Apple Macintosh personal computer. If you have access to either of these machines, I will be happy to send you the programs without charge...in partial payment for the enjoyment your paradox has brought me."

Edwin F Taylor (who christened the thing: Flickering Bulb Paradox)


That was the beginning of a twenty-year fruitful collaboration between MIT Phys and IIT KGP Phys...about which tomorrow.

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Last Laugh

My son told me the other day that a colleague of his read in the Yahoo News that our solar system is going to be gobbled up by a black hole developing in Sagittarius. And asked my son some funda about black holes. My son got a rare chance to brag about his senile papa and told him that I, with my students, had written the Official Solutions Manual for Taylor & Wheeler's latest book: Exploring Black Holes; and started Googling and discovered the following link and sent it to me (apparently one Tuleja wrote a Java Applet on the Flickering Bulb Paradox...any mention of Java Applets turns on Hyderabadi software geeks):

http://www.stuleja.org/vscience/osp/contents/physicsClub/paradox.html


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