Noriginality

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Let me state that there is nothing absolutely original in this world.

That includes that statement of mine above ;-)

For, it has been said much before me, in our scriptures:

"Dhata yatha purvam akalpayat" see:

http://bhagavan-ramana.org/ramana_maharshi/books/tw/tw112.html

Shakespeare also said it long before I did:

"If there be nothing new, but that which is
Hath been before, how are our brains beguiled,
Which, labouring for invention, bear amiss
The second burden of a former child."

And our Autocrat says:

"I told you the other day that I never wrote a line of verse that seemed to me comparatively good, but it appeared old at once, and often as if it had been borrowed."

Well, Autocrat lived a century and half before Google was born, so he was left in doubt. Not me. Several times I tried to coin a new word just for the heck of it. And turned to Google and invariably found that some other crackpot did it before me. For instance, I tried "bibliophobe" and got 11,300 results:

http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2010/09/bibliophobes.html

And "dyshonesty" and got 305 results; with the consolation that the leading entry is ours:

http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2011/10/dyshonesty.html

And wacky titles for our blogs like: "78, 45 & 33.5" that got 123 results with the first three referring to our blog. While composing the above piece talking of sound recording, I thought it was our Edison who first did it and Googled; and found this in Wiki:

"..The automatic reproduction of music can be traced back as far as the 9th century, when the Banū Mūsā brothers invented "the earliest known mechanical musical instrument", in this case a hydropowered organ which played interchangeable cylinders automatically..."

In literature we have Bernard Shaw claiming: "I am taller than Shakespeare, but of course, I am standing on his shoulders"

I found professional writers I am fond of write what appear very original stories, but their subsequent works are a linear combination of the earlier ones and often poor. For instance I borrowed and read Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice when I was in my late teens and liked it so much that I reread it several times. And then when I was solvent enough to buy books, I bought her Emma and Sense & Sensibility and was disappointed...they are a poor rehash of the original. Same with PGW. His best and most 'original' novels were written between the World Wars; and later novels are their different permutations and combinations, though as funny and diverting...one likes him not for the stuff of his stories but for the 'turn of his phrase'. And Conan Doyle got so bored with his Sherlock Holmes that he killed him. Perhaps it is for this fear and dislike of repetition that writers like Harper Lee and J D Salinger wrote little else than their first books.

A knowledgeable friend of mine warned me not to read anything else of Jerome K Jerome after his Three Men in a Boat....it would be such a comedown. And, as I said many times before, I lost my copy of the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table to which I was addicted, having passed it on to my IAS B-i-L thinking he would enjoy it. After a couple of years and several reminders, he asked: "Autocrat of what?" It is a different matter that his son grew up in the intervening decade and fished it out and gifted my copy back to me. But meanwhile I was begging Edwin at MIT to please send me a copy offering that I would foot the bill including Air Mail charges. He kept quiet, till one day I wrote to him that I had just sent the manuscript of my longest Paper (with TRR) to the editor of AJP and it is all about his Spacetime Software and its applications. He then woke up and begged me for an advance copy of the manuscript and I asked him: "What about my Autocrat?" He drove at once to Harvard Square only to find that it has been out of print for ages. And then he went to several 'used-book shops', discovered a century-old hard-bound gilt-edged copy and sent it to me pronto as a free gift.

And after he read our manuscript, he offered to look for Oliver Wendell Holmes's two subsequent books: Professor at Breakfast Table and Poet at Breakfast Table. I warned him that I will stop talking to him if he did anything like it...there is a nice phrase for such things: "Charvita Charvanam" meaning, chewing the Bangla paan that has been chewed several times before.

In the scientific world no one claims absolute originality because as Fermi said: "Science is like a building in which one lays a brick and the next another and the next another..." Perhaps an exception was Einstein's first paper on STR which so angered Whittaker that in his monumental 2-volume treatise: Histories of Aether and Electricity he gave the entire credit for STR to Lorentz and Poincare and dropped a hint that someone called Einstein also ran.

My Guru SDM was so afraid that he would become repetitious and unoriginal that he changed his fields half a dozen times risking specialization. And refused to read others' papers except their Abstracts. He did very original works but his brilliant GR thing (of which Sayan is so enamored) was dubbed Papapetrou-Majumdar Solution and his elegant and original CG Formula for the Rotation Group was the fourth and last after Wigner's, van der Waerden's and Racah's...all great names in Group Theory. But SDM never flinched and he even turned to Classical Electrodynamics for my summum bonum ;-)

I once landed in a cauldron of hot soup and was about to lose my job when a Professor of an Ivy League School in the US alleged that a paper of mine (with my Project Student Somnath Chakrabarty) was stolen from one of his that appeared a few months before...Ivy League tho! That was the only time I fought like the Devil, leaving my laid-back nature aside, tearing the Ivy Leaguer to such minced meat pieces that the Editor had to admit that: "The allegation turns out to be not well-founded." Mark the phrase: "not well-founded" which was a necessary euphemism for "baseless".

I still fancy that a very simple formula (X = d.R/U) of mine published with RSS on the Localization of Generalized Newton-Michelson Rings is new and never appeared before...maybe because it is not important enough ;-)

Incidentally the very original title of this post coined by me evoked 1,660 results in 0.12 seconds just now...let us hope our blog leads the rest after it appears a few minutes hence.


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