Fifteen men on the dead man's chest-
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum
Drink and the Devil have done for the rest-
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum
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When I was young someone told me that Treasure Island is a children's story. And that it was all about pirates. And Mark Twain wrote: "Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates."
Well, piracy is again rampant; in both the real and virtual spaces.
That 'lead' poem cited above frightened me. I also read Gulliver's Travels to the Lilliput Island, and thought only 15 Lilliputs could stand on the dead man's chest...I also read later that in the Dark Ages, Theology centered around arguments like how many angels can be accommodated on the tip of a pin...'A Hundred' as that ad for Bagpipers went...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVvRT6UBjmc...
It was only much later that I learned the other meaning of 'chest' as a big box. Nice pun that!
Talking of chests, the best, I hope is the Hope Chest...(pun again!)...often it turns out to be hopeless, if her husband turns out to be like the perennially high watchmen of Hyderabad apartments.
The biggest chest I ever saw was owned by my Grannie. It could easily hold half a dozen kids hiding in a sitting position. By our time, it came to be used as a soiled clothes' bin but I am sure it must have seen better times.
The next biggest I saw regularly was whenever I used to visit KGP Railway Station. They were all piled up in the Guards' Room and taken out one by one as each train arrived. Often, in the nights, they were dumped outside on Platform # 2. And I used to sit gingerly on the one in the lampshade hoping that the Guard, whose name was pasted on the locked chest, wouldn't come out and shoo me. I always wondered what such a huge box could contain that is of such vital importance to the running of our Puri Express that was perennially late. But never had the guts to ask the Guard to show me.
As for the smallest box I saw, it was surely the matchbox. During our childhood, all matchboxes used to come in a regulation size and had a Cheetah Fight painted in color on their front face and some ad on the back. It is anybody's guess what a poor cheetah getting 'sickled' by a rummy youth has to do with matches. But all successful 'branding' may be like that...it stirs your imagination and leaves it there hanging. Like for instance what that lovely and enchanting picture on the packet of a Passing Show has to do with cigarettes...or for that matter...Capstan Navy Cut. My Father could answer what a 'capstan' is and 'navy' is but not 'cut'...he was a nonsmoker.
Then there was this Pandora's Box, the enchanting story in our Class X English text book. 'Hope' (again) is the name of the last bug out alright, which cured the kids' cuts inflicted by Trouble by its merest touch. Once long ago I asked Supratim why he reads by crazy blog every morning, as he said he does. Among other things, he said, the blogs are 'hopeful' ;-)
The Box that every QM student encounters, for no obvious reason, is the one that holds the Particle (sometimes with oscillating walls):
http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2010/05/elephant-monkey.html
It is only much later, when you come to Scattering and Quantum Stats that you see the Box at work all the time. It is an artifice which John von Neumann would never agree to. Just put the 'system' in a box of volume V, solve the problem, let V tend to infinity...you go over from the discrete to the continuous...a mean trick in the eyes of pure mathematicians, for, discrete infinity and continuous infinity are as different as hive and honey. But Physics folks are like carpenters...who don't care if 'pi' is 22 / 7 or 3.14 or even 3...it depends on the price you are prepared to pay.
But of course, there is one nice thing about such boxes. If you don't ask the 'right' (experimentally observable) question, the volume of the box, V, doesn't cancel and sticks out like a sore thumb...an acid test if you are making an idiot of yourself.
There was a youth in the Mech Engg Dept at IIT KGP who was a pure math buff. He once visited our Physics Dept and argued with whoever was available that QM is all wrong...since they use the Dirac Delta Function all the time, without knowing that it is absurd to call it a 'function'...he said it was a 'distribution'. Folks like me and even DB couldn't care if it is a function or distribution as long as it works...like that cat's name is irrelevant as long as it catches mice.
But he was unrelenting and insistent and so we pushed him into SDM's room thinking it would be like David vs Goliath. But we could hear laughter from both voices and after half an hour of feast of reason and flow of apparent soul, the young man walked out jubilantly.
The next day I happened to be in SDM's room and SDM said: "That young man was talking sense...he will go a long way".
He did, indeed. He went to Canada and ultimately wrote a book with Truesdell...apparently Truesdell wrote in the Preface something like that the book would never have been written but for the young South Indian.
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