Bread & Butter

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Supratim writes:

"...Wonderful post about the need to strike a balance between teaching and research..."

Re: http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2012/03/science-of-waiting.html

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Listen to Feynman again and again:

"...I don't believe I can really do without teaching. The reason is, I have to have something so that when I don't have any ideas and I'm not getting anywhere I can say to myself, 'At least I'm living; at least I'm doing something; I'm making some contribution"---it's just psychological.

When I was at Princeton in the 1940s I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specially selected for their tremendous brains and were now given the opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever. These poor b*****ds could now sit and think clearly all by themselves, OK? So they don't get any ideas for a while. They have every opportunity to do something, and they're not getting any ideas. I believe that in a situation like this a kind of guilt or depression worms inside of you, and you begin to worry about not getting any ideas. And nothing happens. Still, no ideas come.

Nothing happens because there's not enough real activity and challenge: You're not in contact with experimental guys. You don't have to think how to answer questions from the students. Nothing!

In any thinking process there are moments when everything is going good and you've got wonderful ideas. Teaching is an interruption, and so it's the greatest pain in the neck in the world. And then there are the longer periods of time when not much is coming to you. You're not getting any ideas, and if you're doing nothing at all, it drives you nuts! You can't even say 'I'm teaching my class.'

If you're teaching a class, you can think about the elementary things that you know very well. These things are kind of fun and delightful. It doesn't do any harm to think them over again. Is there a better way to present them? Are there any new problems associated with them? Are there any new thoughts you can make about them? The elementary things are easy to think about; if you can't think of a new thought, no harm done; what you thought about it is good enough for the class. If you do think of something new, you're rather pleased that you have a new way of looking at it.

The questions of the students are often the source of new research. They often ask profound questions that I've thought about at times and then given up on, so to speak, for a while. It wouldn't do me any harm to think about them again and see if I can go any further now. The students may not be able to see the thing I want to answer, or the subtleties I want to think about, but they remind me of a problem by asking questions in the neighborhood of that problem. It's not so easy to remind yourself of these things.

So I find that teaching and the students keep life going, and I would never accept any position in which somebody has invented a happy situation for me where I don't have to teach. Never.

But once I was offered such a position....

...Finally there came in the mail an invitation from the Institute for Advanced Study: Einstein...von Neumann...Weyl...all these great minds! They write to me, and invite me to be a professor there! And not just a regular professor. Somehow they knew my feelings about the Institute: how it's too theoretical; how there's not enough real activity and challenge. So they write, 'We appreciate that you have a considerable interest in experiments and teaching, so we have made arrangements to create a special type of professorship, if you wish: half professor at Princeton University, and half at the Institute.'

Institute for Advance Study! Special exception! A position better than Einstein, even! It was ideal; it was perfect; it was absurd!

It was absurd. The other offers had made me feel worse, up to a point. They were expecting me to accomplish something. But this offer was so ridiculous, so impossible for me to live up to, so ridiculously out of proportion. The other ones were just mistakes, this was an absurdity! I laughed at it while I was shaving, thinking about it...."

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Not everyone agrees with Feynman. For him, Teaching and Research held a 50-50 interest. He wrote he was as happy with his Oersted Medal as with his Nobel.

But perhaps there are others whose interest in Teaching and Research vary between 10-90 to 90-10. Still, that 10% either way is important, I guess.

For me Feynman's words are a great solace. For a large part of my stay at IIT KGP, I benefited from questions asked by students; and converted them into articles with those students and colleagues as collaborators.

That was my living.

Take the case of this teacher and his student quarreling about the separability of the Schrodinger Equation. Like in that famous story they approached me as a simian judge. All of us worked on a truly exceptional case and solved that new problem both classically and quantumly and got interesting results and, unlike that judge, I didn't gobble it, but published it with all our three names as authors. By then the student had gone to Princeton and was interacting with the top man there in what he named CMT.

I now see that the problem is taught at Princeton (with our QM citation):

http://puhep1.princeton.edu/~mcdonald/examples/dipole.pdf

DRACULA!

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Bloggaholism

Manas writes today:

"I am amazed by the pace at which you are writing the blogs..."

Varun wrote on January 6:

"...You are too prolific to keep up with! I'm now lagging a couple of days..."

Shamik wrote on January 24:

"I keep a count of the days in a year that have gone by from your blogpost number..."

gps:

Ha! You call that 'prolific!' The score for three good years is not even a thousand; just a measly 944.

Blogging just one short copycat piece a day is contemptible for a full-time author ;-)

Listen to RKN:

"...There is a type of reader who demands to be told, the moment you are introduced as a writer: 'What books have you written? Give me a list of your works.' And you recite the names of your books, the handful of titles you have produced in decades of writing, only to provoke the other into saying, 'Only ten books for so many years! Can't you write fifty books a year? I have heard that the late Edgar Wallace used to write two books a week...' "

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Quantum Teaching

A youngster writes:

"...I shall be taking introductory course on Applied QM...Your tips or notes of it will be helpful to me, since this is going to be my first formal course at undergraduate level..."

gps:

There is only one all-important tip in teaching QM at any level: 'Face the students and not the blackboard for a large part of the class.'

I had taught QM from Planck's Law to Field Quantization for B Techs, B Scs and M Scs. I never solved the Schrodinger (or even the Dirac) Hydrogen atom in all its glory. I just separate the equation for angular and radial parts for a centrally symmetric potential. And I ask them to find the solutions of the differential equations at home. Never cluttered the blackboard with all those derivations of the cussed Spherical Harmonics (Associated or Dissociated) and those blessed Laguerre polynomials. That is not QM; that is math.

Benefits I got thereby:

1. I could attempt a non-central potential (mentioned above) without fear.

2. My aversion to teaching those differential equations and their series solutions led me to find a lazy way of teaching the elementary Multipole Radiation (QM) with all the selection rules, polar plots and polarization charts without using Spherical Harmonics explicitly.

Ask Aniket if you don't believe me.

In Praise of Laziness!!!:

http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2009/10/in-praise-of-laziness.html



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