Picture Perfect

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About 25 years ago Professor S T Abidi asked me a favor: One of his nephews started a monthly magazine in Lucknow devoted to Science Education (Read JEE Coaching). Can I please contribute an article on Physics Education for its Inaugural Number? I told STA that he was the best person to write such a 'popular' article, but if a one-page thing on how to go about solving Problems in Physics (tricks of the trade) would do, I could write it up in an hour (At that time I was solving Irodov Problems single-mindedly). He jumped at the idea and said that was precisely what was wanted. So, I wrote it up and gave the manuscript to him and got a Free Copy of the short-lived magazine duly.

The only thing I remember of my article is its inaugural sentence: "The mind of a physicist is made of pictures." (The rest of it is topoed from the Preface of Irodov ;-)

Listen to Feynman:

"...Topology was not at all obvious to the mathematicians. There were all kinds of weird possibilities that were 'counter-intuitive.' Then I got an idea. I challenged them: 'I bet there isn't a single theorem that you can tell me---what the assumptions are and what the theorem is in terms I can understand---where I can't tell you right away whether it is true or false. '......

......So I always won. If I guessed it right, great. If I guessed it wrong, there is always something I could find in their simplification that they left out.

Actually, there was a certain amount of genuine quality to my guesses. I had a scheme, which I still use today when somebody is explaining something that I'm trying to understand: I keep making up examples. For instance, the mathematicians would come in with a terrific theorem, and they're all excited. As they're telling me the conditions of the theorem, I construct something which fits all the conditions. You know, you have a set (one ball)---disjoint (two balls). Then the balls turn colors, grow hairs, or whatever, in my head as they put more conditions on. Finally they state the theorem, which is some dumb thing about the ball which isn't true for my hairy green ball thing, so I say, 'False!'

If it's true, they get all excited, and I let them go on for a while. Then I point out my counterexample.

'Oh! We forgot to tell you that it's Class 2 Hausdorff homomorphic.'

'Well, then,' I say, 'It's trivial! It's trivial!' By that time I know which way it goes, even though I don't know what Hausdorff homomorphic means."

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Well, as prof AVKR said, Feynman will be known forever for his Feynman Lectures as much as for his Feynman Diagrams...which are pictures and pictures following certain rules. It is possible not to use his pictures as Schwinger was reputed to do (unjustly) but mortals like you and I would be happy to see all those fourth-order photon-photon scattering kites with wavy tails (as in Sakuari's AQM); although apparently Bohr objected to Feynman Diagrams at his lecture in the Shelter Island since he thought Feynman was drawing pictures of the paths of electrons and photons which went against Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and his own Complementarity Principle (on which I have a Paper in EJP), instead of just an Accounting Procedure.

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In general the ability to see relations between one thing and quite another (analogies and similes) is, as our Autocrat says, "appears to me a sort of miraculous gift"..but not so...since, "Nothing is clearer than that all things are in all things..", an almost Upanishadic thought. But a good 50 years ago, I read his famous simile in Reader's Digest's Quotable Quotes:

"The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye. The more light you shine on it, the more it will contract."

And to this day I fondly remember it as one of the best 'dynamic' similes I ever read.

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Our epics and kavyas are full of similes. For instance the blood-red palash flowers (flame of the forest) are compared by Jayadeva to the red arrowheads of the Cupid with which he wounds the hearts of the lovers...as wiki says ;-)

But I read in Rajagoplachari's Mahabharata that Karna (?) just before his death in the battle with Arjun looked like a majestic but bare palash tree, his wounds looking like its blood-red flowers.

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Talking of the minds of physicists being full of pictures and analogies, we have the Plum-Pudding Atomic Model of Thomson, the Planetary Model of Rutherford-Bohr, Swimming Pool Reactor, the Mushroom Cloud, Brighter Than a Thousand Suns Gita Verse, the Eightfold Way, and many others like the God Particle.

But these are a lighter and shallower version of what Physicists have in mind when 'relating one thing to quite another'. To go a bit deeper, like many of my classmates I must confess that our course on Modern Physics came as a huge relief after three grueling years of viscosity, surface tension, cantilevers, the blessed laws of thermodynamics etc. Because, it heralded a revolution in thought. New thoughts don't suddenly descend from the Heavens...they are extensions of the old thoughts in new directions.

I was always charmed by two Nobel-winning Modern Physics experiments.

1. Millikan's Oil Drops:

The experimental set-up has nothing 'modern' about it...nor do the ides behind it. There is this messy viscosity, Stokes' Law (which Wiki says played an important role in at least 3 Nobel Prizes), buoyancy...all first year boring topics.

2. Wilson's Cloud Chamber:

Wilson was really into Cloud Physics trying to study atmospheric specters but had the vision to convert his apparatus into a particle detector. And the principles are just the classical supersaturation, condensation of droplets on 'seeds' which was an 'important' question in our Surface Tension and Vapor Pressure over Curved Surfaces...

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My Guru SDM had a very picturesque mind. When I showed him a calculation of mine in which a certain assumption is used and then dropped finally, he at once said: "It is like a scaffolding that is kicked away after the building is completed".

Once there was a Seminar by a famous physicist from TIFR on Cherenkov Radiation in our IIT KGP which he asked me to attend without fail. And there were lots of Q & A after the Seminar as to a certain 'infinity' which remained queasy and they were arguing about it. I kept quiet as I was still not a Doctor of Philosophy, but on the verge of that hat. The Seminar ended in a confusion. After the Seminar was over, I was escorting SDM to his Office, and he asked me what I thought was the answer. Since I was deep into the very physical extension of 'dispersion', while the TIFR Big Gun was ignoring it, I said that the moment it is taken into account, the infinity disappears.

And his eyes lighted up and he said: "You mean the Cherenkov Cone's Tail will be cut off like a racing monkey's!"

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I myself indulged in a little simile in my AJP Paper, now called the Flickering Bulb Paradox and benefited from it.

There was this H-shaped Object that was gliding smoothly over two parallel rails with the top and bottom of the H touching them all the time. In the Introduction, I compared the shooting 'H' to a 'shuttle in a weaver's loom'.

The decisive Referee Report had the sentence: "The first para of the Introduction riveted my attention and the 'shuttle in the weaver's loom' cinched it."

I had to look up Webster for 'cinch' which was a new word to me and I thought it was a typo for 'clinch'.

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A good 20 years after he attended my Lectures on QM II, Vinit Kumar wrote to me that the way I said in the class that, unlike in the Dirac Equation, spin is put by hand in the Schrodinger Equation, raised a 'vision' in his mind that gps was putting spin into the Schrodinger Equation 'by hand' like sugar with a spoon into a cup of tea.

Cute Picture that!!!

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