After getting my M Sc Degree in First Class (they were pretty cheap), I had to wait 12 years to get my Ph D Degree...I was waiting for my ideal guide ;-)
After getting my Central Government Permanent Job (at a cheap place called IIT KGP), I had to wait 14 years to get married...I was waiting for the ideal wife ;-)
The two waits ran concurrently (like those two PF Loans I was talking about).
So, whenever I got sick of waiting for my Ph D, I would pine for my marriage, for a change; and vice versa.
There lies the nub of how to overcome 'waiting sickness'...mind is a wizard at parallel processing...so create for yourself a variety of waiting lines. It is like using a thorn to pick that other thorn stuck deep in your palm.
Einstein said somewhere that he loved waiting in lines for his buses and salary during his most prolific lowly job of clerk in that patent office. While waiting ostensibly for his bus, his mind was attacking his physics problems. By the time he joined the IAS at Princeton, he didn't have to wait for buses or pay checks. So, he bought a pushbike and roamed around waiting for inspiration while keeping his balance on the bike to avoid a nasty fall.
SDM told me that while he was waiting (agonizingly) for that first cry from Mampi outside the OT in Calcutta, he found his mind coming up with his famous Majumdar formula for the CGC of Angular Momentum.
Thurber wrote (as I copied the other day) that if you are trying to recall from the memory disk in your head a half-forgotten place or name and keep trying, gnawing, and chewing on it, it won't come up...you will only go crazy. The trick is to bamboozle the mind telling it: "I don't want you to get that name, go prepare for tomorrow's lecture"; then it suddenly crops up saying: "Rakhee, Rakhee, Rakhee..." till you put aside your lecture and pick up why the devil you wanted to get Rakhee for, like composing a loveless letter to her; and find meanwhile that your mind has solved the problem of how to hop, skip, and jump over that Fringe Localization Problem without letting your students know that you don't know it.
In the Index at the end of Feynman's "Surely You Are Joking" book, you will find Einstein has as many as six entries; and God none!
But there is God mentioned in that book at least once. Hear what he says:
"...So, I called up Cornell, and asked them if they thought it was possible for me to come back (from Caltech). They said, 'Sure! We'll set it up and call you back tomorrow.'
The next day, I had the greatest luck in making a decision. God must have set it up to help me decide. I was walking to my office, and a guy came running up to me and said, "Hey, Feynman! Did you hear what happened? Baade found that there are two different populations of stars!..."
Likewise I had two bits of luck when Feynman's God helped me make my decisions.
I got the first rank in my B Sc (Hons) at AU, Vizagh; and it was almost a foregone conclusion that I would retain it in my M Sc, one year later. Had I kept my first rank, I would have automatically got the sole post of Demonstrator in the Dept of Physics at AU and my lifeline and worldline would have been different. I loved Vizagh and its beach and it was like my Malgudi, where I lived 7 long and happy years. And I would have ended up with a beach-house after retirement. But, in retrospect, I see that I would have rotted there. I had no aptitude for the sort of research that went on there; and teaching was treated as a headache which can be skipped...our teacher in Optics took only ten lectures the whole year....But God was with me and I lost my first rank due to a nasty paper set in QM. And so I ended up at IIT KGP, rather unwillingly, crying buckets on the Vizagh platform when I was leaving the town for good.
And after joining at KGP, I was so interested in keeping my students interested in my classes that I couldn't do any worthwhile research at all (I got two papers though). So, I was getting terribly depressed and thought I would never be able to get a Ph D. So, while I was sulking, I got a post card from Dr JRK who just joined IISc Bangalore (fresh from Oxford and Michigan) saying I was welcome to join under him for a Ph D in NQR/NMR with the promise of a Degree in 3 years and possibly an entry 'position' into the Department at some level. The offer was very very attractive. So, I took a week's leave and traveled to Bangalore for a (sham) interview after which I got the Offer Letter as RS. JRK asked me to join then and there and resign later...they would keep the offer till I got relieved from KGP. During my four days stay there I saw that the Dept had no UG students at all...and no teaching. So, I demurred and said I would let them know in due course. And after returning to KGP and while traveling in a rickshaw from the KGP Station, my rickshaw was held up at the Circle in front of the Main Gate...it was time for the post-lunch rush of students on pushbikes...and a couple of my students slowed down to smile at me...and then and there I decided I would never leave this place... Feynman's God again!
Now, I know why I was getting depressed at KGP after two years. Hear Feynman again:
"...I now understand it better. First of all, a young man doesn't realize how much time it takes to prepare good lectures, for the first time, especially---and to give the lectures, and to make up the exam problems, and to check that they're sensible ones. I was giving good courses, the kind of courses where I put a lot of thought into each lecture. But I didn't realize that's a lot of work! So, here I was, 'burned out'..."
Well, I am no Feynman, but I do realize that a place which is dedicated to whole-time research or whole-time teaching would have certainly not have been my cup of tea...
While I was getting bored with teaching and not progressing, I was taking up a publishable problem or two and try and crack it and vice versa. And I spent two whole years cracking Irodov problems and keeping notes. After which I got a reprimand from SDM @ Cal that I should never stop publishing something or the other every year. So, I laid Irodov aside and picked up a half-dozen half-solved problems and wrote up six papers in a year...and got promoted. God again in the shape of SDM.
Talking of parallel processing I read that Niels Bohr used to have a cabinet with a dozen pigeonholes into which he used to push partly solved problems and pick up the thing that came to his mind with a lead...And he surrounded himself with students as gifted as he if not more.
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Supratimspeak
Dear Sir:
These days, I am yet to settle down into a regular routine and I often find myself unable to read your blogs on a daily basis like I used to do even a few months ago. So i often end up reading several of your blogs at one go. The choice is not too different from deciding whether to eat one piece of a bar of chocolate at a time thereby enjoying it everyday or going without any for several days and happily binging after the extended period of self control is over. In this context you might find this youtube video on the "marshmallow experiment" quite amusing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3S0xS2hdi4&feature=related
Often, I go to your blog with the intention of finding out about the topic of the day by reading a few sentences and returning to it later on for a more leisurely and careful reading. But almost always, I find myself so captivated after reading a few lines that I have to finish reading the whole thing then and there..."
gps:
Listen to RKN:
"At the end of the last line a pregnant silence, while I awaited the good word from my select public.
'Would you like that I should read it again?' I asked, and one or the other said, 'Oh, no. I have absorbed every word.'
'And what do you think of it?' 'I felt the tears coming up, but I suppressed them.'
Excellent. Precisely what I wished every literary effort to produce.
And then: 'Have you read anything similar to this anywhere?' 'This is a rare unique effort; sometimes reminds me of Shelley's Adonais or some of Shakespeare's sonnets.'
Precisely, precisely. No comparison would be more welcome and appropriate..."
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