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The really big fears do not bother me as much as the little little fears. Like for instance I don't get nightmares about loss of life and limb, loss of loved ones, destitution, disease, and the very good chance that that passing asteroid is going to hit Hyderabad and wipe it out of the Telangana map...along with me in it.
The recurring nightmare I have these days is that I am back at IIT KGP as a young teacher and my vindictive boss, GBM, asked me to go and take his 4th year lecture, at the last minute, and explain to them all about fugacity.
And after what looks like a million tearful years I wake up sweating.
My trouble is that, what with one thing and the other, I never taught thermodynamics during my 4 decade stay at KGP. And I never could teach it to myself. With good reason.
Unlike the other physics subjects, thermodynamics is a very negative science. It challenges you that you can't do this, that, or even THAT. And that you can't build perpetual motion machines of the first, second, and perhaps the third kind. And I never wanted to build any of them.
And the proofs given to these challenges are equally negative. How can you prove that no one...NO BLOODY ONE...can ever build a machine of a certain kind? Maybe some geek would one day come up with a prohibited machine. And then thermodynamics would tell him that there was always that possibility but its probability is infinitesimal although finite.
And probability was always a bugbear to me. In our first year at our university in Vizagh there was this highly constipated teacher who would scowl all the time and try to teach us permutations and combinations from a horrid book called Algebra by Hall & Knight. This book asked us not to show but 'shew'. And that pissed me off...I mean saying shew in 1958!
And it starts with 'an urn contains ten red balls and twenty black balls....'. And we were tutored by our seniors during ragging that 'balls' (in the plural) are the ones we have in our bags but not in our urns. The only urn I heard of, but never seen till then, was in the title of that Keats poem that talks about another weird law:
"Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty"
I mean...the really beautiful girls at out university were born liars.
And so I could never concentrate on what happens when three red balls and 4 black balls are replaced by ten orange ones. So, phut went my probability theory out of our french window into the sea beach that was inviting me (and a few like-minded friends) to cut and run and watch the waves, the fish, the birds and steamers anchored in the distance.
And fugacity is the most awful word in all of physics till quarks came along.
Quite another fear that haunts me even today is that of crowds and stampedes.
This has to do with an early childhood trauma to which I was unwillingly subjected. I was 4 and was in my grannie's home at Nellore. And there is this temple there called the Ranganayaka Swami Gudi. During those days this temple was gorgeous and once a year it used to have its rath-yatra (chariot-procession). And to watch it the entire population of Nellore and its suburbs used to crowd into the narrow gully that led to it.
And my grannie took me there leading me by hand to watch it. And with crowds before me, behind me, below me, and above me...literally...I fell down and grannie tried to lift me up but she was a lady and was too old. And I was manhandled and mishandled by the teeming crowds till someone took pity on me, lifted me up his shoulders, and restored me to my grannie. And I was crying, shouting, and wailing that we should go home but grannie would have none of it.
To this day I avoid crowds and temples.
The loss is entirely God's...
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The really big fears do not bother me as much as the little little fears. Like for instance I don't get nightmares about loss of life and limb, loss of loved ones, destitution, disease, and the very good chance that that passing asteroid is going to hit Hyderabad and wipe it out of the Telangana map...along with me in it.
The recurring nightmare I have these days is that I am back at IIT KGP as a young teacher and my vindictive boss, GBM, asked me to go and take his 4th year lecture, at the last minute, and explain to them all about fugacity.
And after what looks like a million tearful years I wake up sweating.
My trouble is that, what with one thing and the other, I never taught thermodynamics during my 4 decade stay at KGP. And I never could teach it to myself. With good reason.
Unlike the other physics subjects, thermodynamics is a very negative science. It challenges you that you can't do this, that, or even THAT. And that you can't build perpetual motion machines of the first, second, and perhaps the third kind. And I never wanted to build any of them.
And the proofs given to these challenges are equally negative. How can you prove that no one...NO BLOODY ONE...can ever build a machine of a certain kind? Maybe some geek would one day come up with a prohibited machine. And then thermodynamics would tell him that there was always that possibility but its probability is infinitesimal although finite.
And probability was always a bugbear to me. In our first year at our university in Vizagh there was this highly constipated teacher who would scowl all the time and try to teach us permutations and combinations from a horrid book called Algebra by Hall & Knight. This book asked us not to show but 'shew'. And that pissed me off...I mean saying shew in 1958!
And it starts with 'an urn contains ten red balls and twenty black balls....'. And we were tutored by our seniors during ragging that 'balls' (in the plural) are the ones we have in our bags but not in our urns. The only urn I heard of, but never seen till then, was in the title of that Keats poem that talks about another weird law:
"Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty"
I mean...the really beautiful girls at out university were born liars.
And so I could never concentrate on what happens when three red balls and 4 black balls are replaced by ten orange ones. So, phut went my probability theory out of our french window into the sea beach that was inviting me (and a few like-minded friends) to cut and run and watch the waves, the fish, the birds and steamers anchored in the distance.
And fugacity is the most awful word in all of physics till quarks came along.
Quite another fear that haunts me even today is that of crowds and stampedes.
This has to do with an early childhood trauma to which I was unwillingly subjected. I was 4 and was in my grannie's home at Nellore. And there is this temple there called the Ranganayaka Swami Gudi. During those days this temple was gorgeous and once a year it used to have its rath-yatra (chariot-procession). And to watch it the entire population of Nellore and its suburbs used to crowd into the narrow gully that led to it.
And my grannie took me there leading me by hand to watch it. And with crowds before me, behind me, below me, and above me...literally...I fell down and grannie tried to lift me up but she was a lady and was too old. And I was manhandled and mishandled by the teeming crowds till someone took pity on me, lifted me up his shoulders, and restored me to my grannie. And I was crying, shouting, and wailing that we should go home but grannie would have none of it.
To this day I avoid crowds and temples.
The loss is entirely God's...
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1 comment:
Maybe God reads your blog everyday just to make sure he makes up for his loss!
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