There is a thing called: 'Presentation'.
However great one is or one's ideas are, it is worth spending a little time and effort on 'Presentation' when one goes public.
Listen to RKN talking to: 'A Hindi Enthusiast':
***************************************************
"....Secondly, try to make your textbooks attractive, not only in contents but in format. I may say without fear of contradiction that some of the Hindi textbooks I have seen are the shoddiest specimens of book production in the world....
.....Remember that half the charm of English was engendered by the manner in which schoolbooks were produced, at least in old days. I still keep with me an old Nelson Reader, nearly forty years old. I still get a peculiar delight in turning its pages: its exquisite coloured frontispiece showing some London bridge and river and towers in a fog, its thick and smooth pages....."
****************************************************
The only textbook I remember from my school days 60 years ago is my first English Reader called charmingly: 'Coromandel Readers'. Its cover had a beautiful color-picture of the Coromandel sea-coast beach sporting tall and lovely palm trees with their dangling branches swinging in the sea-breeze.
And it had inside it a haunting picture of a rippling river with a lone boat with its fuzzy shadow in the waters and its boatman rowing down a bridge with a rainbow looming in the horizon.
The text below it is the lilting poem by Christina Rosetti titled: 'Rainbow':
***************************************************
Boats sail on the rivers,
And ships sail on the seas;
But clouds that sail across the sky
Are prettier than these.
There are bridges on the rivers,
As pretty as you please;
But the bow that bridges heaven,
And overtops the trees,
And builds a road from earth to sky,
Is prettier far than these.
*****************************************************
I remember nothing else of my school books.
Sometime ago I posted a blog with this facetious item:
***************************************************
[Punch Cartoon: The picture showed the results of a Vegetable Show. The First Prize went to a dame, suitably underdressed, wheeling a barrow with not a Really Huge cabbage; followed by an old man, suitably overdressed, carrying an ENORMOUS pumpkin, winning the Second Prize.
Man says: "She scored in Presentation"].
************************************************
And I got this quick response from Aniket:
**************************************************
****************************************************
I was always interested in Electrodynamics. But in our University the prescribed textbook was a horrible thing called: 'Electricity & Magnetism' by Starling. It was drab in every way.
And as soon as I entered the wonderful Central Library at IIT KGP and was looking for books on the subject I was greeted by Sears. What a fantastic change!
Give it to the Americans: They revolutionized the get-up and style of presentation of Physics books in every way and democratized them. Pictures, pictures and more pictures!
MSS told me that Whittaker is said to have drawn innumerable pictures that facilitated writing his 'Analytical Dynamics'; and then threw them in the gutter, presenting only the forbidding text. That was supposed to be British Aristocracy!
One evening an NCC gent by name Colonel Kamat, with a little science background, entered my room in our Faculty Hostel and asked for the Feynman Lectures. I was curious and asked him why they interested him. He replied that he was enchanted by that picture of Feynman playing his drums and thought the contents were equally beautiful. He said he never saw such a picture in anyone of his College Books. And, if I remember right, that particular picture was printed willy-nilly: "..I think they put it there to satisfy this idea they got that 'the author wants a drum somewhere'. Anyway everybody wonders why that picture of me playing drums is in the Preface of the Feynman Lectures...".
In scientific works attractive Notation is half the battle. Starling had a Chapter on Maxwell Equations in all their ugly component glory. When I saw them in the Vector form in Panofsky & Phillips, I realized it was not only a strikingly concise Notation, but obviously has lot more insight. Gone are the innumerable Rules: The swimming man's rule, the left thumb rule, the right index finger rule, the various cork-screw rules; all replaced by just the definition of cros-product.
Einstein's first Paper on STR didn't use Tensor Notation. It was Minkowski who started it. And we now know how impossible Einstein's later Field Equations on GTR would be without Tensor Notation not only in print but also in thought.
While teaching too, it is worth investing some effort not only on Content but also on Presentation. It could be board-work or Power Point; and, as I said earlier, to face one's students and talk to them chattily, and not seem to pontificate.
Here is Vineet's Certificate to gps after a good decade:
*****************************************************************************
"..Just a coincidence that we were also discussing electron spin and I was telling how I learned from you that electron spin is not like classical spin, you used to tell us with lot of excitement that in Schrodinger Eq., spin is put by hand, and your pose while making this statement used to make me feel as if spin is put in Schrodinger Eq. by hand using a 'spoon'. And, in Dirac Eq., spin is in-built!..."
*********************************************************************************
There is a wonderful word in English which I am fond of: "Pleasing".
There is no harm in trying to make whatever you are presenting to the public 'pleasing' to the eye and ear!
=========================================================
Post Script: Taking some well-deserved time-out from the mind-boggling daily blogging of the last two months.
Thank you!
***************************************************************************
No comments:
Post a Comment