Digital Tyranny

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Thank Heavens I am not, but if I were asked to now write a Primer in Physics, I would start something like this:

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Long long ago (forget how long, it is not all that frightfully important) there was no Earth, nor Sun, nor Stars, nor Home Loans.

There was indeed Nothing other than Myself in deep sleep.

As the Upanishads put it rather neatly, it was all One without a Second.

It got rather bored and exploded in a terrific Big Bang.

Then came Light, Darkness, Man, Woman and Population fighting for land.

Then came Geometry, which, as the name implies, 'measuring' the land before cutting it up.

They then tried to square the circle and failed; to this day.

They then said it all depends on an 'irrational' if not 'transcendental' number.

To this day, whatever they fail to do, they call it irrational.

Like the 8th Order Perturbation Correction to the Lamb Shift.

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Unfortunately, my Physics Primer was not this frank.

It started with a most horrible Chapter called Units & Dimensions; and talked about some platinum-iridium (or was it rhodium?) alloy safely stored somewhere in France (of all places, where the units and dimensions now have all got screwed up).

And then as if it was not sufficiently boring, they talked about CGS, FPS, MKS, SI (French again)...they then said it didn't matter at all...you can make c or e or G unity...

And then the most inscrutable Vernier Calipers with its zero error.

That launched them onto an even more horrible Chapter called Error Analysis.

I frankly don't know how I survived it all for 47 years.

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Concerning numbers, my friend DB had a healthy apathy...he outsourced his Income Tax Calculation to ME of all people. Since we always had the same salary and no other income, he used to copy my Returns taking care to not copy the name of the Assessee.

He also never had a pocket calculator nor log tables (Cal Univ was liberal).

He dabbled only in symbols safely.

And he was always defensive about non-numbers too.

One wintry day when he was blowing smoke rings in our Office (in KGP you can do it only during the week-long winter), I recited a lovely verse from the Brihadaranyak Upanishad where Sage Yagnyavalkya talks about Self-Love as the Universal Truth.

DB couldn't care less, for, he was negotiating a wicked contour integral.

But to show me up, he asked:

"What do the Upanishads say about infant mortality?"

To which I replied:

"That doesn't fall under their scope"

He at once agreed with the soundness of my answer because he knew that my counter-question would be:

"What does Gel'fand say about it?"

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All these germane (good word that I wanted to show off) thoughts sprang up from today's news item with a London Dateline:

"Happy Marriage is worth $105514.79 (at today's exchange rates)"

It seems there is no Error Analysis there.

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