Iconophilia

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"Shilpa Shetty has a penchant for Ganeshas. She has more than 1,000 Ganeshas in her house"...

.....DC, 23 July

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When I was in the Final Year of my M Sc at AU (circa 1963) I happened to visit my cousin, Moorthy, who was in his Final Year M Sc at SVU at Tirupati.

This is the only bit of our conversation I remember after half a century:

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Moorthy: Which book did you follow for your EM?

Me: Starling

Moorthy: Does it use Vector Calculus for Maxwell Equations?

Me: No

Moorthy: How does one understand EM without Vector Calculus?

Me: Umm, ugh, ahem...

Moorthy: Do you mean to say you don't know Grad, Div, Curl, Lapla, Gauss Theorem, Stokes Theorem, Greens Theorem...?

Me: Well...

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A couple of years later, I joined IIT KGP as a Physics Teacher. The first thing I resolved was that my students shouldn't be subjected to such ignominy.

So, I read up all the hi-fi books on EM available in our CL ending up with Panofsky & Phillips & Jackson.

Incidentally, if one wants to learn the basics of Math, one has to start from good Physics texts. And if one wants to learn the basics of Physics, one has to start from good Engg texts {;-}

There was this Senior Prof L in ME Dept who was considered their best teacher. He was a couple of decades older to me and commanded respect. He was famous for his Engineering Mechanics lectures. He was so famous that I almost envied him {;-}

It so happened that one day I was representing Phy Dept in one of the meetings he was chairing. This is the conversation that took place between us:

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Prof L: Do you teach Mechanics in your Dept?

Me: Yes, sometimes

Prof L: Do you use Vector Calculus?

Me: (brightening up) Oh, yes!!!

Prof L: It is silly...I never used it. Mechanics can very well be taught without all that baggage.

Me: Yes...yes...Whittaker doesn't use it

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A decade later I had to teach Special Relativity for our Phy students. SR can very well be taught without tensors, like in Resnick. But I decided to teach it from Landau & Lifshitz Classical Theory of Fields (First Edition which used the ict metric for EM without superscripts and g-mu-nu that Feynman joked about:

"...They would have their heads kind of in air, and they would be talking to each other, not paying attention to where they were going, saying things to each other, like, 'G-mu-nu, G-mu-nu'...His face lit up. 'Ah, yes,' he said, 'you mean Chapel Hill!")

Another decade later I had to teach QM (First Course) for our Third Years. I knew there was strong resentment in the hearts of our Phy students because they were taught QM only in their third year, while their Engg friends were taught (by me too) in their second year. Apparently the Engg guys were bragging about it in their Halls of Residence.

So, I was meeting a bunch of kids with a negative attitude. So, I decided to teach QM to them from Feynman 3rd Volume which teaches QM the wrong way round from 2-state systems, 3-state, n-state, discrete infinity-state, and finally continuous infinity-state Schrodinger Equation for a free particle (with which B Techs start).

And to add spice and masala to their bravado, I started with kets and bras, a cut above Feynman.

Their joy knew no bounds...serious case of iconophilia.

Another decade later, there was this all-powerful External Review Committee visiting all labs. Although I was not the Fourth Year Lab-in-Charge then, but only Guide & Adviser, I took on the stalwarts from Cal and Jadavpur.

And I decided that showing them Electronics and Optics kits would be no good because they would act like Bertie Wooster asked by his Aunt Dahlia to sneer at the cow-creamer.

Fortunately we had in our lab something they never saw at Cal: MIT's Spacetime Software and QM Software playing with Feynman Path Integrals.

That did it.

The QM Expert from Cal almost slapped me on my meek back and proclaimed:

"I have stopped teaching, from last year, QM with Schrodinger Equation...it is junk...I start with Feynman Path Integrals"

Bless his Soul!

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Tailpiece

DC Obit:

"...The 20th century painter Lucian Freud died on Wednesday night in London, grandson of Sigmund Freud (father of psychoanalysis)..."

gps: And so, son of psychoanalysis?


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