Tinkering

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More than a year ago I posted a blog describing my misadventures in a friend's kitchen when his wife was away:

http://gpsastry.blogspot.com/2010/09/cook-it-up.html

As soon as he read it, my cousin, Professor GMK Sarma, retired from the Metallurgy Department of IT-BHU [IIT (BHU)], rang me up and gave me a delightful lesson in metallurgy, since I goofed in that post saying I picked up a lead vessel, poured some cooking oil in it, placed it on the high gas burner, went out for a smoke, returned after a couple of minutes, found it missing, and was told by my friend VR to look below...it had melted and solidified into a shining solid heap.

GMK told me that it couldn't have been a pure lead vessel, since lead is very poisonous and its toxicity can kill if you are fed on rasam made in it for years. And he reminded me of the itinerant tinsmiths who were such a nostalgic feature of our streets, shouting: "kalaai posthaam!, maatlu vestaam!" and collecting old and punctured vessels for plating by tin which is absolutely harmless.

I then asked him why we couldn't as well use tin vessels instead of getting our lead vessels periodically coated with tin. He said tin is dashed expensive. And taught me many things about eutectic alloys, eutectic point, soldering and more.

Anyway, tinkering essentially means getting a thing make do as long as one can by trying to tweak it here and there instead of dumping it in the dustbin and looking for a totally new replacement that is faultless.

The itinerant tinsmiths of our fond childhood vanished as soon as stainless steel arrived in our markets. But not before our moms resisted hard...the power of habit.

That is 'tinkering' with kitchen vessels...but history of mankind's ideas, events, and technologies is replete with valiant but vain efforts to try and tinker and tweak and finally realize, often via a rebellious mind, that a brand new stainless steel of an idea is far better than good old lead coated with tin.

Here is my shortlist from history of science...you can have yours.

1. Astronomers were convinced for millennia that heavenly objects move in circles because circle is a figure of perfection. And tried to explain away the wayward motion of retrograde planets by superposing small circles on larger circles and largest circles and calling them epicycles...heavenly tinkering. And Kepler threw them into the dustbin and came up with his fantastic three empirical laws; an achievement par excellence.

2. Darwin (still disliked by most Churches) snatching the business of Creation from the hands of God. Earlier scientists and philosophers tried to accommodate God by tinkering.

3. Maxwell banishing Faraday's tubes of induction with their pushes and pulls and predicting the speed of light in the bargain from electricity and magnetism data.

4. Einstein's predecessors trying hard to accommodate the well-worn idea of Aether with a dozen or more new experimental findings by tinkering with Newtonian Mechanics. Einstein dumped Aether into the dustbin although Whittaker didn't agree and said Vacuum Polarization is evidence of Aether ;-)

5. Rutherford snatching away all matter from the atom and squeezing it into a nucleus...earlier scientists tried hard with plum puddings.

6. Dirac rubbishing all the earlier efforts to tinker Schrodinger's Equation with patches of spin, fine structure, Thomas Precession and more.

7. And the idea of BIG BANG replacing BIG GOD DADDY!

Just for fun...don't take it seriously...the list is far from complete...time up to close the post.


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