Physics & Hoi Polloi

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"...Any news that mentions the atoms becomes suspect these days. I only hope this does not mean that belligerent folk are going to be in possession of a new weapon; a combination of figures and symbols with which to paralyse the thinking powers of an enemy nation...."

......RKN (circa 1955)

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Once when all my world was young I was introduced by my M.A. (Economics) IAS B-i-L (Collector & District Magistrate) to his Assistant Collector (IAS), as another young Physics Graduate. The following is a snatch of dialogue between He and Me:

He: What is your current specialization?

Me: NQR...Nuclear Quadrupole Resonance

He: What is that?

Me: A cousin of NMR...Nuclear Magnetic Resonance

He: Ya, I understand...you must be working with Uranium, Thorium, Heavy Water and stuff...I was at BARC the other day

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Another noon I was introduced to a Cashier at SBI, IIT KGP, who joined Banking after graduating in Physics a long while ago.

He: What are you working on these days, Sir?

Me: Cherenkov Effect

He: Does it come under Mechanics, Heat or Sound?

Me: Electricity & Magnetism

He: Ha! All those Swimming Man's and other Rules...very very complicated

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My wingmate in the Faculty Hostel at IIT KGP was employed as a Dairy Scientist at IIT KGP after doing his Post-Graduation from NDRI, Karnal. He had just returned from a one-year visit to the US, getting an MS in Dairy Technology there. He entered my room for a bit of chitchat and found me winding up the first Section of Introduction to my Ph D thesis...(I was young and immature and it started bombastically like: "It is amazing that the discoveries of the present century that did so much violence to our picture of matter and motion left Maxwell's Equations practically untouched...," a sentence that tickled my Guide SDM's formidable sense of prose).

My wingmate picked it up and started reading the two-page essay and remarked:

He: You have referred many times to Taylor, Fourier and Bessel

And winked ;-) and said:

He: Your Guide must be planning to send your thesis to them

Me: Could be

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After two months of arduous waiiting, I was sitting in the Banerjee Typing Center, packing up at last the typescript of my Ph D Thesis:

http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2010/05/shyama-o-shaymali.html

I was not only young but looked boyish then. A QIP (Quality Improvement Program) Lecturer in Mech Engg (from Raipur), fortyish, entered the Center puffing on his fag and looking very Senior. And asked Shankar-da if his Ph D Thesis typing is over. Shankar-da said, Yes, only the Acknowledgment is left; and quit the room for refilling his snuff box.

Here is the dialogue we had meanwhile:

He: Are you here for your M Tech Thesis typing?

Me: Ph D thesis in Physics

He: Is the typing over?

Me: Just now

He: What is that in your hand?

Me: Acknowledgments

He: (puffing away nonchalantly) Let me have a look

He then browsed through the single page quickly, sat down, and read it slowly, and said:

He: Can I copy it?

Me: Sure

And he was copying it ferociously as Shankar-da returned and smiled. The first sentence was again poetic like: "Words do not suffice to express my profound gratitude to Professor S Datta Majumdar for his close supervision and constant guidance but for which this thesis would never have been written..."

And after a few minutes, he asked Shankar-da to tear off his earlier draft and replace it with this new one.

I can only hope he changed all the names aright, in particular, in the last sentence: "Thanks are due to my father G Radhakrishnaiah for going through the Introduction closely with his blue-pencil..."

My friend Prof NP of the same Mech Engg Department will attest to the truth of the above episode...

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Tailpiece

One evening while I was waiting for Shayma Babu in the Banerjee Typing Center a young Research Scholar arrived and asked Shankar-da if his Fourth Chapter is ready. This is the dialogue that followed:

Shankar-da: Heyn...kinthu ekti doubt aachey ek jagaythe...eta dekhoon...million hectares hobey kimba billion hectares?

RS: Dekhi...eta ami senior thesis thekey tookeychi...apnaar ki moneihoy?

Shankar-da: Billion ti hovaa uchit

RS: Thayi type koroon..


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To Whosoever It May Concern

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Procedure to transfer Electricity Meter Ownership

1. Electricity Ownership Transfer Form: Free from Electricity Board

2. Fill the details; get it also signed from your Builders as they are the current owners (submit to Mr R---to get it signed)

3. Attach 2 copies of photos (1 each of joint owner, if joint owner)

4. Attach Photo ID Proof

5. Attach latest Bill

6. Attach Receipt of Payment

7. Copy of Sale Deed

8. Copy of Sale Deed must be attested by Notary - Cost Rs 50 to Notary for attestation (Notary available in Miyapur Court---Allwyn Circle)

9. The Attestation Form also requires Rs 100 Affidavit

10. The Attestation Form also requires Rs 10 Bond NOC (For joint AC Holder only)

11. Attach Rs 25 Challan (to be collected from Kukatpally Electricity Board, then and there) as Ownership Transfer fee

12. These documents must be submitted to Kukatpally Electricity Board

13. Its just one time effort only

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HOORAY!

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Happy End of My Computing

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Edwin's 'Computer Graphics Utilities, IMB PC, Apple Macintosh' in 1987 were all Jabberwocky to me and I at once deleted them from my consciousness. I thought he had some Relativity Demos up his sleeve and I was never interested in demos where the audience don't interact. So I wrote a two-sentence letter thanking him and forgot about it.

Within a week, it so happened that our HoD, Prof K V Rao, was on a family visit to our Qrs, and I mentioned Edwin's Letter since KVR was at MIT a couple of decades back during its Centenary Celebrations. He jumped up on reading the letter from a gora saheb and confiscated it saying he would take a copy of it and forward it to our new Diro, KLC, who had a low opinion of our Physics Faculty and expressed it wherever he went (his ideal was our Ex-Prof G B Mitra...one man's meat is...).

I thought KLC would trash it, since I felt his interest in Relativity was meaner than mine in Thin Films. But, no, the very next day I got a Congratulatory Letter on the hallowed Director's Letterhead. So far so good. But there was a tailpiece...he asked me to get those 'computer graphics utilities' and show him what was in them.

As they say in the British jargon, a Request from Boss is an Order.

So, I was in the position of a bald-headed chap whose scalp was itching and he scratched it with the nearest tool available which turned out to be a red-hot poker.

But that set things rolling because it turned out to be a matter of Departmental Prestige as KVR put it. What it actually turned out to be was a six-month period of pleasantest learning...it is minor accidents like this that are labeled 'serendipitous' (the word comes from Ceylon...Simhaladwip...Lions-dwelling Island).

So, I wrote frantically to Edwin to send me his 'programs' forthwith...which he did, in a bulky envelope which was superscribed: "Magnetic Materials". Opening which I saw two huge diskettes I had no idea of whatever they are called, and a detailed Instruction Manual. I read the Manual (whose climax was the Project: Flickering Bulb Paradox). And I found to my astonishment that what he sent were no Demos but Interactive Problem-Solving Software...they do NOTHING unless you ask them to do what you have in mind.

One was labeled: Spacetime (with 90% of the Manual devoted to it) and another called Collision (which was brushed off). Both were developed by MIT Seniors under the guidance of Edwin.

I could see why Edwin was so enamored when he got my Paper for Refereeing...it was as if he bought an expensive tool but couldn't find 'toolworthy' Jobs.

I discreetly found out that there was no PC in our Department nor in most of the other Departments. One was available in IEM where my friend, NP, was the HoD, but it was 'owned' by a newly recruited Lecturer who soon became famous for hiding his keyboard with one hand while typing with the other...ambidextrous...he would hide with the right hand when he typed with the left and vice versa...he went into Banking soon, I was told, where I guess there is much to hide.

BKM had one 'on loan' from Mech Dept...BKM was ever a geek. And he offered to help me out with the PC. But I am a slow learner and despite his enormous patience, I was unhappy with instructions like "chkdsk" and pressing Alt Del and Ctrl or whatever to start it.

What I wanted was a PC all to myself whenever I was in the mood to play with it and learn...like a girl-friend.

And I discovered it in the Tech Market...a young chap opened a cubicle with one primitive PC XT and was looking for customers at a nominal rate of Rs 10 per hour. And that is how I learned Relativity in the Tech Market...I used to go to his shop at around 2 PM when he was alone and learned how to use it from him.

And it turned out that in 15 days I learned the Relativity that I didn't in 15 years. And quickly found that the Collision Program that was dismissed as an 'also ran' had undreamed of power in it. It could simulate (with some ingenuity) obscure effects like Wigner Rotation, Ray Surfaces in Moving Media, Cherenkov Cones, Doppler, Headlight and other effects nicely with figures and numbers.

Within a few months, there was a makeshift Computer Lab with one working PC XT in the abandoned Infrared Spectrometer Room in our Phy Dept. And I and a few students were crowding it with our backs and arms hitting and getting bruised by the dino called IR Spectrometer which had yet to be dismantled and removed.

And when I was ready, I asked KVR to fetch ceremonially our Director KLC; which he happily did. Apparently KLC had another important Committee Meeting and his Secretary gave us only 10 minutes...KLC sat for two hours...the Committee Meeting got postponed.

At then end of my 'Demo' to him, I requested him to install one PC in the 4th Year lab so that my students whom I was teaching SR Theory could also see what they were learning and play with it. KLC got up and said: "I will give one PC on your Table, and one other wherever you want it provided you write a Program like this."

I then remembered the Dennis Cartoon:

Dennis: What about a cookie, mom?

Mom: What about a bath?

Dennis: I withdraw my demand if you withdraw yours.

I told KLC that I was busy cracking Gravitation & Cosmology of Weinberg and had no time nor inclination for learning computer programming at this late age.

But what were rare and precious possessions became peanuts and, before KLC left KGP, there was a PC on every table and in every lab...and some students of Fourth Year started enjoying Edwin's Spacetime Software and also inventing. TRR did his Project on it and we published our 'discoveries' in AJP in 1990 to the delight of Edwin.

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And then there was an evening Sougato asked me a question on what happens to a tippe top as seen in a boosted frame...while I and DB were sipping tea at Harrys. I gave an offhand answer which was right but trite. The next day, I told him to quantify it and use Lorentz Transformations to get a complete solution; and forgot about it...it was Souagto's problem and he should get the credit for solving it.

When he was leaving for England on his Inlaks Schol and came to bid me goodbye, I asked him if he worked out his tippe top problem. He said 'No'; he was busy otherwise. I then asked his permission to try it, but then I would be a co-author. He said it would be an honor.

But it resisted. I didn't want to put the kinematic effects like length contraction, time dilation, asynchronization, velocity addition etc 'by hand' because it would be misleading; a correct Lorentz Transformation of the equation of motion should incorporate all these and more... a tricky job.

As usual it got solved 'analytically' when I was supposed to be doing something else somewhere else...in a 3-hour Invigilation.

But I was not SDM to be happy with an Equation...I wanted numbers and pictures...

It led to a transcendental equation, solving which requires elaborate numerics. One day, I and RSS stayed back at lunch and with a pocket calculator and a graph sheet could just plot a few points in one-quarter of a cycle. That gave us confidence that we were on the right track, but getting complete pictures for various angular speeds and boosts required an enormous amount of effort which only a computer could do. So, we shelved it for the time being.

And then Aniket joined as a Project Student under RSS (I gave up that job long before) and RSS was supposed to give him a problem on Atmospherics. But I told him why not ask this young genius to write a program for the tippe top thing and show the particle orbits on the monitor of a PC (I guess XT and AT were by then written off and a more powerful model was in). I don't know what happened then, but late one evening Aniket and Kedar were in my room for a spell of gossip and I asked them if they did the tippe top. They said they were 'trying', but I was no 'kind' Prof like RSS and so I chased them, egging them on.

One night they entered my Room when I was chatting with Edwin and 'announced' they solved the programming hitches and invited me to have a look at their monitor in the Computer Lab...by then the IR Spec was junked and the whole room was available for many PCs on which students were playing pranks and hacking their teachers' mails.

After a few minutes, I was very happy that all our hunches came out right and there is a Paper in EJP. But procrastination being the byword of all males, I delayed writing it up and after a couple more years, the manuscript was ready with printouts of the figures supplied by Aniket and Kedar.

The Editor was happy to publish it but with the proviso, as asked by the Referee, that the entire Computer Program has to be supplied as an Appendix. Ha! There is the rub as Hamlet said...I didn't have an iota of idea of what the Program looked like. And Aniket and Kedar were 'elsewhere'.

But by then I learned to send and receive emails with Attachments and Aniket fished the program out from his old files, worked it out again, and sent it to me, while Kedar sent me its 'movies'...not blue but colored...

So, I ended my career with a good-looking Paper with five authors (I was always happy with as many as I could gather) and an Appendix with a Computer Program of which I don't have an inkling.

That is what happens when you are lucky to collaborate with students young enough to be your kids and grandkids...sucking their blood like a Dracula:

Quote from Dr Dracula: http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2010/05/dr-dracula.html

"...Only the other day I was talking to VK that I was a Dracula sucking the blood of students. With the difference that after slaking my blood-thirst I did that of their juniors as well..."


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My Computing - 9

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My Guru SDM belonged to the Whittaker school of thought deeming figures and numbers as infra dig in their publications. Equations, Equations and more Equations. I on the other hand loved Sears' books having as many figures as possible.

I bought SDM's book on QM and, as expected, didn't find many figures in any of its 250 odd pages. On the other hand, I was then reading and enjoying the book Quantics by Levy-Leblond and Balibar. Most every other page of the book had a cute figure picked up from the latest research journals showing one graph or the other using bread and butter QM in their Labs. If I remember right, It is the only QM book I referred to in my Paper with VS and AVM:

http://iopscience.iop.org/0143-0807/17/5/005;jsessionid=40A4970AE534FCD9937D153AB75F7C8D.c1


SDM's ideal was a path-breaking Paper (like his famous 1947 Paper on GR) every step of which has to be cracked by the earnest reader with pen and paper, teasing out the naughty missing steps. One morning when I went to his Qrs, he read out the Referee's Report on one of his Papers...the Referee was fairly irritated by the suppressed steps, while SDM was enjoying the Referee's discomfiture.

My ideal (which I sort of achieved in 1990) was a Paper so full of figures with detailed captions that a casual reader doesn't have to go through the text at all to get the gist...just see the figures and browse their captions...

And SDM & I had to 'collaborate' and write Joint Papers. Our first two Papers were written in his style devoid of figures. By the time we came to the third Paper, I took over and insisted that a figure would do a lot of talking. And I explained to him that the Figure I had drawn is as powerful as the Universal Resonance Curve. He was curious and asked: "What is that?" And he was so charmed that it went in.

But all I had to do for drawing that curve was to consult Tables of Bessel Functions that didn't require any massive computation.

I don't recall any subsequent Paper of mine that didn't have a figure or two. And none needed anything but a pocket calculator.

So, for about twenty years after my first fling with IBM 1620, I lost touch with computers, programs and data structures. And those two decades saw the operation of Moore's Law in its full swing.

One morning around 1985, I was 'employed' as the Chief Invigilator in F-134. As usual I was gathering wool while the youngster helping me suddenly rushed to a student in the back benches happily working with a pocket calculator (which was allowed). And snatched his device and brought it to me saying it is a 'programmable calculator' packing the punch of an IBM 1620. And perhaps can store a whole lecture notes ;-) And then on, there was a ban on 'programmable calculators' in the Exam Halls...ha!!! 99% of the Invigilators were like me who wouldn't know if a calculator was programmable or not...we just read out the Big Ban aloud and threatened anyone flouting the rule with expulsion from the Exam Hall forthwith.

This reminded me of the Chandamama story where a goldsmith boy falls in love with a Brahmin girl and convinces her father that he too is a Brahmin. And one day before the wedding when the prospective F-i-L was getting ornaments made in his courtyard, the faking bridegroom arrives, listens for a second, and warns his would be pop-in-law that his goldsmith was cheating him and passing off 14 carat gold as 22 carat. And confronts the goldsmith and exposes him. The cheat then gets up and, before leaving, warns the bride's father that his 'Brahmin' bridegroom is a cheat too, since none else than a born-goldsmith can figure out the difference in sound made by a 14 carat ornament and the 24 carat one...the wedding is canceled forthwith...thief catching thief...geek catching geek.

I didn't then know that another long spell of flirting with computers was indicated in my lifeline.

In 1976, when I started teaching SR to fourth year physics students, it occurred to me that an electrical version of the Pole-Barn Paradox that can be completely resolved would be worth attempting. And I mentioned it to DB. It took a decade for it to materialize. Finally one evening I saw the best way it could be done. And in a couple of days I did the algebra and sent the manuscript: "Is Length Contraction Really Paradoxical?" to the Editor of AJP.

And soon I got a warm Referee Report recommending publication of the manuscript and asking me to add a bibliography of all the earlier paradoxes in SR. The revised version appeared in Oct 1987.

And very soon I got a gracious letter datelined Oct 20, 1987 on an MIT letter-head reading:

"I was a reviewer of your wonderful article 'Is length contraction really paradoxical?' published this month in the American Journal of Physics. Enclosed is a take-home project assigned this week to my relativity class at MIT. The students are asked to solve your paradox using an outline that gives them some hints....

The students in this class make use of computer graphics utility programs that help them to visualize and develop their intuition for relativity. These programs can be run on either an IBM personal computer or the Apple Macintosh personal computer. If you have access to either of these machines, I will be happy to send you the programs without charge...in partial payment for the enjoyment your paradox has brought me."

Edwin F Taylor (who christened the thing: Flickering Bulb Paradox)


That was the beginning of a twenty-year fruitful collaboration between MIT Phys and IIT KGP Phys...about which tomorrow.

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Last Laugh

My son told me the other day that a colleague of his read in the Yahoo News that our solar system is going to be gobbled up by a black hole developing in Sagittarius. And asked my son some funda about black holes. My son got a rare chance to brag about his senile papa and told him that I, with my students, had written the Official Solutions Manual for Taylor & Wheeler's latest book: Exploring Black Holes; and started Googling and discovered the following link and sent it to me (apparently one Tuleja wrote a Java Applet on the Flickering Bulb Paradox...any mention of Java Applets turns on Hyderabadi software geeks):

http://www.stuleja.org/vscience/osp/contents/physicsClub/paradox.html


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My Computing - 8

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One of those days when I was in the IBM 1620 Palace, the front plate glass door opened and a grim-looking young Lecturer entered and the Boss got up, smiled and welcomed him...a rare sight...we mortals were all sneaking through the back door and avoided the Boss like the very Devil. The young man had a deck of red cards in his hands unlike the cream ones of us janata. The Boss took the deck from his hands and inserted them in a special slot where the cards were read at lightning speed and the Execution was finished in 5 minutes and a rare Printout was delivered to the young one, who left as grimly as he entered.

Amidst hush-hush we learned that the young one writes his Programs straightaway in the Machine Language that short-circuits Precompilation and Compilation...verily the supergeek!

Amalendu also had his own reputation as a specialist front-door geek. My friend NP told me this typical Amalendu Story:

Apparently NP had an IEM problem of computation and sought Amalendu's help with the 1620. Amalendu wrote down the program in record time as he had to go to the KGP Station in the evening to catch the 6.20 Local to Cal. NP offered to drop him as a pillion on his scooter. They entered the 1620 to a right royal welcome by the Boss and the janata were asked to step aside as Amalendu inserted his deck into its slot. As he was in a hurry, the deck fell down on the floor and got dispersed like a pack of dropped cards. Amalendu stooped and picked them up with both hands as if they were so many potato chips, and pushed the deck back into its slot. And NP asked him why he didn't check if the cards were in their proper order. To which Amalendu replied with a smile: "Let the Precompiler check it...it is its duty."

The deck rushed through the Precompiler but got stuck in the Compiler and Amalendu tried to sort out the problem in his Program, but it didn't work out. The train time was nearing and so NP told him to postpone it to the Monday morning after he returns from Cal. And as they were passing through the tunnel at Dhobi Ghat, Amalendu shouted: "Stop!" and asked NP to U-Turn and get back to the CISS Building...because it flashed on him where the syntax error was. They returned and in a few minutes the thing was rectified and in another 10 minutes the Printout of the Result was delivered to NP. They raced to the Station and Amalendu caught the 6.20 local as it was easing out of the Longest Railway Platform in the World.

Within a couple of months of my engagement with 1620, I had a deck of about 100 cards with holes in them (and a few virgin ones I pilfered from the Palace). I used to keep the deck discreetly on my work-table for visitors to see and wonder and ask what they were. But, within a couple more months, everyone was having his own deck and it became passe'. One day Chinta, the youthful 'high' sweeper, asked me if he could have those cards. I knew that Chinta is not interested in anything in life that can't be converted into ethanol, but wondered how this deck could give him his dose of high. And asked him. And he said there is money in it. I gathered later on that Bus Companies were buying used 1620 cards at a throwaway price, getting them cut into 1 cm x 5 cm pieces by the bookbinder's guillotine, and using them as bus tickets in place of the expensive multicolored printed manifold paper. Within a year every Bus Conductor had a stack of these punched cards clipped in his left hand and was punching holes in them with his hand-held punch...one hole for the first stage, two holes for the next stage etc. And in the Exit stood the Cleaner who would tear each of them into two and throw them on the ground. In due course, all the roads of all towns and cities in India where buses plied were littered with torn IBM punched cards...the term 'ecological disaster' was not yet invented.

My last IBM 1620 story has to do with the Science Congress held at IIT KGP in the first week of January 1970:

http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2010_12_01_archive.html

I was asked to man the makeshift Registration & Welcome Counter in the Office of the B C Roy Hall, along with two more youth like me.

The initial interest in a weird place like KGP was lukewarm and they expected, extrapolating from the response in the first few months after the ad, that there would at most be 200 delegates. And some Geek offered to arrange the names of delegates as they paid the Registration Fee by Money Order in the alphabetical dictionary order. And the Diro was impressed that we can show off how 'modern' we were. As the stream became flood, names beyond the first three letters went awry...Sastry and Saswat were ok in the beginning but when Sashank came, it got sandwiched between. And then anything after the first letter got garbled; and finally Sastry and Mistry got inverted and the whole 9-page printed document, each page having about 100 and more names, was a mess.

When they delivered the 1620 (Shamefaced) List of Delegates, we three in the BC Roy Office decided to hang it up in the Notice Board outside, just to ward off the rush for a few minutes when everyone would be hunting for his name outside instead of jumping straightaway on our heads. Meanwhile we split the 9-page List into 3 parts and each of us mugged up our 3 pages so that the moment anyone rushes in and says: "Prashant Bhushan", the concerned one of us would point out his name in the 7th page 20th line triumphantly. Bidhan Mohanty (of the Ukridge fame) escorted a young pipe-smoking Professor from SINP and when he saw the garbled List outside, he asked Bidhan which computer we were using. And laughed: "IBM 1620? It can never arrange 1000 names...We have the latest CDC and I organized the PTP International Conference without a hitch last month," and puffed away. Bidhan fell silent and escorted his esteemed guest fuming into our Room and when we asked his name, one of us opened Page 6 at once and pointed it out to him in the 23rd line. The Visitor was stunned and exclaimed: "What is the need of CDC when you have such smart guys at IIT KGP!"

Bidhan stood me a Coke later on.

In the second week of January 1970, I fell into the orbit of SDM like a free electron getting trapped around a proton in the First Few Minutes, and My Computing came to an abrupt end for the next 20 years.

By the time I was into it again, our IBM 1620 got first cannibalized and then sold as scrap perhaps...

But it remains a symbol of my pristine youth and romance...much like the Steam Engine...


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My Computing - 7

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Now that you are armed with Prof KV's Fortran II program for finding the principal values and locating the principal axes of the crystal field gradient tensor, you feel 'empowered' and ask him before leaving how much time IBM 1620 would need to do this entire calculation and when he says: "Not more than 10 minutes," you marvel...a 3-month hard labor with your Facit machine is compressed to just 10 minutes!!!

And walk to the CISS Building...remember your new Avon pushbike was stolen, the next day you bought it, from the Gokhale Hall Mess. And go to the backdoor where you were told you would find a very soft-spoken and naram boy (BB) working as Assistant to his garam Boss...Nature's way of compensating...thinking he would take your handwritten PT sheet and give you your results in 10 minutes...

Ha!!!!!!

He would smile at you and ask you to get a 'Work-Order' form signed by your HoD, HNB. And you would trek back and ask Ghoshal Babu (who loves you because you are also a deserving Brahmin) for a work-order form. He would tell you that only the Central Workshop in the Hangar, half a kilometer away, is empowered to stock work-order forms. Another long trek and the man behind the Counter there looks at you suspiciously because he never saw your face so far (he will see it infinitely oftener by and by) and ask: "What for?" His face reminds you of the Clerk behind the Counter at the Post Office when you ask for that (dried-up) gum pot. After some supplication, he would place just one form, with columns to be filled in on both sides, in your hands. HNB is kind and would sign it proudly.

The next day you take it to the CISS and meet BB hoping that your travails are over. He asks you to push it into the (ballot) box with a slot, and advise you that you will duly get a letter informing you of the date and time slots allotted to you and warn you not to miss it. After a week you get the letter that you are to report at CISS at 2 PM next but one Friday. You go there and BB would let you in and ask you to wait for a free "punching machine", all of which are busy with sundry Research Scholars punching with their fingers madly away. That would remind you of waiting for a vacant table after you 'cut' your lunch coupon in the Ajanta Hotel of Vizagh.

You ask BB what to do with the damn machine. He would tell you to insert a deck of (post) cards on each of which are rows and rows of 0 and 1s. And you start 'typing' your program line by line on each subsequent card. The machine, you will understand, translates your alphanumerics into ASCII binary codes. You are amazed that it is so simple.

You now have a deck of say 30 cards with holes at appropriate places. And ask BB: "Now what?" He would ask you to wait for your turn for 'precompilation'. You await your turn and BB inserts your deck into the IN box of the glorious IBM 1620 and press: 'precompile'. The cards would fall down at an alarming rate till it gets stuck at the 19th card and the red bulb glows. BB would retract your deck and ask you to correct the typing mistake you made in the punching machine in the 19th card (only, hopefully). You go back to the end of the new queue and await your turn.

And stand at the end of another line of precompilers. And this time, if you are lucky with it, BB would press: "Compile." Now the cards would fall more slowly and agonizingly one by one, and BB tells you that the think-tank is reading your cards and converting your Fortran II into Machine Language (Assembly Language). Since your program was written by Prof KV, the green bulb glows saying the program is ok and 'executable'. The Research Scholars standing ahead of you would get abusive 'feedback' from the think-tank (ALU) saying there are at least 15 errors with 'error codes' supplied by it courteously...like the list of error codes behind our SBH ATM in Khairatabad.

Remember that all the while the think-tank is 'executing' someone else's program that crossed all the hurdles (so far). Often, the concerned Research Scholar would be biting his nails, because there is every chance that the 'Check Stop' Red Bulb on the console would glow and the machine stops whirring. Then the Boss would come and pick up the card deck of the poor chap and throw it on his face and say: "GET OUT" for wasting the precious time of his gizmo...Check Stop, I am told, is due to the fault of the machine...it can't find the missing 'address' to which a piece of the computed result has to be forwarded. The 1620 is a bum and its compiler is not intelligent enough to spot some internal mistakes in the flowchart or whatever...

You are lucky and at the end of the promised ten minutes, all the green bulbs on the console will glow saying it has done its job and is ready to send the result to the 'output' end. You are generally advised to write: "PUNCH" at the end of your program and not: "PRINT", because the built-in Printer is expensive and only favorites of the Boss are allowed to do it.

You will then find that from the Output Slot a few cards would fall down. BB would pick them up and hand them over to you and ask you to go the "Inverse-Puncher" which would convert the ASCII binary codes into plain English...Huh!!!

You thank BB and stare proudly at the Boss and quit and celebrate...your (friend's) results are ready: the principal values are 2.3, 2.3, and 4.2 and the axes are at 31 deg azimuth and 42 deg colatitude (or whatever) of his (idiotically) chosen XYZ axes.

You then convey the result of his computations to your friend at AU, Vizagh, thinking that you would get a warm ThanQ Card for saving him the labor of 3 grueling months.

But Life is Never Like That!

He would write saying that, while he is happy with the results you sent him, he became more ambitious meanwhile and wants to beat all his competitors by computing the results for the 2000 nearest neighbors instead of the default 200; knowing that with their Facit Machines they would take 2 years to do the manual calculations and he would thus be ONE UP; "Won't you please...don't forget that I lent you Rs 20 one good old weekend when you were awaiting the Money Order from your Father"

You say, OK, since it means only changing one line of the program...in the DO loop instruction just change the numbers.

Back to the Work Order.

Now, however, instead of adding a decimal or two to the significant figures with 200 neighbors, the IBM 1620, who is not easily cheated, would give the new results:

3.1 (in place of 2.3) and 2.4 (in place of 4.2) and 16 deg (in place of 31 deg) and 24 deg (in place of 42 deg).

You inform and advise your friend not to become even more ambitious and ask for 20000 neighbors because the series unfortunately doesn't feel like converging anywhere nearby; and so hurry up and submit his thesis before they find it out...

Don't blame good old IBM 1620 whose motto remains:

"Input BS...Output BS" (BS for Bullshit)


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My Computing - 6

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So I decided to approach Prof KV (EE) with my problem of translating my high-level language which our IBM 1620 couldn't read into the famous Fortran II.

KV was about five years senior to me and was living in a posh Guest House then. I walked in one night after dinner and shyly tapped on his door. When I explained to him the purpose of my visit, he welcomed me in and offered a plush sofa that I was not used to.

After my narration, he took a pen and paper and started with DIM 100 or maybe 200, and he involuntarily started explaining what that DIM was all about, looking at me benignly. And as he proceeded to write talking about all those DO loops and subroutines and fixed points and floating points and overflows and how the arctan is double-valued and how to fix it and every single detail, I could see he was enjoying.

Much later I happened to watch a TV program in which Bismillah Khan was at his best. And I noticed that while he was negotiating a tricky passage, his eyes were smiling since his lips were busy. I then recalled KV's eyes on that night two decades ago. KV was not just another great teacher...he was a Born Teacher. Born Teachers enjoy teaching irrespective of their audience reaction; and by and large their audience, whether they follow him or not, enjoy the sight. I read somewhere that Feynman used to enter his Jumbo Class Room a few minutes before his students did and when they entered, they found him smiling and drumming on the table before him...in anticipation of sheer pleasure.

After about an hour I thanked him and quit his room confident that Fortran II was just another evil spirit that has been exorcised once for all, and that I could write any other program if I sit down to it. That is another acid test of a Born Teacher...his students will no longer be afraid of the subject taught by him.

I then decided I owe a debt of gratitude to KV and would be happy if I get a chance to redeem it. As it turned out, I found him knocking on my door one Sunday morning two decades later with the request if I could coach his eldest daughter in Physics for some entrance exams...she had just passed her B Sc (Physics) from BHU. I welcomed the opportunity and for the next couple of summer months she was in our Qrs every evening playing with my kid son when I returned from Phy Dept via Harrys.

Yet another decade later, one midnight when I was coaching my son and his friend Dipu in Physics for their JEE, my son, in a moment of pique, placed his forefinger in the discharge path of a series LR circuit and asked me what happens if there is another inductor there. I gave him some vague answer, but that night I couldn't sleep, because that simple addition of an 'ideal' inductor was giving rise to a profound paradox: if I conserve current, energy is not conserved; and if I conserve energy, current is not conserved. What I thought was an interesting JEE problem was turning out to be nasty. And I found no way out for over a week; but I was enjoying the riddle though I couldn't solve it...typical symptom that there is a Paper in it that Physics Education would love.

One of those evenings there was a Fete in the backyard of the Technology Club and I escorted my wife there, although I never ate outside those days. It just happened that there came a moment when KV and I were thrown together without anyone else within earshot. And KV noticed that I was distracted and offered a penny for my thoughts. I then blurted out that I was unable to solve for more than a week a simple LR Decay circuit that my son invented. And KV jumped up and asked me what it was. I then saw that I put my foot in my mouth...I didn't want to tell him the problem for more reasons than one. One: it maybe too trivial for one who has dealt with circuit transients and Laplace, Fourier, and their kins' Transforms all his life. Two: the problem was giving me a lot of pleasure since it was a typical teaser. Three: if the problem turned out to be too tough for him to spell out the answer offhand, and if he works on it and gives me the solution using those wretched transforms, it will go out of the reach of my son, and I would be left with a big baby in my small lap.

So I demurred and changed the topic. But he was waiting after their khana for me and collared me again to state that simple problem that was foxing me for days on end. So I had to tell him that I would certainly seek his help if I decide finally that it was out of my reach. And after a month he caught me again in the cycle shed shared by Phy and EE and asked me if that problem got solved; and I had to say: "Not yet." That provoked him and he implored me to state it again and I dithered.

It took me six good months. Not that I was thinking about it day and night...I was too preoccupied with the cussed Lecture Notes I promised myself to compose...to prevent unwanted students attending my forthcoming Jumbo Classes. But it was there at the back of my (so-called) mind like the hum of the sea at the Vizagh beach-house I lived in for seven long years...when you are busy, you don't notice it...but the moment you try to relax, you hear it loud and clear and wonder how you could miss the infernal thing.

KV left me alone after a couple more attempts and finally one afternoon when I was sipping chai at Harrys, after a good six months, I saw what a fool I was to neglect the self-capacitance of the inserted inductor. You see, some paradoxes appear because you are so used to idealization in physics that you forget it. Here, no matter how ideal the inductor is, and however tiny its self-capacitance, it saves the situation from agony...and both current and energy (now electrical as well as magnetic) get conserved every moment.

Rest is simple...the one-loop LLR decay-circuit becomes two-loop series-parallel LCR oscillatory-decay circuit and you end up in a cubic equation that can always be solved by the Cardano's Method by inserting numbers...unlike linear and quadratic equations, the cubic devil in general has no closed-form solution. And the problem goes out of IIT JEE. I wanted to rig up such a circuit in our 4th Year Lab, but I never got around to it...it looked too trivial...there is this saying for it in our Telugu: "When it is not understood, it looks like Brahma Vidya (Supreme Knowledge); when it is mastered, it becomes Koosu Vidya (mere 'skill', like getting that yo-yo back in hand)."

One of those days, I was taking a class on History of Science and Technology for Research Scholars and noticed that one bright-eyed boy was enjoying it thoroughly. After the lecture, he ran after me and introduced himself as Mainak Sengupta and said he was always interested in Physics and used to make trips to the Dept of Physics at Kalyani University and met Prof Somnath Chakrabarty who told him that he did his M Sc Project under one gps (and left KGP with 4 Papers from it).

Mainak chose to do his compulsory one-sem Project under my guidance and published it as a Paper in Physics Education, Pune, where my son's LLR problem also appeared after gathering another couple of co-authors along the way.

And Mainak told me he was working for his Ph D under Prof KV and used to describe rapturously how MUCH he learned from him.

That sort of concludes happily the 'teacher-student-teacher-student' flowchart in academia like IIT KGP those four decades...


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My Computing - 5

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So there I was at IIT KGP at a tender age of innocence trying to learn Fortran II to help my ex-colleagues at AU. With a live problem in hand as an example, I wanted a bread and butter start-up.

Friends told me that Dr N of the Math Dept is a wizard. I knew him as a nice man, our age; so one fine Sunday morning I knocked at his home-door and told him the purpose of my visit. He asked me to come in and explain my problem (now I know it was essentially summing a series and diagonalizing the resultant 3x3 matrix...but not then). So I beat around the bush and showed him the piece of paper on which I wrote the steps of algebra.

He took a pen and a paper and wrote down his Fortran II program in ten minutes and handed it to me asking me to go to the IBM 1620 Palace and they will tell me how to proceed further. I left his place dissatisfied since he was so curt and I was afraid to ask him to explain what all that Jabberwocky of DIM and DO and SQRT was all about.

And after a couple of days of hunting for someone more openfisted, I was told to go to Prof Venkataratnam (KV). I asked them if he too belonged to the Math Department. Oh, no, they said, "He is from EE and a fantastic teacher."

Now that we are on this topic let me state the "3 Golden Rules of gps" learned from a lifetime at AU & KGP:

Golden Rule # 1:

If you are a beginner trying to learn bread & butter Mathematics, go to a Physicist.

For instance, I wanted to learn the Vector Calculus used in Physics. I picked up a couple of books on the subject stacked in the Math Section (515.112). And threw them on the desk...they were all abstruse, like if you ask the simplest path from hand to mouth they will start from the definition of geodesic and affine connection. And picked up Reitz & Milford's and Panofsky & Phillips' EM books and their Appendixes gave me all I needed to know about all those vector calculus theorems and the expressions for grad, div, curl in all the coordinate systems that a sensible chap wants.

Likewise I wanted to learn the Tensor Calculus needed in Physics and went to my good friend Dr SGH of the Math Dept. He took his used packet of Charminar cigarettes, turned it inside out and scribbled an A with ten superscripts and eleven subscripts and wrote down its transformation formula using twenty one or so wicked partial derivatives with sub- and super-scripts and discovered that there is no more space left on the wrapper. And he wrote the rest in the 3-D space around us. He looked forlorn that there were only 26 or so measly alphabets in English or even Greek and would have loved to use his Marathi alphabets (my pristine Telugu had 60 at one time before they omitted ten or more). He would have loved E J Post's system where he invented a tensor notation with superscripts and subscripts on superscripts and vice virtusa till the APS Journals' printers gheraoed their editors and they had to banish them in their Instructions to Prospective Authors.

I learned my tensors from Landau & Lifshitz's Classical Theory of Fields (1st edition, now out of print...the subsequent editions are no good for beginners).

Golden Rule # 2:

If you are a beginner trying to learn bread & butter Physics, go to a Chemist.

Our teachers of QM at AU were beginners in the subject and stayed so. They must have been too scared of Schiff and so they prescribed the book by two Chemists: Pauling & Wilson. That was good enough for them and us because it avoided abstract things like kets and bras of various brands and stuff like Hidden Variables...if they are hidden they should stay hidden, like if a singularity is removable, it should be removed...

And when they had to teach us Classical and Quantum Stat Mech, they preferred Samuel Glasstone's Theoretical Chemistry...although it had all those grand and not so grand canonical ensembles and the wicked ergodic hypothesis, they were clearly winking at them.

Golden Rule #3:

If you are a beginner trying to learn bread & butter Chemistry, go to a Psychiatrist ;-)

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My Computing - 4

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Within a month of my joining IIT KGP on May Day 1965, my friend Chari (a senior Teacher-Trainee in ChE) and I made bold to climb the steps to the First Floor of the (now defunct) CISS and see the famed IBM 1620. Neither he nor I knew what was 1620 with it, but he was one better. He asked me to expand IBM and when I couldn't, he told me secretly its expansion extracting a promise that I wouldn't divulge it to one and all since it was a topical quiz question. I then learned that IIT KGP is different in more ways than one from my alma mater AU, where as the Poet sang: "knowledge is free..." Well, in our AU, knowledge, however scanty, was practically free but we had to fight for Facit Machines and Remington Typewriters...here it is the other way round.

As soon as we landed on the last step, we felt overawed like Wordsworth when he saw that pond with those ten thousand sudden daffodils. The whole of a Hall was filled up by this air-conditioned Dino. There was a huge plate glass door through which we could see a big console, very like the cockpit of a Jumbo Jet (which I never saw), switches, keyboards, blinking red, blue and green 'jewel lamps', with a guy (Boss) sitting in front of it with his back to us and fiddling with it (console, not his back), a huge machine (think tank) with red hot glowing tubes, surrounded by a couple of subsidiary slaves with revolving transparent disks; a behemoth printer whining, half a dozen mini-typewriter-looking gadgets that we came to know as 'punching' machines, the works...

We looked at one another and decided to try and barge through the glass door; hearing the squeak of which, the Boss turned back, scowled and growled: "GET OUT!" Chari, having been around at KGP a year earlier to me, simpered: "We are teachers," a half-truth. The Boss then howled: "No bloody teacher is welcome here unless he has a prior appointment." We retreated hastily and hit a senior Assistant Professor of a sister Department we had been introduced to earlier. This guy just pushed the glass gate, walked to the Boss, put his hand on his (Boss's, not his own) shoulder, smiled, dragged a chair and sat on it, fiddled with the console switches, got up, went round tweaking a switch or two here and there, the Boss all the while following him like that Mary's Little Lamb. It looked as if the problem whatever with the machine got solved by our A.P. and they drank tea from a flask as a toast.

We then understood that there were 'geeks' even then, before the term became popular, and they were welcome everywhere unlike goons like us. And felt humiliated.

It is a different matter that after a decade, the CSE Dept and Computer Center came up in the ground floor of the Cryogenics Building and bought its own more powerful, but Russian, Computer called (heaven knows why): Riyadh; and our Boss’s IBM 1620 was getting deserted; and after another decade when the IBM PCs started arriving on every table, it was abandoned, and our Boss (who we found out was a Technical Assistant trained to handle only the IBM machine) got reverted to his parent Department where his services turned out to be superfluous, and he took to cycling on the streets hoping against hope that his erstwhile fawns would recognize and smile at him...he even visited my room once...his son had developed a backlog in Physics I...

I guess there is a lesson there...the Caterpillar in Alice would have said it is called a 'lesson' because less and less people are learning it till it is too late.

I then bragged to my Research Scholar friends who were still struggling with their Facit machines at AU that IIT KGP has an IBM 1620. Within a week, I got frantic envelopes seeking my help with their horrid computations, saying that they could at best compute the field gradients of the nearest 20 neighbors in 3 sweaty months, but they heard that IBM 1620 can handle 200 neighbors in 10 minutes. I laughed up my sleeves, since we had absolutely no idea whether our series converges at all unlike the harmonic one (1+1/2 +1/3...) ...but I thought I was well out of it and so shouldn’t throw cold water but help them as best as I could. They sent their data to me and I went about it earnestly.

I wrote down the steps on a sheet of white paper in my (highest level) language and started hunting for folks who could convert it into what was then called bombastically Fortran – II of which I had no idea. I visited Thackers and found he didn’t stock any book on the topic. His showcase was filled with Feynman Volumes, Berkeley Series, Resnick-Hallidays, Maugham’s books…but nothing on computer languages.

Two decades later, the same showcase was filled from top to bottom with bulky but cheap books on Java, dBase, and their sisters but no Feynmans. I don’t know what that showcase displays now. The Teachers there got a 100% hike in the last Pay Commission (that I narrowly missed) and their entry-level salary is 100 times mine was. And, since all compu and other books are available online (except the mighty RSS-GPS Lecture Notes, the first author of which is happily upstairs and the second is down below busy blogging on a daily basis), Thacker must be stocking expensive imported children’s books for the rich campus tiny tots. I myself entered a bookshop in Secunderabad the other day while waiting for my son to park his sedan and found lots and lots of children’s books and bought one for Ishani.

It is titled: Ganesha, and has only about a dozen pages. But they are all stiff and the paper glossy and it has great pictures and stories of Ganesha and on an impulse I bought it for a whopping Rs 200 and gifted it to Ishani. She took it to her mom asking to tell her its story and after half an hour lost all interest in it. I find it nowadays here and there on the floor perhaps used to swat bees that tend to encroach our high-living sixth floor lives.

My D-i-L told me that a couple of months back when they were in Nellore, she found Ishani ‘reading’ a piece of soiled newspaper:

“Bethwin you ann me and litthle Ishani; Granpas thall thales for Ishani and frinds; Chatthy essays for naughthy Ishani...”

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My Computing - 3

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My Final Year M Sc at AU, Vizagh, was the best of times and the worst of times, to steal the opening line of Dickens' Tale of Two Cities. Our theory classes were deeply depressing but our labs were fantastic. We were allowed to do experiments in the Research Labs. In particular, I can never forget the thrill I had while doing the 6-hour experiments in the Spectroscopy Labs built under the supervision of S Bhagavantam (Raman's collaborator).

We were allowed to work with a high-resolution spectrograph, taking real time photographs of the line spectra of iron and copper and band spectra using (evaporating) carbon rods as electrodes between which arcs are passed. Loading the film into its chamber, taking the photograph of the spectrum, going to the dark room, opening the chamber in total darkness, developing and fixing the film stuck on the glass plate, counting seconds by practice, and calculating the wave numbers by comparing them with the standard 'iron chart'...the entire experience was lovable.

And the 'spectroscopic accuracy' demanded needed 7-figure Log Tables, only a couple of which were available in the Department. In contrast to the 4-figure Clark's Tables which were the thinnest we ever bought, the 7-figure ones were the size of a primitive Calcutta Telephone Directory. And of course there was no question of 7-figure antilog tables...we had to use Log Tables in the reverse by interpolation.

Even Hans Bethe couldn't have memorized them.

After passing M Sc, I was asked to assist my 3-year senior, JRK, in the calculations that went into his Ph D Thesis (I got Acknowledgments in 3 of his papers and did a joint paper with him much later). The experience was miserable. I had to numerically compute, on tables spread over twenty drawing sheets with 50x50 slots in them, the Electric Field Gradients in crystals using the so-called (nonsensical) 'point charge model'. The entire exercise took 3 months of numerical calculations 7 hours a day.

And I was given a Facit Calculator to do it with. The thing was totally mechanical with maybe wheels and gears inside and equipped with a number keyboard and a cranking handle. It may now be a museum piece but research scholars used to fight for its possession for a day or two. Addition, subtraction, and multiplication required turning the handle clockwise, but division required turning the handle the other way round till a 'jingle bell' rings, when you have to go back by one turn.

At the end of 3 months my fingers were aching, somewhat like what happened much later to me when I had to keyboard endlessly on my PC composing the (infamous) 250-page Jumbo Lecture Notes to meet a deadly deadline and got such severe shoulder cramps that I didn't touch my PC for one whole year, happily.

When I joined IIT KGP in 1965, and went to the Accounts Section to ask for my first pay bill I found each of the 20 or so tables there equipped with a Facit Machine whirring with squeaks and bells and then I understood I have arrived at a 'rich' institution, unlike my poor University. Fortunately however, none of the Research Labs in our Phy Dept needed such heavy computations to need a Facit thing, except the X-ray Lab which boasted of an electro-mechanical hybrid calculator with glowing tubes and a keyboard as big as a mini-piano's and with capped rubber tubes to be pulled and inserted into slots here and there like the old-fashioned Telephone Exchange consoles operated by girls with head phones saying: "Number Please!"

And then someone told me that IIT KGP recently acquired an IBM 1620...story for tomorrow...

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Blind Man's Bluff

I think I told you a story I read half a century back in a weekly magazine...but no harm repeating.

A handsome youth wearing dark glasses enters this sleeper compartment of Madras-Mail, shuffles, and tries to sit in a vacant seat opposite to what turned out to be a lovely girl, touching her here and there. The girl takes umbrage but says nothing. He then leans forward to push his suitcase under the seat opposite to his below her and happens to touch her legs saying, "Excuse me!". Still the girl tolerates. And after a few minutes, decides to pull out a book from inside his suitcase, this time falling over her lap fairly squarely.

The girl slaps him so hard that his glasses fall off and he vainly tries to pick them up...turns out he is totally blind...

I am daily reminded of this story nowadays. I park my car in front of a tea-stall and ask for the cheapest (Rs 4) chai. It is served in the thinnest possible plastic dispo, too delicate to handle if the chai is really hot. I am ok with it if the 'server' is Yadayya, the fortyish man. He just shoves the cup onto the counter and I pick it up with shaky hands.

Trouble comes when his youthful wife mans the counter. She has this habit of pouring tea in a dispo-cup, holding it in her hand by two fingers placed diametrically on its rim and pushing it towards me to be picked up from her hand. That means I have to place my two fingers on the rim at the ends of the diameter at right angles to hers; and I can't ask her to place it on the counter for fear of offending her in her noble gesture to an old man.

As you know, my right eye is practically dysfunctional, and working with one eye means I lose stereo-vision and have to grope delicately back and forth. And I don't look blind...not at all.

So, if you happen to read a news-item like: "Retired IIT KGP Professor slapped in Hyderabad," you now know how.

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My Computing - 2

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The anteroom of my Father (HM)'s Office Room served as a minuscule science museum cum lab. There was a sensitive balance we were not allowed to touch and several beakers and bottles. My Father who taught Science and English equally well used to bring once a fortnight a couple of demo experiments to the delight of us all; microscopes we were allowed to peer through one by one, a simple pendulum where we were allowed to handle an expensive stop-watch, reagents that change color like litmus solutions and such.

On top of the science almirah was a curious harp-like object with several wires through which colored beads were strung like in a japa mala. No one ever touched it and it was gathering dust and cobwebs. I asked my Father one day what it was and he said: Abacus. And he said it is a device for adding and subtracting manually. I could feel he was not very forthcoming and comfortable about it, so I let it go at that.

I met the word thirty good years later while reading the Feynman crazy book, Surely You're Joking. and realized that what I saw was the first 'computer'. Of course, it was not as sophisticated as that of the Japanese salesman who beat Feynman in a Restaurant till he challenged: "Raios Cubicos! with a vengeance" and was beaten hollow. The encounter was very instructive. Here it is:

**********************************************************************************************************

A few weeks later the man came into the cocktail lounge of the hotel I was staying at. He recognized me and came over. "Tell me," he said, "how were you able to do that cube-root problem so fast?"

I started to explain that it was an approximate method, and had to do with the percentage of error. "Suppose you had given me 28. Now the cube root of 27 is 3..."

He picks up his abacus: zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz---"Oh yes," he says.

I realized something: he doesn't know numbers. With the abacus, you don't have to memorize a lot of arithmetic combinations; all you have to do is learn how to push the little beads up and down. You don't have to memorize 9 + 7 = 16; you just know that when you add nine you push a ten's bead up and pull a one's bead down. So, we are slower at basic arithmetic, but we know numbers.

Furthermore, the whole idea of approximation method was beyond him...."

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In short Feynman was saying that the Jap abacus expert was at best a robot. I don't think the Marwari shop teenager or the students at Cincinnati I talked about yesterday are any better; instead of pushing and pulling beads they are punching keypads. And unlike me, they have been doing it from their pre-school years (like Ishani is going to do). I am no good at numbers and extracting cube roots by approximate methods; but when my son and I are together, he often asks like what is 7.5% of 2.25 lakhs and pulls out his cell phone to do it on (I too have one with a calculator, but I rarely need it). Invariably I beat him to it by, let us say, as in this example by converting the decimals into fractions, getting a rough answer good enough for estimates before taking a loan ;-)

When I entered University, we were asked to buy Clark's Mathematical and Physical Tables (and Worsnop & Flint's Practical Physics...a great book) before entering the Phy Lab. The first half of Clark's is Logarithms and Antilogarithms followed by trigonometric functions. They were four-figure tables. We used them so much that we all had the values of Logs of integers from 1 to 9 by heart (I checked that I still can recall the first five). But then this lateral entry whizkid in our fourth year (YSTR, who went to TIFR) challenged us to ask the four-figure Log of any number between 1 and 10, say, Log 6.7 (the whole lot of two pages of close print). And he was always right. We were wondering how he could do it; maybe he has a secret series formula up his sleeves, but we never asked, for fear he would refuse to divulge his trade secret...attitude problem.

But in that crazy book, Feynman says about Hans Bethe at Los Alamos who invariably beat him:

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"Oh," he says, "the log of 2 1/2 is so-and-so. Now, one-third of that log is between the logs of 1.3, which is this, and 1.4 which is that, and so I extrapolated."

So I found out something: first he knows the log tables; second, the amount of arithmetic he did to make the interpolation alone would have taken me longer to do than reach for the table and punch the buttons on the (Marchant) calculator. I was very impressed.

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This reminds me of the Big Brother Bull story I read in Reader's Digest:

http://gpsastry.blogspot.com/2010/11/big-picture.html

I learned a lot of Physics (and Math) from that Jokey book.

For instance, there was this perennial confusion in the terminology of STR and GTR in what the texts used to call the 'proper' time of a clock, which got clarified by that question Feynman put to Einstein's Assistant (and answered it himself).

In our fourth year, we learned the Bohr theory. And I got curious enough to whip out my Clark's Tables and calculate the theoretical value of the Rydberg Constant substituting the various ugly powers of e, h, m, pi, in the numerator and the denominator using the log tables. And lo, and behold, it agreed famously with the experimental value. That was the first time I put in numbers in a theoretical formula and checked, and got a thrill. The second and last time came 40 years later when I was teaching Quantum Statistics to Second Year B Techs for a couple of years before I retired. And that was to decide if MB statistics would do in a given situation or one has to necessarily go to the BE or FD statistics. That required putting the Boltzmann constant k in too.

But by then I got spoiled and was using my son's Casio scientific calculator...


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My Computing - 1

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The White Rabbit put on his spectacles. "Where shall I begin, your Majesty?" he asked.

"Begin at the beginning," the King said, very gravely, "and go on till you come to the end: then stop."

.........Lewis Carroll

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In the beginning there was this Counting up to 100.

My mother tongue was kind to me...just learn up to 10 and the rest follows a rule without exception. English too was ok; once you cross the troublesome teens, life is easy. Although for a long time I had a doubt if 'ninety' is spelled with an 'e' or without it. And when I wrote my first diffident check for "A hundred and twenty rupees" the clerk in SBI, KGP struck it out and wrote "one hundred twenty rupees only" and asked me to sign it (they always made a horrible spelling mistake in my name alright). And he leaned towards me and whispered the Golden Rule of Banking: "There is no 'a' anywhere till you reach 'thousand'."

By the time I was asked to mug up Counting in Hindi, I developed a logical mind and said: "Satthavis, Atthavis, Navavis" and got a rap on my knuckle. This is the fruit of logic in math. I don't know why Hindiwalas should back-stab when they reach 29, 39 etc. And by the time it came to 'bavan, tirapan' I lost count and interest in all things Hindi, Hindu, Hindustani...although I admire Sushmajee's fluency in English, Hindi and Urdu (maybe Sanskrit too). But as far as English goes, I like the fluency of the Tamilandu CM of all the current lady CMs (UP & WB make no pretenses, but I guess Delhi comes close).

Then came addition, which was a breeze and I even mastered 'carrying'. Then suddenly my Father was transferred to a school in a different village and as my luck would have it, it was the Quarterly Math Exam there the day I was enrolled, and apparently they had already taught subtraction with 'borrow'. There was this question with a 'choice': "Answer any one out of the three problems below you like"...all with heavy borrowing. I jumped on the words 'you like' and made up a problem in subtraction that I liked much and wrote:

9999
8888
---------
1111
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The Math Teacher (who didn't yet now I was the son of his new HM) asked me to come up and turn to the Class as he exhibited my subtraction problem, with my answer script high up in his hands, turning it this way and that, so that the entire audience is regaled (much like Soniajee held up to her TV audience the Congress Manifesto with Manmohanjee's photo when a Reporter insolently asked her who was their prime ministerial candidate before the last General Elections).

I now think that ridicule I suffered at a tender age has much to do with my aversion to math. Teachers should be sensitive to students' feelings...after all, that aging bald shortsighted bespectacled math teacher (Kondal Rao) couldn't have withstood the onslaught of SDM for five years, no? I recall soon after winning his Nobel, Abdus Salam made a trip to his native village in Pakistan to pay obeisance to his high school math teacher who inspired him...any NL candidates from KGP Physics out there?...time is running out ;-)

Then came Multiplication Tables. My Father wouldn't let me go out to play in the evenings unless I recited those horrible tables up to 20 x 10 = 200. That was no problem for me, for, mugging up was in my blood. But there was this son of our Telugu Teacher, who could recite the wretched tables till 20 x 20 = 400, which rather triggered an inferiority complex in me. And what is all this fuss about? The other day I went to this Marwari Corner Shop to get my quota of a dozen packets of Knorr Classic Thick Tomato Soup with an MRP of Rs 35. And a free gift of a Noodles Packet on each worth Rs 15, which I declined. The teenage daughter manning the counter in the somnolent afternoon spoke to her mom on her cell phone and said I get a rebate of Rs 7 on each for foregoing the noodles gift packet. And when I asked how much should I pay, she instantly whipped out her pocket calculator, punched a few buttons, erased, punched again and reeled out her answer. And when I showed her my palm with the right answer scribbled on it, her eyes flashed as if to say: "Old Man, you are a GENIUS!"

It first happened to Moitreyee Sinha, Classmate of Supratim, when she went as a TA to Cincinnati a couple of decades ago. She told me that when she said offhand to her students that sin 30 = 0.5, they clapped and said: "Ma'am, you are a GENIUS!"

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An hour ago I was Googling for My Computer and got this video:

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/3948449/naked_and_funny_help_me_with_my_computer_2210/

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