In our B.Sc (Hons) course at AU, Vizagh, during the 1950s, we had two-years of Subsidiary English, with 17 books to read, with lots of choice.
One of them was a slim book called: "Newman's Idea of a University". The book had about 150 pages written in a convoluted, involuted, perveruted style. Everyone in our Class of 120 was repelled and chose to ignore it and preferred books like the fat Victory (Conrad). But I was smarter and saw that here is a goldmine of marks...if you alone attempt that question, there is no scope for 'relative grading' a la IIT Kaanpoor. The other text I chose was also unique: Milton's prose booklet called Areopagitica, an absolutely unreadable but slim book. Such abstruse ancient classic styles are like neem leaves and coffee seeds. They require a cultivated taste. Once you cross their repulsive barriers, you get hooked to them.
That year my Uncle went to Baltimore and brought a unique gift for me...a ball-pen with four simultaneous refills...it had four plungers on four sides so you can press down refill of any of the four colors you like...red, green, blue or black. On the first reading of Newman's book I underlined 'important' passages with red ink. On the second reading looking for left-out nice sentences, I used green ink. On the third, blue ink; and on the fourth, black ink. And I discovered that by then ALL sentences were underlined by one color or the other; and all four refills exhausted. And I got the whole book by heart.
The essential point made by this Catholic Cardinal who started the Catholic University of Ireland (now University College, Dublin) during the mid-19th century is that Universities should promote liberal education exclusively and leave professional courses for the more mundane colleges. By liberal he meant, 'useless'; like arts and pure sciences.
So, when I joined IIT KGP (a 'glorified engineering college' in the words of my Guru SDM), I felt superior (and still do). Our models were Oxford and Cambridge and I never heard of MIT or Caltech that IITians were speaking of as their ultimate heavens...which IIT teaches compulsory English for two complete years with 17 books for ALL its undergraduates?
So, it was a shock for me to hear of what were called MKS Units. We were all taught CGS units and were quite happy with them. Of course we did hear of 'practical' units like Volt, Ohm and Ampere; but they were used only in the lab, with factors of 10 to various powers.
The first edition of Resnick & Halliday (Part I) had both FPS and CGS units, if I recall correctly. All those pounds (avoirdupois in contrast with sterling), pound-mass, pound-weight, pound-force, poundal, foot-pound...There was also a unit called slug (IIT CE and ME Engineers used to swallow them without retching). And why not ;-)
The entire trouble was created by the Electrical Engineers who considered themselves vastly superior to other engineers. My friend NP who did his BE in Mech Engg told me that students of electrical engineering in his college at Anantapur (AP) used to boast that their subject was very very much tougher...the reason being: they have to imagine all sorts of fields like electrical and magnetic which can't be seen unlike bricks, mortar, screw drivers, boilers and stuff.
It is the electrical engineers who invented weird things called 'epsilon not' and 'mu-not' and Tesla (never heard of this God of EE), and made life miserable for everyone. And called most of their units names...like Weber, Henry...We were happy with egs-esu, cgs-emu. Whenever we were dubious of our units and dimensions for say, Inductance, we could always write 150 cgs-emu and let it go at that.
And they succumbed to the French Dictatorship and agreed to what were called SI units. I asked what SI stands for, and they said some French-sounding words for what should obviously be IS (International System).
However, their zeal stopped short at MKS. So, I have a few suggestions below for 'missing unit nomenclature'. The idea is to name every unit after a man or a woman. Like for instance, I am told that Maidan Metro Station is going to be called Gostho Pal Station (GPS).
Let us start with MKS:
Meter...............becomes.......Manoj
Kilogram.........becomes........Kesav
Second............becomes.......Singh / Sinha
The beauty is MKS remains MKS. Note that the new names suggested are after eminent retired professors of IIT KGP in EE.
Jokes apart, I am unhappy that no unit is named (to my knowledge) after Carnot. So, why not name the unit of entropy after Carnot?
Coming to Astronomy, I don't know if there is any new unit for AU or light-year or parsec. These ought to be named after famous modern astronomers like Hubble, Sagan, or Hawking, not to speak of Chandra?
And Gravitation and Cosmology? The Unit of Gravitational Constant G should be named after Einstein rather than so many N (m/kg)^2, since Newton is already booked. The radius of our Milky Way Galaxy could be called 1 Hoyle.
Coming to atomic physics, Bohr Radius should be called One Bohr. 'h' is already after Max Planck. But 'e' has no name. Why not Millikan? And 'c' could be (if Einstein is already booked) Michelson.
I dabbled in Assembly Lines and have a fat paper to show for it in IJPR (International Journal of Production Research). I always felt that Henry Ford is not duly recognized. So, I suggest, every unit of ANY item thrown out by an assembly line, like cars, pork tins or even shampoo bottles should be called one Ford.
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Last Laugh
I asked Ishani (all of 2 years and 3 months) what HP stands for in the equation:
1 HP = 746 Watts
She said: "Hewlett Packard"
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