Saturday, July 27, 2013

Tamaso Ma - 25

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The attendant who pasted a black patch on my eye led me to the waiting room and asked me to lie down there for an hour quietly.

And my son looked me up and told me that the Chief Surgeon was very happy with the way my surgery went:

"His went very well"

And I took all the credit for it.

And while my son went out to buy the Cataract Kit that had four different bottles, an eye cap, and sunglasses... all enclosed in a complimentary pouch, I went back to my musings about eye surgeons and optics.

I am sure my Chief Surgeon never had to undergo the infinite troubles I did to understand Optics all my working life.

It started with my Class X science book. This had great diagrams about curved mirrors and lenses, both convex and concave and rules for drawing rays...any two would do to get the image. It also talked about real and virtual images, without mentioning how a virtual image is seen.

The problem is that ultimately any image is to be seen by the eye and the position of the eye plays a role on what it sees.

My troubles with optics took a nasty turn when I went to college and our teacher arbitrarily declared some rules about what he called: "sign convention" which didn't make any sense to me.

Anyway I survived Optics and went on to publish a few articles in 'phoren' journals and a whole book devoted to it.

And I recalled the day when Samit was visiting me recently to look up his old teacher...he was in my class of 1981 at IIT KGP. And I was telling him that my son and D-i-L were planning to get my cataracts removed as early as possible.

And Samit said that he had taken his mom to an eye specialist at Calcutta to have a LASIK surgery performed on her eyes. 

And apparently he told the youthful surgeon that the excimer laser that he would be using was developed by a team of physicists of whom our first Ph D at IIT KGP (also from the Dept of Physics) was the leader.

And the LASIK surgeon was duly impressed.

And I was thinking that the surgeon may have known what the expansion of LASIK is but he would never know what the expansion of LASER is. That is how it is in life. Laser has become such a byword that even Ishani knows about it...but everyone forgets that 'laser' is an acronym.

By the way, I had heard of LASIK but never knew its expansion till I Googled for it the other day. I could guess the LAS part of it but not the K in its tail. And I am sure I would never be able to remember it.

It is a horrible medico term standing for:

Keratomileusis

Try and digest it...



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