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Aunt Dahlia telephones Bertie Wooster and asks him to go at once to that antique shop in Bond Street, ask the dealer for his 16th century silver cow-creamer and when he fetches it, sneer at it, and say that it looks like a fake 20th century poor imitation. The idea is to make the dealer reduce its price when Uncle Tom visits the place after lunch so that he is tickled pink and mellowed enough for her to touch him for a check to meet the expenses for the Milady's Boudoir she runs at a perennial loss.
Cousin Angela was aquaplaning at Cannes, French Riviera, when she slips from her board, takes a tumble in the blue Mediterranean, and as she gets back aboard, a great brute of a shark keeps snapping at her ankles till she is rescued by and by. It was since called Angela's Shark. She relates the horrifying incident to Tuppy, her betrothed, and he says there are no sharks at Cannes, and it may just be a floating log or a flatfish...and phut goes their engagement.
It is so easy to trivialize with or without intention.
The first I heard of Einstein's Relativity was from my Complex Variables tutor Dr J in 1961:
http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2011/01/condescension.html
He said:
"Physics people say it is the greatest achievement of the century. But is just Riemannian Geometry"
Since I knew neither, I kept quiet.
And as I said before, Truesdell is said to have dismissed Newtonian Mechanics as nothing but the solutions of a class of second order differential equations.
And when Dirac presented his Angular Momentum Algebra at Princeton the mathematicians there said it is nothing but well-known Group Theory.
Examples abound in which some mathematicians think they understand the whole of physics because they are familiar with the equations they see in Physics texts and papers. Feynman said that such mathematicians contribute little to physics and less to mathematics.
I don't blame them because Physicists also do the same thing when they see Engineering Books. They dismiss Civil Engg as Newtonian Mechanics with whiskers, Mechanical Engg as more of the same with Thermodynamics added as a pinch of salt, and Electrical Engg as nothing but solutions of Maxwell's Equations.
Of course they are horribly wrong, as any trivialization is.
I had a problem at IIT KGP with professors of Maths and Chemistry who were at one time invited to the Grand Viva Board of our outgoing Third Year students because they take these two subjects as compulsory electives.
At that time I was teaching Special Relativity to the third years in my own pedestrian way; and there were a couple of professors in the Math Dept who were publishing papers in the best General Relativity Journals. They would sneer at Special Relativity as an obsolete joke and ask the poor student if she had heard of Einstein's Field Equations. And she would stand dumbfounded and look at me for help thinking that my teaching was at fault. I had to then go to the blackboard and write down Einstein's Field Equations that I learned with difficulty from Weinberg. And ask the student to derive Length Contraction and Time Dilation from them. And look pleadingly at our Math Guest Professor to help her out...And that was that as far as that viva went...because there were rumors that, while teaching the Introductory Chapter on STR to Math students, their GR professors were getting Length Dilation and Time Contraction at will, and said it was ok since these are trivial and won't appear in their GR Question Papers.
So it is not true that if you know the general case you know the special cases.
I had similar trouble with the good old Chemistry Guest Viva Professors. The Chem Dept used to send their QM experts since Quantum Mechanics was fancy physics at that time. And they thought Schrodinger Equation is the summum bonum of QM. And they had perhaps forgotten the little Classical Mechanics they had learned in their first year UG. And they would ask our student to write down the Schrodinger Equation and then ask for its 'solutions'. And the student would be baffled. And I would suggest perhaps the Professor means the Particle in the Box...and the Chem Prof would nod his head since the best of Chemistry UG text books started this way...they had little use for Free Particle Solutions which they thought were trivial.
Once I wanted to have some fun and asked the student, after he wrote down his Schrodinger Equation with its Planck's Constant (h) in the right place, to take the limit as h tends to zero and get Newton's Law "F = ma". Just for fun. And heard that later on this was a raging question in the Chemistry Dept.
Once again to warn us that nothing is trivial...if you know QM it doesn't mean you know CM...
Physics ought to teach us modesty since the whole Universe is the subject matter of Physics. Indeed, when funds for the Superconducting Super Collider dried up and the multi-million dollar project was getting scuttled midway, theoretical and mathematical physicists delved into what they called:
"Quantum Consciousness"...
I don't know what transpired of it but there are still 260,000 results (in 0.24 seconds) with Roger Penrose in the wiki.
Maybe it is our next challenge after the God Particle...
...Posted by Ishani
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Aunt Dahlia telephones Bertie Wooster and asks him to go at once to that antique shop in Bond Street, ask the dealer for his 16th century silver cow-creamer and when he fetches it, sneer at it, and say that it looks like a fake 20th century poor imitation. The idea is to make the dealer reduce its price when Uncle Tom visits the place after lunch so that he is tickled pink and mellowed enough for her to touch him for a check to meet the expenses for the Milady's Boudoir she runs at a perennial loss.
Cousin Angela was aquaplaning at Cannes, French Riviera, when she slips from her board, takes a tumble in the blue Mediterranean, and as she gets back aboard, a great brute of a shark keeps snapping at her ankles till she is rescued by and by. It was since called Angela's Shark. She relates the horrifying incident to Tuppy, her betrothed, and he says there are no sharks at Cannes, and it may just be a floating log or a flatfish...and phut goes their engagement.
It is so easy to trivialize with or without intention.
The first I heard of Einstein's Relativity was from my Complex Variables tutor Dr J in 1961:
http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2011/01/condescension.html
He said:
"Physics people say it is the greatest achievement of the century. But is just Riemannian Geometry"
Since I knew neither, I kept quiet.
And as I said before, Truesdell is said to have dismissed Newtonian Mechanics as nothing but the solutions of a class of second order differential equations.
And when Dirac presented his Angular Momentum Algebra at Princeton the mathematicians there said it is nothing but well-known Group Theory.
Examples abound in which some mathematicians think they understand the whole of physics because they are familiar with the equations they see in Physics texts and papers. Feynman said that such mathematicians contribute little to physics and less to mathematics.
I don't blame them because Physicists also do the same thing when they see Engineering Books. They dismiss Civil Engg as Newtonian Mechanics with whiskers, Mechanical Engg as more of the same with Thermodynamics added as a pinch of salt, and Electrical Engg as nothing but solutions of Maxwell's Equations.
Of course they are horribly wrong, as any trivialization is.
I had a problem at IIT KGP with professors of Maths and Chemistry who were at one time invited to the Grand Viva Board of our outgoing Third Year students because they take these two subjects as compulsory electives.
At that time I was teaching Special Relativity to the third years in my own pedestrian way; and there were a couple of professors in the Math Dept who were publishing papers in the best General Relativity Journals. They would sneer at Special Relativity as an obsolete joke and ask the poor student if she had heard of Einstein's Field Equations. And she would stand dumbfounded and look at me for help thinking that my teaching was at fault. I had to then go to the blackboard and write down Einstein's Field Equations that I learned with difficulty from Weinberg. And ask the student to derive Length Contraction and Time Dilation from them. And look pleadingly at our Math Guest Professor to help her out...And that was that as far as that viva went...because there were rumors that, while teaching the Introductory Chapter on STR to Math students, their GR professors were getting Length Dilation and Time Contraction at will, and said it was ok since these are trivial and won't appear in their GR Question Papers.
So it is not true that if you know the general case you know the special cases.
I had similar trouble with the good old Chemistry Guest Viva Professors. The Chem Dept used to send their QM experts since Quantum Mechanics was fancy physics at that time. And they thought Schrodinger Equation is the summum bonum of QM. And they had perhaps forgotten the little Classical Mechanics they had learned in their first year UG. And they would ask our student to write down the Schrodinger Equation and then ask for its 'solutions'. And the student would be baffled. And I would suggest perhaps the Professor means the Particle in the Box...and the Chem Prof would nod his head since the best of Chemistry UG text books started this way...they had little use for Free Particle Solutions which they thought were trivial.
Once I wanted to have some fun and asked the student, after he wrote down his Schrodinger Equation with its Planck's Constant (h) in the right place, to take the limit as h tends to zero and get Newton's Law "F = ma". Just for fun. And heard that later on this was a raging question in the Chemistry Dept.
Once again to warn us that nothing is trivial...if you know QM it doesn't mean you know CM...
Physics ought to teach us modesty since the whole Universe is the subject matter of Physics. Indeed, when funds for the Superconducting Super Collider dried up and the multi-million dollar project was getting scuttled midway, theoretical and mathematical physicists delved into what they called:
"Quantum Consciousness"...
I don't know what transpired of it but there are still 260,000 results (in 0.24 seconds) with Roger Penrose in the wiki.
Maybe it is our next challenge after the God Particle...
...Posted by Ishani
**********************************************************************************************************************
