Thursday, December 13, 2007

Physics and the Right hand

Now this is the stuff that would make even Einstein wonder in his grave. His anecdotal genius in his classroom days and Ramanujan's 0 boys with 0 bananas doubt would pale in front of this line of thinking. A genius by the name Mr. M (people from JK, Kanpur esp my colleagues from league of Science with Economics in 11-12 std would know whom I am talking of) had answered simple looking Physics definition question 'What is flux, give its formula?' by something akin to:

ρ = Q /ε

where all the above symbols except the common = and / meant some soopar arcane stuff in Physics. The above formula was not something found in textbooks. So based on a simplistic text search in an NCERT book the teacher, a simpleton, straitjacketed lady, gave a naught to our protagonist. The nearest search result she could get was a formula by some chump named Gauss. (apparently it had another of those strange symbols Φ in it instead of ρ, it all sounds unintelligent greek to me anyways, How does it matter phi or roe? )

With humility and politeness, traits of a true genius, M walked towards the dreaded teacher's table. On a polite inquiry about the zero tagged to his profound answer, madam told him about about the correct symbol to be used and the 'convention' to associate certain symbols with certain parameters in physics.

Right at that moment our iconoclastic Mr. M gave a beautiful reply in his characteristic mumble:

Madam right hand side to theek hai na

(Madam, at least the right hand side is correct)

The poor lady had an expression of a deer caught in headlight, not knowing how to react she slapped our hero in front of the whole class. (I dont remember she used the 'right' hand or the left one for pseudo poetic justice). I could get a glimpse of great Galileo arguing against the mighty dogmatic church. His ignorant colleagues could not appreciate the mettle of his supreme logic. Rest of his colleagues where an ignorant bunch. All he got was some giggles from the girls and guffaws from brats. Man we have no place for people who dare to challenge the convention.

Alas! I think this is why we have such a dismal performance and blatant plagiarism (and this) due to utter desperation and lack of original ideas.

3 comments:

A said...

Dial M for Physics

Unknown said...

well... what was Mr. M's intention when saying right side correct hai..... Mrs. T Sandon must have really misunderstood.... poor chap got a slap... heheheeee... :)
gr8 conception patrik... cheers!!!

TheQuark said...

@atishay: Would have been great if it would have been the dreaded mathematics teacher. Mathematics is like the dreaded bogeyman of Indian school going kids.

@ashish: Mr. M only knows the dead hidden subtle genius that Ms (and not Mrs. Ahem ahem) Sandon could comprehend! I want to write more on the two pappu's but don't think every one from the readers would be able to relate to it