Wednesday, June 22, 2005

a general theory of distant relativity

to sum it all up, math totalled me and the chemistry just wasnt there. but physics had a gravitational pull of its own. i'm an engineer by degree. i'm not sure if thats euphemism for geek or if geek is cooler these days. but if one were to extrapolate based on that fact, the conclusion would be that i had an interest for physics in high school.an interest that was exceeded only by a desire to become a board of education director and abolish certain math topics from the syllabus.

physics was glorious if i left out the proofs and equations that one was expected to memorise and churn out.my physics teacher in high school did the best to make us like it. he would liken a capacitor to a member of a tribal group and when they were in series, he would demonstrate, it was like a bunch of them holding hands and performing a tribal dance around an imaginary fire. while the description was pretty good as a memory aid, come exam time all i could think of was groups of male and female capacitors dancing in colorful costumes, feathers on their plates and some beating on drums. the equations were forgotten and even if i remembered some,i would often miss out mentioning units which in high school translates into exactly zero marks. describing the series capacitance equation as an item number probably didnt help much either.

college physics was much better. it should be mentioned that my college unlike others in india was a total party school.in fact it merits a post on its own..maybe some other day. but yeah, total party all the time.but due to the weird laws of physics governing engineering school seating arrangements, no matter how we tried, the girls always ended up on one side of the party, segregated from the boys. apart from the fact that we were made to sit in class from 9 to 5 , it was like a huge carnival without the tents and the rides and the jolliness. to convey how easily college can kick high school's ass, we were assigned 2 chemistry teachers and 3 physics lecturers in our first year. these guys were not ones to joke about the subject though. no singing or dancing. more work for my right arm as they competed with each other at breaking the official black-board speed writing records. we were like pythons, swallowing all that crap as a whole and regurgitating it on exam sheets spelling mistakes intact. yeah we skipped the digestion part. we were clever pythons. thermodynamics, acoustics, optics - all words that we were fluent with in high school merely represented different huge notebooks that reflected the blackboard. one such "ic" pursued me for 3 more years forcing me to learn and then participate in capacitive and then resistive tribal dances. that i managed to escape with an electonics degree was largely as a result of dancing in a huge crowd where my 2 left feet went unnoticed.

i'm done with physics for life. praise should indeed to go those 3 lecturers of my college who caused recurring nightmares in which schrodinger's cat and einstein were tag-teaming against me in a wrestling ring. if not for them i'd have become something pretty cool like a quantum physicist or an astrologist.

9 comments:

Subramaniam Avinash said...

ur the son my dad never had. write on! needless to say, i'm the son who'll never get any of this shit. what you just did sounded like the conversations i never had with my dad. thank god, he's no more. had he read this, he'd have bequethed everything he didn't bequeath but had no choice 'cept to leave behind for me, to you. cheers, physic's'cally challenged.

Subramaniam Avinash said...

umm...you meant astrologist or astro-pysicist?

Subramaniam Avinash said...

if you guys dig this, mine this: http://wired-vig.wired.com/wired/archive/13.06/physics.html

catcharun said...

father,son,nephew,uncle, cousin,brother..they are all relative dude..

i meant astrologist..i think they are cool.

thanks for the link...i've read it..its quite an awesome read for anyone who likes einstein and its rather well written...even i could understand it

Subramaniam Avinash said...

even i couldn't understand what an astrologist is...do tell mr. einstein.

Anonymous said...

physics... *shudder*... i decided i could consider being an engineer only after a kind soul told me that physics was required only the first year.

catcharun said...

i dont know about your college but we used physics well into the fourth year...especially aerodynamics and projectile motion. some guys from nasa once came to observe our boys sending paper rockets to the girls side.
this despite the 3 first year physics lecturers

Ms.V said...

scenes from my physics days..

http://willowy-menhir.blogspot.com/2005/02/ways-physics-practicals-can-go.html

Oh well, I'm getting into Math now..and fortunately, Math does not have practical classes..But, the geek that I am, I couldn't probably ever say I hated Physics practicals..

catcharun said...

V : math ?? nice talking to you.thats one language i do not understand.