My feeble science lab adventures: Part 2

Read into the life of Einstein, you'll find reason enough to cheer for yourself even if you were bad in studies!

Reportedly, Einstein's teacher at school had told his father that there was not much to expect from him as he did very poorly in his lessons. If his teacher had lived long enough to see him come up with E= mc², I'm sure the teacher had to turn ostrich for the rest of her life! 

Of all the science lab sessions I had in my school days, the physics lab sessions were the most dreaded ones. In the chemistry lab you could tweak the chemical experiments and their results in some manner, and a hit and trial identification wasn’t that tough when you could guess the main reacting components. But this was painfully difficult, at least for me in case of the physics lab experiments. Some days back I came across a facebook meme where it mentioned that if the tree had fallen on Newton’s head instead of the apple, our lives would have been a lot easier. With due respect to Sir Issac Newton, I wouldn’t have disagreed to this fact when I was in school. Remembering myself during the physics practicals, I would have wished that a whole lot of these adventurous physicists actually lost their way before they stumbled upon their discoveries. But again, these men changed everything and physics is one of the highly significant branches of science. Anyway, I didn’t feel so magnanimous while figuring out the experiments. The thing that I disliked the most about the physics practical classes was the mathematical calculation we had to sort out with the formulas. Almost all the time invariably, my results would show up highly deviated from the expected range of values.

The physics lab was on the floor just above the chemistry lab and unlike the latter it was well lit and ventilated. As far as I recollect, the first experiments began with some measuring instruments which were taught to us. I clearly remember, there were Vernier callipers and screw gauge. At first sight they appeared to me like tools from Frankenstein’s lab. The Vernier Calliper was a set of sliding scales and it had a metallic strip that could be used for measuring depth. When you extended the scales to their limits, it appeared like a junior AK-47. When teachers didn’t look, kids would love to use the Vernier Callipers to simulate an intense war field targeting the enemy with the supposed lethal weapon. Though initially confounding, using the Vernier callipers turned out to be easier compared to other experiments we later had. And the screw gauge! The screw gauge was used for precision measurements as you could figure out the value till the third decimal place. I felt screwed while counting places of 100 markings. Later more was in store as we came across the application of theoretical physics in the lab practical.

There was torque effect, pendulum and its relation with acceleration due to gravity, electric circuits, real and virtual image using lens, tracing magnetic field (I liked this one) and some more I don’t remember. I was once floundering in my internal assessment when I had to determine the weight of a rock (picked up from the school ground) in a torque effect experiment. There was another weight suspended at the end of a metre scale to balance the weight of the rock. My results were betraying the torque principles and I kind of goofed up the calculations to make things fall in place. I was however happy that I didn’t get the pendulum experiment. Every time I did this experiment during class, the pendulum bob would share a love-hate relationship with me while dancing away under the gravitational acceleration. There was some relationship between the height of suspension and the time taken by the bob to sway on its path. The bob didn’t comply with the laws in my case and I would rather end up copying accurate values from a friend’s copy.

The lens imaging was nice. We used the wall as a screen and the trees outside were used as the objects. A cute little faint image of the trees was captured on the wall. Tracing lines of a magnetic field was also nice. The iron pins would arrange themselves along the lines of the magnetic field and we would then trace it on a paper. I also remember that while setting up a very simple circuit I got a small electric pang that felt like an ant bite. The only thing that was a problem in the experiments was when the calculations of an experiment deviated madly beyond the expected ranges. During tests you could only pray that you guessed really well while trying to match the right values when there was a sign of faltering. In chemical experiments you could take the help of a neighbouring friend as the same test or not more than two test variants were given for assessment to the entire class. This privilege didn’t exist in case of physics experiments as each had unique results and the teacher would later verify with your set of instruments.

The physics practical room was like a huge hall. There were stretches of cupboards or drawers, whose flat tops were used as tables for the experiments. If our teacher was absent for a practical class, the substitute teacher would usually ask us to practice on our own. This was a golden chance to chatter away 80 minutes of a double period practical class while putting up pretence of being deeply engrossed in an experiment with an Einstein like expression. There was enough light coming in and sometimes if you worked near to the window, you might want to stare at the trees outside in our school campus. I liked watching the trees, especially if they bore flowers and their leaves swayed in the breeze.

And all this ended after I passed out my tenth standard board exams. I would only catch a peek into the physics lab later to see how my science stream friends were faring in deadlier experiments. Some obviously aced them and were totally brushed up with all the concepts. And for some who chose science to feel secure among the herd of science opters didn’t appreciate the unexpected complication of the subject! No it wasn’t bad. I realize it now that our teachers were really good in teaching us stuffs that made Salt Lake School produce a brilliant lot of academic achievers. Most of my contemporary friends are doing really well and I feel proud to share the same batch. It’s not been that long I have left school. But I do feel nostalgic when I recollect sweet memories of my schooldays!

The Grecian urn that teases the heart

This is a follow up to my series of tributes to the literature classics that stole my heart. Last time it was Tennyson’s Tithonus, a very beautiful piece of work. This time it is ‘Ode on a Grecian urn’ by John Keats. Now it is really difficult to express my feelings and the flight of imagination that Keats evoked inside me. The reason is very simple. Feelings, especially love and gratitude cannot be put into words. No matter how hard you try, the other person may only get an essence of what you actually feel and you will end up with a feeling that you failed to convey what you wanted. Ode on a Grecian urn is a cherished poem which has left an irremovable impression in my being. This poem is based on a very beautiful observation which is otherwise missing in the vagaries of the mundane human life. Keats’s poem leads me to an amazing insight and I find it deeply spiritual. By spirituality, I mean living one’s life with a feeling of an unseen entity that craftily drives the working of the universe. It gives you a feeling of freedom from the shackles of life. This is what Keats summarizes the poem to. But let me start off with how actually this poem moves on with mesmerizing ideas, one after another.

The entire poem revolves around the multitude engravings of people, nature and things that adorn the face of an ancient vessel- the Grecian urn. Keats admires the urn like an artist admires a beautiful art piece. He carefully unfurls the urn’s beauty like a legendary lore. The scenes carved on the urn’s surface come to life with Keats’s enquiries about what he sees. He beholds beautiful valleys, woods and trees, men or gods- he himself is not sure, playful men chasing maidens, a youth playing a flute beneath a tree and a priest leading a procession with a heifer which is to be sacrificed at a green altar. And what amazes him about all these things? That everyone he can see, is living in eternal bliss. It is because their moments of ecstasy have been frozen for eternity. The tree will enjoy perpetual spring never having to shed its leaves; the young lovers will never face disappointment as they are immortalized in the anticipation of meeting their beloved, the youth will play on sweet melodies on his flute untethered, and the heifer will forever gaze at the skies unsure of his fate. Keats further imagines that the procession that has arrived for the ceremonial sacrifice has left its town desolate for forever. So if anybody ventures into the empty town, there will be no one to inform the visitor about why the place continues to remain abandoned.

Keats stresses upon a very remarkable note- the mutability of the material world. He finds the marble men, maidens, trees and things thriving in bliss, as they will never perish. Here I feel he makes a hint at what mortal pursuits are aimed at, i.e. in finding happiness or bliss. Anything we do in the material world is with a purpose of gaining happiness. But the small moments of happiness or what we expect would make us happy soon fades out. We only get a glimpse of the ultimate bliss when we fulfill our desires in the material world. There are places in the poem which can make one sure that Keats is actually talking about something like this. He refers to the different pursuits of the marble beings as living a life free from ‘human passion’- that cloys your heart and cripples you with feverishness for holding onto the pleasures too tightly. He further upholds the urn as a beacon of hope for people who are steeped in misery. The urn’s wisdom is stressed upon as it ‘teases’ men’s imagination such as the poet himself, as does eternity to a mind that attempts to gauge everything. Remember I spoke about spirituality in the Grecian urn? The poem’s conclusion aptly hammers on this philosophy. Keats pays his homage to the urn by referring to it as an epitome of the ultimate truth- “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”. So the urn that has stood the test of time will continue to convey the beautiful truth that lies above the material world of transience.

If you have made it this far in this post, then I admire your patience and maybe your heart for things. I remember most of my friends in class either dozing off while the poem was being taught or cursing the whole fraternity of romantic poets who made things really complicated for the English exams. We had Keats’s poem for our twelfth standard board examination, and as far as I remember I was lucky enough to get it on the question paper.  Now, taking the entire poem in a literal sense would sum up to an eccentric poet dreaming away with possibilities of varied interpretations of the engravings on an urn which was created thousands of years ago. Visualizing this would be funnier: a man staring at an urn and running his wild imaginations. But again, that’s why poetry acts as a medium for subtle things in life that might not fit into logical facts. Poems like the Grecian urn are made to reflect on aspects of life that revitalizes the passion to live. Yes it is lofty, and those who didn’t like literature (let alone poetry), would rather like to be sent to hell than extricating the poets’ fantasies which never stopped getting loonier for them. For me, I had a heart for such things. The visualization of frozen ecstasies delighted me immensely, such that I have wished in some beautiful moments of my life that those moments could be immortalized on a beautiful urn like the Grecian urn. There are some moments really beautiful in our life where we would want to remain captured forever, beyond time and space. And this is exactly where Grecian urn led me!

In any case, I would recommend all to read the poem for once. Who knows what musings it might lead you to?

No this is not a Grecian urn, it's a huge vase
that Romans loved to keep it in their gardens.
Anyway, it comes close to a sculpted urn......