Q16 of 16 Page 13

Textbooks on science may give you a wrong impression that studying science is dry and all too serious and that scientists are absent-minded introverts who never laugh or grin. This image of science and scientists is patently false. Scientists, like any other group of humans, have their share of humourists, and many have led their lives with a great sense of fun and adventure, even as they seriously pursued their scientific work. Two great physicists of this genre are Gamow and Feynman. You will enjoy reading their books listed in the Bibliography.

Scientists, like any other group of humans, have their share of humourists, and many have led their lives with a great sense of fun and adventure, even as they seriously pursued their scientific work. We can take the example of many scientists like Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman. C.V. Raman, etc., who were fun, adventurists and loving. Albert Einstein played the violin and enjoyed Mozart’s music, Richard Feynman the greatest explainer ever was humours and he played the bongo in addition to doing the serious scientific work.


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12

India has had a long and unbroken tradition of great scholarship — in mathematics, astronomy, linguistics, logic, and ethics. Yet, in parallel with this, several superstitious and obscurantist attitudes and practices flourished in our society and unfortunately continue even today — among many educated people too. How will you use your knowledge of science to develop strategies to counter these attitudes?

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Though the law gives women equal status in India, many people hold unscientific views on a woman’s innate nature, capacity and intelligence, and in practice give them a secondary status and role. Demolish this view using scientific arguments, and by quoting examples of great women in science and other spheres; and persuade yourself and others that, given equal opportunity, women are on par with men.

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“It is more important to have beauty in the equations of physics than to have them agree with experiments”. The great British physicist P. A. M. Dirac held this view. Criticize this statement. Look out for some equations and results in this book which strike you as beautiful.

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Though the statement quoted above may be disputed, most physicists do have a feeling that the great laws of physics are at once simple and beautiful. Some of the notable physicists, besides Dirac, who have articulated this feeling, are Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Chandrasekhar, and Feynman. You are urged to make special efforts to get access to the general books and writings by these and other great masters of physics.

(See the Bibliography at the end of this book.) Their writings are truly inspiring!