I could hear my professor from undergrad school drilling into my ear “polishing sample is as much an art as it is science”. Damn! That should have been good for me. I am a fairly decent artist. But this was one form of “art” I had absolutely no knack for. I cursed the sample for the umpteenth time and drifted into thoughts of the other forms of art that I was reasonably adept at, namely, pencil sketching.
Animals were my favorite subjects. I remembered the little fawn I had sketched as a 13 year old, which my art teacher had said was good enough to be put up for an exhibition. And that brought a silly smile on my face – thinking of babies, whether human or animal, always brings on those silly smiles on my face, dunno why. “Yes”, I told myself, “my animal sketching skills aren’t that bad”. And then I thought of the (attempted) self portrait – my latest artistic creation, a week ago. That was horrible. I had showed it to my labmate and asked him to identify it, and after a long hard look he had said, “You know, he sort of resembles our prime-minister” (our = chinese in this case, since my labmate happens to be from China). I winced in chagrin as I thought of this. The sample wobbled apologetically between my fingers. There was a slight “plop” and all of a sudden, my fingertips started feeling warmer and warmer.
Again I indulged in soliloquy – “I am not going to give up on sketching portraits”, I said. And I resolved to sketch one of my idols, Richard Feynman, once I was done polishing the sample. Feynman was a genius. He was a fantastic physicist, and it is said that three of his works – quantum electrodynamics (QED), super-fluidity of helium, and studies on friction at atomic scales – were good enough for a Nobel, although he got the Nobel only once for QED. But Feynman, apart from being a scientist was a superb artist too. As I thought of sketching Feynman, I thought of one of his anecdotes. Those days he was learning to sketch from a friend called Jerry. They struck a deal. Jerry was to teach Feynman how to sketch. In return, Feynman would teach physics to Jerry. Here is an excerpt on this from Feynman’s biography:
"I practiced drawing all the time, and became very interested in it. If I was at a meeting that wasn’t getting anywhere–like the one where Carl Rogers came to Caltech to discuss with us whether Caltech should develop a psychology department–I would draw the other people. I had a little pad of paper I kept with me and I practiced drawing wherever I went. So, as Jerry taught me, I worked very hard.
Jerry, on the other hand, didn’t learn much physics. His mind wandered too easily. I tried to teach him something about electricity and magnetism, but as soon as I mentioned electricity,” he’d tell me about some motor he had that didn’t work, and how might he fix it. When I tried to show him how an electromagnet works by making a little coil of wire and hanging a nail on a piece of string, I put the voltage on, the nail swung into the coil, and Jerry said, “Ooh! It’s just like fucking!” So that was the end of that."
As I thought of this anecdote, I started laughing like a jackass. I felt a slight tap on my shoulder. And my labmate’s voice floated “Pratik!! What are you doing?” Good question. What was I doing indeed. Reverie broken, I saw that the sample had popped out from my finger, and was lying on the table. And there I was, polishing my finger nails against the polishing wheel. It was easy to understand the plopping sound, and the warmth at my fingertips. :-)
I realized why I wasn’t such a good experimentalist. Like Jerry, my mind wandered too easily. I pretend to be a scientist, and actually manage to do some science too, but deep down perhaps the core is made of a different clay.
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