Obvious

Un Eléphant dans mon carburateur | home

Obvious

We were commanded to attend a lecture on <<physics>> by a visiting professor from U .S.A.

Really, physics was of no interest to us, and if our Teachers had got themselves into a mess by inviting a touring American professor to Uppsala, why should we have to waste two hours?

We were in the sixties, physics was very much the subject of these days, you could not by physics with million of dollars, any project involved spending hundred of million of dollars, most of these projects having as ultimate goal to discover something that was so small that some millions of those particle were smaller than one of them, yes, I know, sounds strange, but this is the way High Energy Physics works;

It is a bit different with agronomy; ten cows are definitively bigger than one cow and you do not have to spend a hundred million dollars to find one cow. Even if it was astonishing how at milking time, at 5 o'clock in the morning, by minus 5 degree centigrade 42 cows suddenly transformed themselves into 41 cows. Or, when you tallied your figure just before the milk lorry came to collect the milk you discovered that you had 42 cows and you had milked 43 cows.

I have a feeling that High Energy Physics is not my main interest and that I have let my mind wander on the green pastures of the dairy.

So let us go back to the visiting professor. We have very diffuse ideas about what a visiting professor could be. We knew that American professors were grossly overpaid, that when they wrote, they used 5 pages to say what a Swedish Scientist would say in two paragraphs, that they had been known to smile while lecturing, a feat not recommended for any Swedish Professor unless he wanted to be considered as “odd”.

We had seen films and we knew that American Professors found it quite entertaining to crack jokes, the nearest we had ever been to a professor cracking a joke in Sweden was when our Professor in statistics stated that the recent milk production figures in Sweden showed a distinct correlation between the number of divorces and the Swedish milk production. Then he was laughing so much that he had difficulties coming back to the subject, but he managed by clarifying that taken a stochastic sample of an heterogeneous population, the canonic analysis of principal component would always show a trend towards the great Attractor and only fools (meaning his respected colleagues) would not perceive that. By that time we had long gone over to waiting for the end of the lecture.

So here was a visiting Professor from America, which we understood to be a man who was clever enough to have his Grand Tour of Europe paid by his University or was to much hated by his colleagues that they were willing to pay anything to get rid of him.

We trooped into the Lecturing Room under the vigilant eyes of our Professors, and in come the American professor carrying under his arm piles of roles, paper rolls, rules, bottles;

Strange?

It somebody going to pull our leg?

You may not remember that in those days in Sweden, when being evaluated for the position of teacher, you got bad marks because your elbows had not stuck to the side of your body.

Here comes this American professors who does not even bother to sit down, who does not even bother to go behind the lecturing table, but comes in front of us;

His opening gambit was fantastic:

<< I would like to demonstrate that physics is not a subject that demands million of dollars, that even very interesting law can be discovered with just a few dollars>>

And he then started demonstrating some problems;

To my shame I must admit that I do not remember everything.

May I tell you what I remember, but please, do understand, it was not the problem he was demonstrating that fascinated, me, it was the way he made us look at our world.

I loved one very simple demonstration.

<< you all know that we live under the pressure of the atmosphere above us, we do not notice it anymore, but it is there, how could we demonstrate it? It is not a very tiny pressure, the pressure of the atmosphere on our body is the same as the pressure of a column of 10 meters of water; when you dive, by ten meters, you really feel the pressure; Why don't we feel it here, when you are sitting and waiting for the lecture to end?

He took a newspaper, a Swedish newspaper in those days was sufficient in size to cover a dining table. He opened it, put it on a table.

Under the table he put a construction plank, one of these quarter inch planks we used everywhere.

Then he told us that he was going to break the plank using the pressure of the atmosphere above us.

So, we had a large Swedish newspaper, Dagens Nyther, a quarter inch plank under it, and nothing else.

He pounded the bit of the plank that was sticking out of the newspaper, and the plank broke!

If any of you is working with physics, I do agree that there is more than one explanation to why the plank broke. But that is not the point.

The he took one of these toys children use to lake air bubbles with soapy water; This time he had modified it a bit, it had two branches, one narrower than the other. He dipped it into the soapy water and got at the end of the two tubes two bubbles, one big, one small.

Question, when I release the tube, will the air go from the large bubble to the small bubble (as your instinct tells you it will do)? And he did it and the air went from the small bubble to the large bubble;

OK, when you know a little bit of physics, it is obvious that it will work that way. It took me 40 years of dormancy to realize one day that what was true for a soap bubble was also true for group for galaxies. As you know galaxies are ordered on the edge of large bubbles which apparently are void of anything. Should tone bubble galaxies meet, which one is going to collapse and which one will increment and would that explain why the expansion of the Universe is accelerating? All this with only a 1 dollar gadget!

The last demonstration I remembered, but regretfully I do not remember the point he wanted to make, was two cardboard tubes; he took a hair drier and warmed the tubes in the middle, keeping them horizontal, then he would turn the cardboard tubes vertical and the tubes started singing.

As from that day, I was a different teacher. This visiting professor will never know that he changed a man, that he changed me so much that classes after classes of students would see me coming in the class room, my pockets full of ping-pong balls, of paper rolls, of plastic bottles, and that they would be waiting for the classes just for the pleasure of finding out which new idiocy I would demonstrate.

One day, the subject was colors and transparency. I bought ten packs of felt pen color pens and aluminium trays for cookers and some cheap mirrors. I sent out my teenagers on the grass patch and they had to study the reflection of sunshine on colored water. The training ended with my teenagers being all kind of colors from head to toes.

And you cannot even imagine the pleasure it is for a teacher in physics to scavenge a broken car depot. Can you imagine the number of pumps, generators, conducts you can get for nothing?

My colleagues hated me.