APPLICATIONS OF PHYSICS

Eating and drinking Physics

No man, you are mistaken. I am not going to speak on someone so dedicated to Physics that he/she eats or drinks Physics or does Physics even while eating or drinking.

This is an old story. Renjan was four or five then. One day we went to a tamilian vegetarian restaurant in Kottayam and we were seated on opposite sides of one of the unusually small tables there. The tables there were not broad enough for two people. I had this funny thought. If two strangers are seated on opposite sides, how will they manage without an "overlap of wave functions"? Anyway worrying about that was not our business. We settled down to our business and ordered two masala dosas. Dosa came flying, though it was assumed that various items are "manufactured" only as per order. Probably these people have a well defined statistics, borne out of experience. They might definitely have a very correct "distribution" of the orders for items enlisted in the menu. Otherwise how can those dosas that came flying along with the order be so hot? "These tamil people are great mathematicians" I told myself. Even as I was completing my soliloquy, I heard the supervisor shouting,"Ramanujan, "Antha front table Kleen Pannunko". Oh! It was chaos in my mind for a moment. I was thinking of mathematics and here the supervisor asking Ramanujan to clean up a table!! This often happens to me. It takes me a "very small but finite" time to come to grips with situations like these. Every "Aryas", Uduppi" kind of restaurant has a supervisor like this. These men seem to just walk the length and breadth of the hotels. But in fact they are wonderful "space-time" managers in these usually congested places.

HYDRODYNAMICS

I lost no time to enter the solemn duty entrusted with me. I was half way through my masala dosa when I noticed that Renjan has not started even. The boy was sitting there with pouted lips and tears rolling down his cheeks. Even before I asked anything, he said tremulously, "That uncle behind you is scaring me". Now how can I suddenly turn back to see this uncle? I gently massaged the back of my neck with my left hand and turned my head in slow motion as if I had pain or stiffness in my neck. Alas! the boy was right though for wrong reasons. I remained in that "semi peechae mood" position for some more time and realized what was happening. This man had a very peculiar way of eating. He took a fistful and stuffed his mouth with much more than its "permitted capacity". He chewed a lot and what followed was really frightening. His head came forward by three or four inches like that of a tortoise and I saw him applying some pressure somewhere in the "Northern Hemisphere" thereby sending the well chewed stuff down the throat in one shot. In this process his eyes came protruding out. And this was what frightened Renjan. "Poor boy" I said. I wanted to tell him, "Mon, this is what Pascal's principle is all about! It states that a change in pressure applied to an enclosed incompressible fluid is transmitted undiminished to every portion of the fluid and to the walls of the container". But then, the boy was too small to realize that eye-balls are very loose parts of the container!

OPTICS

I told Renjan to not look at the "bad uncle" any more. I started "concentrating" on the latter half of my dosa and there was a loud scream from the poor boy. I turned back to see what the man has done this time and seeing him I thought I was going to scream even louder. The man had turned into a Dracula. I told you earlier? Sometimes it takes me a moment to come to grips with what is happening. The gentleman was now drinking water from a glass. "So what?" did you ask? Then listen. With his mouth wide open almost half of the rim of the glass was inside his mouth. When he tilted the glass to drink, his front teeth in the upper jaw were now inside water. The curvature of the glass plus the water in the tilted position of the glass formed sort of a plano-convex lens. The gentleman's teeth got magnified beyond all proportions and had a devilish look. I wanted to tell the boy of the lens action. But then the boy was too small.

I felt sorry for the boy as he sat there with an all-lost feeling and an untouched masala dosa before him.

Physics is such a wonderful subject finding application every where. So you finally agree with me?