Common Sense

 

“Are you interested in popular science books?” He asked me as I put down Carlo Rovelli’s Reality is Not What It Seems in my lap to think about what I had just read: “… great science and great poetry are both visionary, and may even arrive at the same intuitions. Our culture is foolish to keep science and poetry separated: they are two tools to open our eyes to the complexity and beauty of the world.” That was what had caught my attention particularly. That was very much in tune with my own thinking. I took interest in science precisely for this reason.

I told the fellow passenger the same. He was impressed. We were both on a train.

“My name is Ananthapadmanabhan,” he said. “Pretty long, isn’t it? They call me Pappu, for short.” And he laughed. The name Pappu is in North India what Sasi is in Kerala: Dunce.

“People like to compartmentalise truths,” Pappu said when I told him about my limited interest in science. “It makes life easier. Use science for practical life and religion for morality and poetry for beauty. Pretty easy. If only we would care to realise that all these are not so conveniently separated systems.”

“It is because of these compartmentalisations that we have so many problems,” I reflected loud.

“Indeed,” Pappu conceded readily. “Just imagine the religious bigot applying physics to his fervour.”

“Physics would have provided a better trajectory to his heaven.”

Thus went on the conversation until Pappu gave me a classical problem to work out.

“Two trains start from opposite stations, say Station A and Station B, at the same time. The distance between A and B is 150 km. The trains move at the same uniform speed of 50 kmph. A bird starts flying too from Station A at the same time at the uniform speed of 100 kmph. When the bird reaches Train B, it turns around and flies back to Train A. When it reaches A, it turns back again and flies to B. And so on. How much distance will the bird have flown when the trains pass each other?”

I had worked out similar problems as a young man. I used physics and simple arithmetic for that. Here too I set upon thinking in the same way. When the trains travel 50 km each, the bird will have flown 100 km. So the bird reaches Train B at its 100^th km. The trains are still 50 km away from each other when the bird turns around. Now the bird will fly around 33 km (double of what each train will run) to reach Train A and the trains will have moved some 17 km each. A bit of arithmetic will tell us that the bird will fly distances of 100 + 33 + 11 + 4 + 1 km (approximately) which adds up to 150 km.

“That is quite a mindboggling arithmetic,” Pappu said. “You made it very complicated by bringing in geometric progression and all that stuff. It’s much simpler, you know. See. The trains are moving at the same uniform speed of 50 kmph. It means they will meet exactly in the middle of the total distance. That is at 75km. The bird’s speed is just the double of each train’s. So when each train covers 75 km, the bird will have flown 150 km.”

Cute, I thought.

“Very often we make things complicated unnecessarily,” Pappu said. “If only we make use of our common sense, life would be much simpler.”

Our train was approaching the next station where Pappu was to alight.

“Remember D H Lawrence?” He gave me a parting shot. “I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.”