Education

2007-08-20T11:10:00.000-07:00

Getting yourself educated is quite useful. For one thing, you are able to read this article, and for another you get paid because you are an educated man. Education is much more complicated than the way I have put it. I tend to think of it this way.

Over the years, millions and millions of people have lived, and some of them (which still counts to millions) have spent a lot of time thinking – be it about the universe, the stars or geometry. Sometimes, it so happens that these thoughts might occur again to you. It is possible that you may have suspected the existence of the gravitational force when you were five, for example. Or that you discovered the existence of Venus in the evening sky when you were nine. Now suppose that you had chosen to get educated. You would then first discover Venus in your textbook instead, and picture it as a tiny orange ball. Perhaps, you may never bother to actually look at the planet in the sky – you know now, that it does not flicker like other stars, you know why that is so, you might even know its diameter or its surface temperature.

Now, is it really important that you spotted Venus before you were told it exists? Is it really important that you interact with nature yourself and discover her intricate ways, than being fed this information by those who have lived before you?

Isaac Newton believed that it isn’t. His famous saying goes “If I have looked farther, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants”. He accepted the information compiled by his forefathers and went on to show which were the parts that were wrong. Although, he is most famous for his discovery of the law of gravitation, he was an excellent mathematician and also contributed to optics. I deem these would have been impossible in one lifetime without education. Newton was a practical man.

There are many debates in this world on education. These vary from discussing whether the present system is good to whether a thing called education is needed. I do not know of systems and if I do, I would probably want to stay away from them. As far as the need for education is concerned, most people argue that education does not let us think independently. What they mean is that education saves our time by keeping us from pondering over things that have been firmly established. But it does not tell us what the set of firmly established things are. That is for us to decide and accept. If, for example, Albert Einstein had accepted the firmly established velocity transformations of Euler, we would never have had a different theory of relativity.

The two constraints upon an individual’s understanding of this universe is his life span and his intelligence. Now, I believe that it is important to get educated since that gives you a glimpse of how people before you spent their lives and what they concluded from it. Education is the name we give to this coordination that enables faster development. It is vital for us to evolve and it is our security for the future.

The foundation for education is not completely baseless. What I mean is that there are a set of firmly established things and that we have started the right way. The alphabet and the numbers, arithmetic and algebra are a few examples of assertive and definitive theories. Some people may tend to contradict me by stating that these are largely definitions and there is no way any physically observable relation is contained in them. In the medieval times, the fact that the earth is the center of the universe was, in some communities, as solid a definition as that 5 is larger than 4. My point is that there are no internal contradictions in such a set of axioms and evolution has not raised a contradiction in such theories.

Today, education is changing rapidly to include processes that simplify our life and also things that make these processes faster. We are moving on to an age of rapid thinking and immediate recognition of proven results apart from increasing resources for testing one’s theories. When I say this, it seems absurd then, that a ground-breaking discovery such as quantum physics is not happening every other Tuesday. What I mean is that from a gap of two centuries that it took to discover that Newton’s laws are invalid in the quantum domain, it now only involves using a linear accelerator to test which hypotheses hold in which domain. If we are not making quantum jumps in various fields with every passing day, it is because we are eliminating the wrong conclusions fast, and in fact moving closer to the truth.

Intuitively, I feel that time has never been as important in any period in history as it is now. As I try to picture this, an athlete comes to my mind who starts slowly, and carefully crosses all hurdles, but sprints towards the end as fast as he can to the finish line. Are we then beginning to get close to a universal law of everything? Is this the acceleration that will last until the finish line? The least education can do is to stop us from demanding choices for this question too.

Memoirs Of A Mosquito

2007-04-17T08:54:00.000-07:00

I was born in the Midgewater Marsh
On top of a traveller's hat
My flight instructor was harsh
She was swallowed by a hungry rat
I slipped when trying to fly
And landed on the traveller's nose
Hungrily, I stung; heard a cry
And was almost crushed - "Close
Oft there were times like these
When blood was hard to come by
I felt my life was just a lease
15 days and then it's goodbye
I was not alone though
There were others like me
All the way from Tuckborough
I thought she was, maybe
So sweet was the scent
Of her pheromone
That I was literally bent
On making her my own
We flew together all around
I grew tired at Lambeth
She flew on but made a sound
The traveller crushed her to death
I grieved and felt so small
The rage inside made me buzz
But sympathy isn't for all
We were a pain to him as he to us
Later, on a hunting trail
I stung a fat buffalo
Old, I was caught on its tail
And died in 5 seconds or so

A Small Poem

2007-04-17T08:53:00.001-07:00

On rain clouds, wet eyes and grass there is
A water drop that can't know what it is
Whose boundary shrinks into a sphere so small
And when it can't stick, is forced to fall
Its form ain't choice, it forms by chance
No sign of pride in its humble stance
And yet, though it be such a little thing
Of which there ain't tales nor songs to sing
It does and dies as all small things do
Unnoticed, unappreciated and unseen too
It sees us not, this beauty, nor hears or speaks
But ceases not from duty, in tears or leaks
It seems no threat to providence at all
Can fate be changed by a thing so small?
Ah! But you forget this my friend
When all that's small does die, big ones end
Small was the universe when it began
Small was the spark that brought fire to man
Small is the mosquito that gives you such trouble
Small is a bomb that can turn buildings to rubble
So, next time you feel small amidst bigger things
Think of all the changes that small hope brings

Cupid

2007-04-16T10:52:00.000-07:00

He lets love
that others can make it
and then break it

Pensieve

Education

Memoirs Of A Mosquito

A Small Poem

Cupid