Doppler Effect

If you remember your Physics, the Doppler Effect causes the sound of an approaching train to get bigger as it gets closer, and smaller as it recedes. My new hypothesis is that we face the Doppler Effect in events that are happening around us too.

Anything, from an election result, to a break-up, always feels as if it has a great impact on our life for a few days after it happens. We think that the new political leader will change everything for the better -in the case of election results. If it's a break-up, we may feel that it's the end of the world. But the world has not ended in spite of many predictions of its demise attributed variously to the Mayans and Nostradamus.

So, as time passes, most of these things reduce in importance, and we reach a state of unattached, neutral, or at least less noisy state as it pertains to the said event. Our high expectations, or suicidal tendencies, as the case may be, give way to equanimity, and we can sometimes even laugh at our previous ideas about the importance of these things to our lives.

Life goes on, in other words, and sometimes for the better. Now, you know why they taught us about the Doppler Effect.

Text Book Nostalgia

I am suddenly nostalgic about text books. Not certain I read all of them, though.

Resnick and Halliday was a Physics text.

BL Theraja wrote several books that became our Bibles for Electrical Engineering.

Tuli's book on Chemistry I still remember the title of.

Pindyck and Rubenfeld was one for Macroeconomics, and Paul Samuelson, for Microeconomics.

Don't remember the book for Advertising, only the fancy ads shown by guest faculty at IIMB.

There was also a thick Operations Research book, that terrified me by its sheer size.

But I was impressed by some non-text books about various management disciplines. Ogilvy on Advertising, Positioning, Maverick, The Goal, for instance.

I did not exactly like them, but some books that I referred to in Marketing Research included those by Green and Tull, Luck and Rubin, and Churchill. They inspired me to write my own.

Fritjof Capra

I am reading an account of Fritjof Capra's work and life in his own words, a part of the book called Uncommon Wisdom. He is also the author of the Tao of Physics, a bestseller on the similarities between Western concepts of Science and Eastern mysticism or spiritual thought.

According to him, the "theories" of everything that we take for granted (Newtonian Physics, Biological theories, or anything else we take as absolute truths) are actually approximations, because the nature of matter is not based on a firm, inviolable foundation. It is dynamic, and based on interrelationships between various parts. It keeps changing, and the patterns are what one can see and what we understand. But there is no single underlying theory that holds good under all circumstances.

There is a nice incident that he quotes about an argument between two of his acquaintances at a dinner table, with their spouses also sitting around the table. One of them, fed up about the argument that there is nothing in the world that can be called as an incontrovertible fact, said to his colleague, "Isn't it a fact that there are six people sitting at this table?" To which the other person replied, with a glance at his colleague's pregnant wife, "Who knows where one person ends and another begins?

Very intelligent, very enriching.