The curse of the Bhattachary(y)as.

The curse of the Bhattachary(y)as.

In the first week of college I was teamed up with Jishnu Bhattacharyya for the Honours lab as well as the Chem Pass lab. Little did I know that this was to be a three year long experience in character building. Jishnu is one of those really smart people who are very good with theory, but lousy with experimental setups. I am one of those more lab oriented people who like doing stuff and leaving the differential equations to someone else, in this case: Jishnu. So, the partnership was a very good one. To this day, I am thankful to Jishnu for clearing up concepts the way he did. Early on, we discovered that there are three kinds of lab philosophies:
The first: get the setup done. Look at someone else's data to make sure you are properly calibrated. Take readings. Get them checked. Go to the canteen. By and large, this was what people did.

The second: fake the setup. Look at someone else's data. Fake the data. Leave. Sit down with a calculator. Back calculate all the readings with a believable margin of error. I am glad to report that most of the guys who did this (and girls) and pursuing great careers in theoretical physics.

The third: destroy the setup. Rebuild it from the ground up. Any loose wires? Lets rip them out to see what happens. Lets try crossing these wires and BOOOM! What if we increase the temperature a bit more? Aha, so this is the pinchcork which holds the vaccuum? Interesting.... Well you get the drift. This philosophy was uniquely ours.

It is on record that every single apparatus we touched in the first two years broke down. Every single one of them. In fact, we took two and a half months (as opposed to the normal one and a half weeks!!) to investigate a CR circuit starring a very high capacity capacitor. And in the end, our results were messed up, cos the monsoons started and the capacitor changed value with the increased air humidity. Optics was another nightmare. The Lamp, Scale and Mirror arrangement behaved much like the 'Pyar, Ishq aur Muhabbat' in that rather corny movie: never lined up to satisfaction.

Quite understandably, our travails in the lab became widely noticed, and people began whispering about 'the curse of the Bhattachary(y)as'. What noone ever understood was that we were, in fact, having a great time! As a postscript, I must note that the University of Calcutta has replaced some of the more hideous experiments which we agonised over. We believe that it is in no small part due to our demonstration of the very hideousness of those experiments. Talk about leaving lasting impressions!!