Whose Wavelength Are You On?

Physics and Compton and probes all combine in this one and apologies to those who may be offended by the content.

Whose Wavelength Are You On?

It was a summer school in Durham and I was trying to remind myself that I was a tutor representing the organising body and must behave! There were fifteen of us at an Indian restaurant in Durham, all Open University students apart from myself and as the alcohol flowed the jokes were becoming worse. Racist jokes are hardly ever amusing but when directed at hapless Indian waiters they serve to really irritate and embarrass all who hear them. I certainly was wishing myself out of this environment. Feeling guilty by association and not drinking left my mind all too clear to the offensive comments becoming the norm. It’s hard deciding what to do. In a tutorial one could announce in heavy tones “all right, getting back to the interior of the atom we can see…..” But here in this smoky, hazy restaurant I could see that the point of some of these people’s lives was the blame game. If their lives were not what they should be, who was there to blame, who else but the foreigners.

Henry, the main protagonist, had gone on too long and I began to send out annoyance signals. Patience is not one of my strong points. Henry suddenly was startled by a stage whisper from the left. “Hey, the tutor is married to a darky”. Henry’s face suffused with colour. “Don’t get me wrong some of my best friends are coloured!” he addressed me with injured care as if I had just chastised him. The rest of the evening was mercifully short as Henry tried to be overly matey with the Indian waiters to make up for his earlier insults and everyone else had that rather hang dog expression of the ever so slightly guilty party. You could see another anecdote would soon be added to Henry’s repertoire though. Something like “God, you’ll never guess what happened, there we all were in a Packy restaurant and having a bit of fun when it turned out the bloody tutor is married to one!” Geography is never a strong point for such people. The fact that my husband is neither from India nor Pakistan is neither here nor there. India, Africa, S. America, the Middle East, etc. all have in his mind the same non-white skin tones and that is all that matters. Skin tone is far more important than Geographical or indeed historical facts

My son once won a competition for drawing a picture of God. It sounds strange but the local education authority in N.I. had organised a competition for all the schools in its area. The children were to draw their idea of what God looked like. The ten or so winners had their work produced on slides and shown at an award ceremony. When my son’s picture came up the clergyman speaker said “I can tell that this child’s family comes from the east and perhaps that’s why he’s chosen to represent God as a coloured man. I had felt an incredible urge to jump up and shout at the man “just where do you think Christ came from, Belfast?”

However such instances are not uncommon and often offence is not even intended so heightened sensitivity to such things rarely helps either party. By the next day of the summer school I had recovered from the evening before and was responsible for the laboratory workshops that morning. Having outlined to the fifty or so students the experiment they were all about to do, my job was installing the radioactive sources in the equipment. Safety procedures dictated that only I the tutor handled these long glass probes with radioactive sources at the end. I quite enjoyed the drama these caused. They were kept in a lead box with radioactive hazard signs all over it. Beside the box stood a Geiger counter and as I would raise the lid and removed sources the click click of the counter echoed eerily around the room. Only when the glass source had been inserted in the equipment on each lab top and the box closed did the maniacal clicking die down.

O.U. students are eager beavers and all were soon measuring and taking notes. As luck would have it, Henry of the night before was the first to finish. I hadn’t spotted him before that moment. He raised his hand and asked what he should do now. I told him that the next experiment involved him inserting the radioactive probe in his ass and repeating the measurements as before. Thankfully the students seemed to take it with good humour and much laughter, perhaps too much at Henry’s expense.

Unfortunately, at lunchtime the Senior Course Director approached me and asked if I had instructed a student to insert a radioactive probe in his ass, as this was not in accordance with safety procedures. Deciding to brazen it out I told the Director that I would have of course inserted the probe personally and would never have allowed the student to handle the probe himself. The Director retreated to consider his position. No more mention was made except on the last night of the school when special awards were given to all the tutors at the school. Best disco dancer, best singer etc. I won the prize for best experimental modification to the Compton Effect Experiment! In this well-known effect the wavelength of incoming photons collides with an electron and emerges with a changed wavelength, slightly longer.

I like to make an analogy. There are those who are on a different wavelength from ourselves. Collisions on an individual level (mutual interactions if you like) can change the original wavelength subtly and in doing so result in a broader range of views.