Thursday, November 01, 2012
Good Manners and Boyle's Law
Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution (New York: Free Press, 2009), p. 366 (footnote):
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Boyle's Law states that, for a fixed quantity of gas at a given temperature, the pressure is inversely proportional to the volume. I have never forgotten Boyle's Law since my class at school, Form 4B1, was taught a single lesson by the school's senior science master, whose name was Bunjy. He was standing in for Bufty, our usual physics teacher, and we wrongly thought that, because of Bunjy's extreme age (as we thought) and extreme short sight (as was obvious from his habit of reading a book in contact with his nose), we could ignore his discipline and tease him. How wrong we were. He kept the whole lot of us in for an extra detention lesson that afternoon, which he began by making us write in our notebooks: 'Object of the lesson: To teach 4B1 good manners and Boyle's Law.'
