Of scientists and temperatures…..

Well let me clarify the title of this blog, it’s the temperature of the lab we are talking about , not the global or body or incubator or mental state temperature for that matter. :P
So yeah, temperature of the lab, in the sense ambient temperature or in scientific ( or layman ) terms, RT – bole toh room temperature of the place we are working in. By we, I mean all the people in the lab that I have been allotted to work in, for the next six months at a premier research institute of the country.
As I may have mentioned to some of my friends before, this place is great with all the facilities that one can hope for.And hence one thing that is abundantly found here is the air conditioner, which is omnipresent in all the closed places (except for the corridors and toilets of course :P ).Also, people here can be found wearing sweaters perennially!
The problem (or rather conflict) arises when people working in the lab differ on what temperature the AC should be set at, like it happened in my lab today morning (actually it’s been there for the past one week now). One of the senior( I mean education wise) people in the lab got a cold which worsened, owing to the low temperature in the lab and even colder conditions in this city and hence with everyone’s consent set the AC to a temperature about 2˚ higher than usual. Now this person is completely cured of his cold, but the AC temp remained same. Well for the past one week, the weather in this beautiful city has been quite cold due to the rains and the winds, so nobody really objected to the lab being warmer than the outside environment.
But for some strange reason today, conflict arose about the lab temp again, and being the scientists that they are, people tried to sort it out in their own ways. One person actually called the instrumentation dept to clarify the issue, wherein he was informed that the temperature displayed on the indicator in the lab is actually a little higher than the actual temp. Not convinced (well they are scientists, they need proof), this person asked them to send in a person with the most accurate thermometer they had in their possession! So the dept duly sent in personnel with some thermometer to prove their point. Now this thermometer (being extremely accurate as was claimed) showed diff temp. at diff places n the lab which perplexed the people more!!! Moreover the thermometer in the lab showed a different reading altogether and all the 3 readings weren’t even coinciding!!!! Perplexed, people decided to set the lab temp as the one recommended in the user manual for the most expensive piece of equipment in the lab. Unfortunately, the manual did not have any specific information for the same and mentioned the temp in very ambiguous terms. So finally they decided to take a poll to reset the temp. And as luck would have it (not luck actually, its science, the science of probability :P ) , there were people with completely different points of view and hence no consensus was reached.
Well they are a bunch of scientists here, how can they not find a solution to a problem!? So the problem was put on hold till all the people in the lab had arrived. But alas!! That just created a new problem, more people, and more opinions! Also some people insisted that no matter what temperature is set; they want the indicator to show 24˚C!!!! Then there were deliberations like,-
“why is the lab feeling hot now, it was feeling cold before we left for lunch!!” ,
“aap sweater pehnoge toh garmi toh lagegi na!! ” ,
“ yaar, 10 min pehle lab mein thand lag rahi thi, aur ab garmi ho rahi hai !!”
“aap ka metabolism rate jyada hai, isiliye aap ko garmi lag rahi hai”
“ tumhe hypothyroidism hai toh hum sab garmi mein baithe!!! “ and so on and so forth….
Well so much for scientists trying to solve a problem. I am leaving the lab right now, but inspite of so much probing and thought put into the issue, the problem still lies unanswered……