Physics Quotes

Physics Professors often say things funny in class. Sometimes advertantly, sometimes inadvertantly. Either way, they are recorded here. Note: Date and time (if available) are given in italics.

Prof. Pelcovits - PH 204 - Electricity and Magnetism - Brown University - Spring 2003

"What do you do with this integral? Well, you look it up, because it's nasty." - 2003-02-04 11:40
"Well... it agrees with the bible." referring to confusions with signs on the board, and verifying with a student's copy of Jackson - 2003-02-06 11:26
"Reading Jackson will teach you nothing." - 2003-02-11 11:36
"Jackson is really anal-compulsive about this stuff. I guess when you get to the third edition you've got nothing better to do." referring to Jackson researching whom of Lorenz and Lorentz did what - 2003-02-13 11:54
"The government has established an RDA, recommended daily allowance, of vector identities. You must have at least one per day." - 2003-02-20 10:39
"Rather than shoot himself, he invented the convention." referring to Einstein developing the Einstein summation convention - 2003-02-20 11:05
"That's the story of Jackson. It's not wrong, but God knows what he's talking about." - 2003-03-13 11:27
"I decided for better or for worse, and usually with Jackson it's for worse, to use Jackson's convention." - 2003-04-01 10:50
"Things are very general. That's why it's general relativity." - referring to g^(mu nu) and g_(mu nu) 2003-04-01 11:22
"Yeah, I screwed up. You know what happens at ten of twelve. I lose my mind." - 2003-04-10 11:51

Prof. Marston - PH 206 - Quantum Mechanics - Brown University - Spring 2003

"It's like when you put a frog in a pot of water and slowly heat it up. The frog never notices it's getting hotter, but you end up with a cooked frog." - 2003-04-02 10:30

Prof. Guralnik - PH 210 - General Relitivity - Brown University - Spring 2002

"The boredom level becomes infinite." referring to how you could teach a year long course on the Rotation Group. - 2002-02-01 12:18
Scott: "Why is it minus delta nu?" Guralnik: "Because I was damn careful with the signs." - 2002-02-04 12:37
"To the first approximation, signs don't matter." - 2002-02-08 12:10
"But you're so screwed, so we don't do it." referring to putting $(F^{\mu\nu} F_{\mu\nu})^2m$ in our action - 2002-02-11 12:43
"Let me put my chalk where my words are." - 2002-02-13 12:47
"I assume that you've all seen this before until you're nauseous. Please leave the room if that's really true." - 2002-02-15 12:35
"What you try to do is to be brilliant more often than you are an idiot." referring to what physicists need to do to be considered smart - 2002-02-20 12:34
"Physics is made out of little bitty bites. Some of them taste bad, some of them taste good. You can't tell which is which until you swish them around in your mouth for a while." - 2002-02-20 12:45
"Whew, I got carried away. Thank you for staying awake through all of that." after looking at the clock - 2002-02-27 12:49
"I've reduced General Relitivity to the chain rule." 2002-03-01 12:38
"Which is someone's fancy proof in differential geometry... which no one should care about... except for the guy who wrote it... who probably got tenure for it." referring to negative g determinants - 2002-03-08 12:25
"...is one, at that's sure as hell a number" referring to the integral over all 4-space of $\delta^4 (x)$ - 2002-03-15 12:17
"Point charges suck when you try and calculate anything." - 2002-03-15 12:30
"The indices obscure the ideas. That's part of physics." - 2002-03-15 12:32

Prof. Partridge - PH 217 - Nuclear and Particle - Brown University - Spring 2002

"So we need some new physics, but we don't know what it is, because if we did, it wouldn't be new." referring to a process that could violate baryon number - 2002-02-13 13:34

Prof. Maris - PH 241 - Solid State - Brown University - Fall 2001

"Let's really cheat. The later it gets, the more we have to cheat." - 2001-09-24 12:50
"There were all sorts of mistakes which is another way of saying it's a subtle subject." referring to Ascroft & Mermin having many factor of two errors in the elasticity section. - 2001-09-28 12:14
"It's great to see everyone so awake at eleven o'clock in the morning." - 2001-10-01 12:26
"Then we want to do some sleazy mathematics." refering to calculating the total energy. - 2001-10-10 12:25
"It's one of those things when the more people looked at it, the more holes they found. Sometimes physics goes that way -- often physics goes that way." referring to tunneling theory (two state) for C \propto T - 2001-10-12 12:12
"I'm trying to be kind to people by not doing things correctly." refering to not explicitly writing the bose-einstien function. - 2001-10-12 12:26
Student: "I have a question about your picture of phonon scattering." Maris: "It's not my picture." 2001-10-12 12:47
"Sulphur can act as valence 2 or 3 and other such mumbo jumbo like that." referring to chemists and their "valence" - 2001-10-15 12:19
"It's like 1 million people sitting listening to a boring commencment." referring to electrons moving together in k-space under the incluence of an electric field; the people can shift to the left together, but not one at a time - 2001-10-17 12:30
"Unless your reactions are really quick, or you're a super-fast basketball player, you'll never notice." refering to t ~ 10^-13 sec - 2001-10-17 12:45
"Hi Hongbo." as Hongbo enters the (50 minute) class 41 minutes late - 2001-10-22 12:41
"James Jeans. The man who invented jeans. No he didn't." referring to the Jeans equation - 2001-10-22 12:53
"We haven't gone to infinity, but we've gone to three. That's pretty good for a physicist." - 2001-10-26 12:45
"Quantum Mechanics was only 12 years old or so. Just going into high school." referring to a book by Matt and Jones published in 1938 - 2001-11-07 12:28
"It was like the dinosaurs. And they all became extinct, like the dinosaurs." referring to the different kind of particle accelerators - 2001-11-12 12:20
"That's one of those terms that I'll secretly erase when you aren't looking." referring to deriving some formula from Maxwell's equations - 2001-11-14 12:32
"What other forces have infinite range? Well there's on I can vaguely remember, called gravity." referring to the Coulomb force having infinite range. 2001-11-16 12:44
"That's how moonshine whisky is made. I don't know why that popped into my head." referring to Ramerlingh Onnes distilling Mercury. 2001-11-26 12:07
"You can imagine Nitrogen has a soul." referring to what phase a substance is in. 2001-11-28 12:13
"You can't feel the effect unless you are a very sensitive person, which I don't think you are." referring to being able to feel a magnetic field. 2001-12-07 12:06

Prof. Guralnik - PH 207 - Advanced Quantum - Brown University - Fall 2001

"Dry perhaps this is, but unbelievably powerful you will see."
"10 to 50 times infinity degrees of freedom -- this is enough to make even a computer barf." - 2001-10-09 10:09
Guest Speaker (50 minutes into class): "What class is this? Is this a grad class?" - 2001-10-11 09:50
"A good colloquium is like a loaded gun, be careful where you point it." - 2001-10-16 09:15
"These states suck in terms of their renormalization." - 2001-10-18 09:21
"That's trivial, right? Wait, that's not trivial! Shit, I screwed up." - 2001-10-23 09:34
"I don't want to take the 5 minutes to get this right." referring to whether or not to add a '+' or '-' sign - 2001-11-13 09:44

Prof. Seidel - PH 214 - Statistical Mechanics - Brown University - Spring 2001

"The energy has to go way the hell up" - 2001-02-01 09:39
"We're always going through these blasfed transformations" referring to Maxwel Relations - 2001-02-06 09:57
"And it seems to be right, even with the signs, which surpizes me, because I often make sign mistakes." referring to deriving an entropy equation - 2001-03-02 11:15
"The pressure in space is pretty damn low." referring to dissacociation of Hydrogen - 2001-03-13 10:17
"The cannonical method is one hell of a problem....It's a real bitch" - 2001-03-15 09:40
"I guess I have got a problem with signs. I have a problem with signs." - 2001-04-12 10:14
"IS this right... let's check... [looks at notes]... it's amazing, it is!" - 2001-04-13 11:38
"What am I writing down? Stop. Stop. Stop." as he is erasing something wrong on the board - 2001-05-04 11:27

Prof. Kosterlitz - PH 204 - Classical Electrodynamics - Brown University - Spring 2001

"For those of you in PH 202 once I mumbled something about the requirements for a solution to be physical." - 2001-02-01 11:07
"This is all very formal and useless." - 2001-02-01 11:16
"Suppose I took a large weight and lifted it up over my head. Well, I used to be able to do that, but not any more." - 2001-02-06 11:32
"So, I'm more spaced out than usual" referring to being jet-lagged from Seattle - 2001-03-15 10:31
"But if we have a magnetic field, we have a current flowing, which is the same as charge moving... So what the hell do we mean by magnetostatics?" - 2001-03-15 11:22
"You learn about it by some idiot talking about it from the board. ... that's how most major discovieries are made." - referring to Maxwell modifying Amperes law to get Maxwell Equations - 2001-04-03 11:16
"You're Russian, moving at Russian speed, and I'm American, moving at American speed." - referring to relativity being like a dictionary to convert from one reference frame to another - 2001-04-24 12:03
"Oh, we're going to continue talking about Relativity." 70s secretary from outside: "Nooooo!" - 2001-04-26 10:33
"Of course, for this problem, that's a little like cracking a nut with a sledge hammer." referring to using general relativity to solve the twins paradox - 2001-05-01 11:14

Prof. Ying - PH 206 - Quantum Mechanics - Brown University - Spring 2001

"The formal solution is not really a solution, it's a formal solution." - 2001-03-09 10:22
"At this point, all hell breaks loose....we don't know what's happening, and we don't care." 2001-04-06 10:35

Gordon Baym - Lectures on Quantum Mechanics - 25th Printing - September 1997

"This exchange term generally makes the differential cross section more wiggly." - page 402

Prof. Partridge - PH 217 - High Energry Physics - Brown University - Spring 2001

"I don't know if any of you are married, but I find that I often am." - 2001-04-24 17:12

Prof. Brandenberger - PH 203 - Classical Mechanics - Brown University - Fall 2000

"Of course, this is completly useless to solve problems in classical physics." referring to the poisson braket - 2000-10-12 10:52
"If you ever encounter $\delta^2$ in physics literature, you know not to read any further." - 2000-10-31 11:19
"I want to do a summary of the entire class [looks at clock] in 10 minutes." - 2000-12-07 11:23

Prof. Kosterlitz - PH 202 - Mathematical Methods - Brown University - Fall 2000

"That's all that you have to know about Mathematics. You don't have to know all the nitty gritty details." - 2000-09-15 11:05
"Before you know the tricks, it can be a real son of a bitch." referring to finding the residue - 2000-09-15 11:27
"My brain is not functioning today." - 2000-09-20 11:20
"Basically, ignore everything that we did on Monday." - 2000-10-04 11:00
"I'm sorry, I'm being dumb." - 2000-11-13 11:07
"Ummm.....[looks at watch, realizes he's gone over time]...let's take a few minutes to go over this some more. [he let us out 13 minutes late]" - 2000-11-13 11:54
"After all that jiggery-pokery." - 2000-11-13 11:58
"What if we were really stupid, and didn't know how to solve this problem exactly." - 2000-12-06 11:02
"The harmonic oscilator is used to work with because it has been solved by 55 different people, and everything about it is known." - 2000-12-06 11:23

Prof. Marston - PH 205 - Quantum Mechanics - Brown University - Fall 2000

"It now has the happy property [it's hermitian]." - 2000-09-20 10:35
"There has been much written on this in popular fiction, and most of it is crap." referring to EPR experiment "spooky action at a distance" - 2000-11-06 10:39
"I worked this out in detail because I wanted you to see the power of a cannonical tranform." - 2000-11-10 10:20

Prof. Akerib - PHYS 316 - Particle Physics - Case Western Reserve University - Spring 2000

"My favorite material, Germanium."
"Note: For this discussion, E=mc^2 applies. For that matter, in any discussion, E=mc^2 applies." - 2000-02-22 13:40
"You know, if I'm gonna skip steps, I might as well skip all of them!" - 2000-02-29 14:25
"Changeness Stranging." - 2000-04-13 14:20