Physics Society - Quotes Archive

Aida El-Khadra -- Physics 470

"Fundamental parameters, not adjustable parameters!" [re: the 27 parameters in the standard model]
"The beauty of particle physics is that you can just say these things are true; you don't have to derive them."
"We want to deal with reality here...well, at least we try to."
"We have two vertices, four external legs, and a propagator. Let's throw it all together and shake it up and see what falls out."
"Infinity is far away."
"Let's parameterize our ignorance"

John Kogut -- Physics 225/326

"The acid rain blackboard"
"Tippy tops"
"Newton was a wacko. An absolute wacko!"
"Theter," "Gammer," "Omegger"
"The speed of light is enormous... I'll put big tails on those fellows."
"We just found the solution by mucking around"
"Potentials are doing all sorts of wacky things"
"The E is sloshing between L and C"
"Let's make friends with the solution"
"The second solution is hiding in front of your face. You want the second solution to do something for you, not sit there like a lump."
"It just opens and closes and opens and closes and opens and closes and that's no good because you let the flies in."
"So you have all these damn clocks everywhere...it's kind of like a nightmare from Dali. It'll drive us bonkers."
"I'll just jigger this one up"
"You want to jigger up a constant here"
"Light moves at the speed of light"
"Maria's a really hopping girl. It's a very human story."
"Darwin had a lot of time on his hands"
"This is a fairly pedestrian routine. Some people like to make particles that are a little sexier."
"The field [Lagrangian mechanics] was born at cocktail parties"
"It has to be true for all wiggles"
"Let's look at this because it's cute"
"This is real bodybuilding here"
"We've thrown the baby out with the bath water"
"My head is the C [carbon atom]"
"I need periodic boundary conditions for myself"
"It's flopping up and down like that"
"And I whip it" [addendum by Maggie: "Whip it, whip it good!"]
"If you haven't seen it, you've seen it here first"
"I need combat pay"
"The cross terms are going to vanish like mad"
"I'll have to make friends with them. It's still pretty bestial."
"I can't open my wrist too much because I have arthritis or something." [rigid body motion, twirling a baton]
"Now you're cooking"
"Put it [inertia tensor?] in your back pocket so you can pull it out whenever you want"
"It won't jiggle or bump"
"Euler was no doofus"
"Now you're probably looking at this problem and wanting to throw up"
"Macho man has a football today because we'll be fooling with it"
"You're all just really damn smart"
"Inersher"
"Maybe if we start kvetching now"
"It's jiggering a little bit, maybe it's just nervous"
"It just wanted to nutate like mad"
"You don't want a schlep like me, you want to be able to play better"
"I come and look for this month's salary" [spinning penny demo for rigid body motion]
"The arithmetic here is fairly bestial"
"It's kicking around like mad"
"And so you hear these beats right? You kind of hear this WAAAWWWW WAAAAWWWW WAAAAWWWWW sound..."
"Oh no, I don't go outside" [when asked to hold class in the Krannert ampitheatre]
"The football equation: w || z' = $"

Naomi Makins -- Physics 335/336

"You pull the big thing out of the...thing"
"It's useful when you're surrounded by expensive vacuum pumps and there's someone screaming `CAN WE MOVE IT DOWN ANOTHER 10 CENTIMETERS?!'"
"And for God's sake get some sleep! You all look so depressing! Your brain runs at 200% when you sleep; I didn't figure that out until grad school. You can even come to class late, just get some sleep!"
"We're going to whack the entire equation with an integral."
"First order may look like a sphere, second order may be an elongated blob, an additional order might add a wobbly thing..."
"This preflight...the spawn of Hell."
"This is a classic example of separation of variables...or is it?
"q, q, q, q? q? q? Q."
"This is what comes from having anti-histamines for breakfast :-/"
"In theoretical condensed matter classes you may run into the abbreviation `HTSC' or `High Temperature Superconductor.' In this class we have the abbreviation `HTCS' or `How to Calculate Stuff.'"
"Why have 1 convenient symbol when you can have 3? It's much more confusing."
"We have enough definitions that you might think this is a chemistry class."
"Last time, we were casting our life, the universe, and everything we know in terms of free charges."
"REMEMBER THE EPSILONS. This is like a Buddhist mantra!"
"I think that physicists are generally happy people...they're idealistic even though sometimes they don't like to admit it."
"This piece is gone. O blessed happiness."
"Oh didn't that hurt. Two boards later we have this..."
"You can come sit next to her and keep her awake. I feel so bad, I just want to give you a pillow or something!" [to me and Anne Kahle]
"You get elliptic integrals which you can't solve. Mathematica will barf out some big expression."
"Any contribution from this will get squelched by the 1/r."
"I visited my best friend in Virginia and she has a new baby. The dog is very confused about this new object -- it smells bad, it can't eat it..."
"I put this on Mathematica and it barfed out a page of algebra."
"And look -- O happy day -- this part vanishes..."
"No more turgid algebra"
"Today will be a fluffy class"
"Too many constants cause pain and suffering."
"It's the infinite spike function...FOONK!!"
"E inside a conductor is...all together now, with feeling!"
"26?! Dude...well, actually it's about 9."
"Would a cop pull over an electron that was going at that speed?"
"So you have your happy charge in the elevator here..."
"Now we have buckets of intuition so we can do an example problem."
"So we get mu_0 - N - I - h -- National Institute of Health, ha ha! ...over 2 pi log b over a, yoohoo!"
"We can get rid of this piece by doing a little song and dance."
"Four equations is a lot [to memorize] for a physicist...maybe not for a chemist, but we DERIVE everything!"
"I'll pull a 10 out so I can take the square root; square root of 10 is 3."
"I dub this exam 'The Beaches of Normandy' exam..."
"S=UV. Sport utility vehicle!"
Although technically not a quote, how could we ever forget the "SUCK equation?" :-) S (Poynting vector) = u (energy density) * c (speed of light) * k (unit vector indicating direction of propagation)
"Let's do a sanity check..."
"You get something that's relatively pathological"
"Last time, we were casting our life, the universe, and everything we know in terms of free charges."
"This is so beautiful it just brings tears to my eyes." [d'Alembertian forms of Maxwell's equations]
"We'll be able to write it as one equation which is really a treat." [tensor form of Maxwell's equations]
"Infinite wire, patent pending"
"Remember that metals are shiny and that you can see yourself in them."
"Retarded time = temporally challenged time"
"Shit! That's only for waveguides!"
"Let's see if life is still on the real axis"
"My laptop is like my friend...its name is Lucy..."
"IMPORT
ANT"
"Any mathematicians out in the hallway? No? GOOD."
"This is the whole book summarized in ONE equation. This is the god equation."
"I don't know you; what's your name? Oh, Brent. Hi Brent, nice to meet you." [Naomi to Brent Dickman 3/4 of the way through SECOND semester]
"Pico? Ha! That's one step up from a 'professor editor,' you know something like Notepad."
"The kind of music I listen to...most people would rather listen to a refrigerator."

Dale VanHarlingen -- Physics 343

"Next: FETs ("Lab 5"). 5=3."
"Three letter acronyms, or TLA's..."
"These are canned functions"
"Darlington pair...kind of looks like 'pain.' I guess that's about right."

Ian Robinson -- Physics 344

"You might imagine that squirrels or cockroaches or desperate grad students from theory will somehow interfere with the signal."
"Your nerves inform your brain that something is burning your fingers off."
"It [74138 decoder chip] looks like a cow."
"You can also have a fourth state called the fried state if you turn both on." [re: tri-state outputs]
"Logically it should do something violent, and it does in this case."
"And now this is happy...or is it?
"This is known as a flip-flop...nothing to do with footwear...a latch, or bistable...nothing to do with horses."
"I've frequently heard of children from large families who do physics who are called runts. They don't get into cars or other things that normal kids do."
"This is the Entsheidungsproblem. You need two blackboards for German."
"I thought I heard some of that characteristic whispering that usually happens three equations after a mistake."
"That's clock, not dock."
"You would need very unusual eyes to be able to see infrared."
"24V is chosen because it's just safe enough to touch and not kill you."
"Knowing the track record of some of you in the lab, they [transistors] probably wouldn't survive that."
"And your poor little TTL circuit doesn't want to see any of that high voltage equipment"
"We make the spherical cow approximation -- we simplify it to death... and wave our hands..."
"This depends on the logarithm of the two dimensions of the cow that matter"
"We want use the Wavetek and choose a sine wave, or square wave, or Led Zeppelin, or whatever we want to propagate through our cable."
"This problem has many different names, some of which are not printable"
"Of course, it's not immune to someone sticking a spade through the wire"
"Real things are not imaginary, by definition."
"When he's not busy teaching circuits or cashing his checks..." [Re: Paul Horowitz]
"If you drop one of these symbols, it's instant death for what you're trying to prove."
"Window: not to be confused with the type of thing Bill Gates would sell you."
"This is for the personal gratification of seeing flashing lights."
"Next time each of you will spend five minutes trying to explain your project so the rest of the class can laugh at -- I mean..."
"This isn't digital except in the sense that it involves fingers."

Russ Giannetta -- Physics 361

"The happy life is determined by maximum entropy."
"Bose statistics are kind of like a 60's hippy thing where everyone can jump into the commune. Fermions are like Republicans where everyone gets their own 2000 square foot apartment."
- "So would penguins stay warmer if they were all white?" - Ricardo Rojas
- "I guess so...I'm sure there's some sexual reason for that that's not included in our calculations." - Russ Giannetta
[conversation about blackbody radiation and its effects on penguins in Antarctica]

Scott Willenbrock -- Physics 386/387

"Jack! I remember you! Weren't you in my class last semester or something?" [during Physics 387]
"What's a factor of 2 between friends?"

Dave Hertzog -- Physics 398ST

"So suppose you're in a collaboration group that's setting out to make the widget that saves the world"
"Maggie, show us a surprise so that I don't have to go home and drink."

Mike Stone -- Physics 498MMA, 498MMB

"If you find a book that's impedance matched to you"
"Action principle <-- DEEP!" [written on board]
"I'm going to do a bit of cosmetic algebra..."
"So you can imagine that you're playing a video game with a starship that goes off one side and comes back on the other. That's periodic boundary conditions."
"If I make you do these things, for awhile you'll scream in pain, but it'll be good for you."
"Ah yes, 'non-trivial'...this is like a legal document."
"It's not entirely trivial to plug this in because you can screw up."
"I did this in less than a page, not knowing what the answer is, so it's do-able, and you'll feel very virtuous afterwards."
"This equation is an intelligent beast."
"I'm not supposed to be good at English."
"When we did the bendy-bar business..."
"I always do my dx's naked and my dk's with 2pi"
"When something's painful, it also means it's interesting."
"Let's pick an equation and study it to death for awhile."
"I was walking down Green Street and saw this young couple holding hands. The girl was carrying a suitcase, and it was obvious that she had come to visit the boy. They were walking towards me and gazing into each other's eyes, and I caught a fraction of their conversation as they walked by: the boy was saying 'So, you set h_bar = c = 1.' It made me wonder what kind of relationship they had."
"If you've never seen this, go play in a bathtub until you do."
"This puts a unit blob of heat into the system."
"You might start by assuming an infinitely long cylindrical plane."
"Mass, length...well they're the same, aren't they?"
"You know that when I say something's obvious, it's not obvious."
"There's a certain amount of expiation of sins on my part for this problem...so I feel virtuous now that I've actually done the calculation."
"I'll draw a little frog here...Hopf. Hopf. Hopf."
"Let me hide the fact that we're dividing by zero."
"This Neumann gets around a lot."
"That's not my real homepage; you have to go to the bottom of the physics propaganda"
"If you're using Windows, god help you."
"There are actual English words between the equations, and hopefully they're spelled right."
"They're sitting there really aching to be integrated over."
"You'll learn to love it, and I'll make you love it."
"These are supposed to be educational experiences, not me discovering that you're idiots."
"...bright Stone Age guy who knows calculus"
"After you've lived with these things for so many years, they're so obvious that it becomes impossible to explain them."
"The fact that it is deep is because it takes some time to prove."
"It's called Stokes theorem because it was written by Lord Kelvin."
"My friend had gone off somewhere to birth a cow...I ended up standing in a phone booth talking to him -- we didn't have a phone at home back in those days -- and I did this stupid integral in my head..."
"Take your cat and squish it down and try to comb it...you'll get a bald spot or a swirly bit."
"You can't comb a hairy sphere."
"A left-hand-side American car goes out of the screen, and a right-hand-side British car comes into the screen."
"I remember that he didn't want to graduate and that he became inverted."
"If you 'd' it twice, you die."
"Let me make a map that acts like an octopus."
"If Frobenius knew how useful this stuff would be, he would be very unhappy. Math should be a pure thing."
"Now we do the magic"
"It blew my mind...I've never quite recovered." [re: Schur's Lemma]
"It's a set of equations that I think only their mother would love."
"Let's do this one in a perverse parameterization"
"An ideal circle living in the Platonic world where circles live..."
"People who talk about these kinds of things [multivalued functions] should be taken outside and shot."
"The graders keep me honest -- they come to me with questions, and they tell me if they can't understand the homework problems, you certainly can't be expected to understand them. I tell them don't be silly, go away and work on it."
"I'm afraid I'm slightly schizophrenic."
"Be alert! No, be aloof -- the country's got enough lerts."
"I'm not very good at thinking about these things in front of you."
"It has a suck-in property"
"There was one hard problem, so I made it optional. That means only the graders have to do it."
"I'm writing zeta's, not xi's. The single wiggle one is a Greek z; the double wiggle one is a Greek x."
"This [natural boundaries] violates your notion of free will."
"We don't write the 2*pi*i. That's for wimps."
"I want to tell you something about the exam so that I don't end up giving out a bunch of zeros."

Donald Ginsberg

"Give me a truck, give me a shotgun / Give me a girlfriend by my side" [PRL '99]
"Why is it that all famous scientists have screwed up love lives?"

Nigel Goldenfeld

"So you might ask, what's the connection between physics and finance? Well, money is quantized..."
"Hello, I'm Nigel Goldenfeld, and I'm from the REAL Cambridge."

Laura Greene

"Quantum mechanics is kind of like a religion."
"I know you all hate me, so feel free to write whatever you want on your ICES forms. I've got tenure."

Taekjip Ha

"...so we know we have an intermediate state. We call this the zombie state because it's half-alive, half-dead."
"If you ever have any questions about bio-shit, just come ask me."

Alfred Hubler

"Good morning ladies and gentlemen; thank you for coming back."
"Physics 420? No? WANT TO TRY???"
"High voltage... Dangerous chemicals... COME SEE!!!"

Paul Kwiat

"Go ahead, touch my knob to see how sensitive it is." (got this one from Daryl & Co.)
"Now people half my age are legal." (36th birthday)

Tony Liss

"Hilbert space, named after the famous mathematician Dr. Space."

Munir Nayfeh

"You know brush? Brush for oven? You bring next time."
"Silicon nanoparticles are HOT!! Not because they are sexy..."
"Everyone knows that dyes are carcinogenic. But silicon is completely biologically compatible. When you go to the beach people don't warn you to not breathe in the sand. And, as we well know, people have used silicon in implants...not small quantities!"
"Looking at you is better than having cake!" [Nayfeh to Anne, coffee hour woman)]

Kevin Pitts

"Now that is one big-ass dipole magnet."
"Here are the 2 most important pieces of equipment in the control room: the refrigerator and the coffee maker. More advanced experiments have an espresso machine."

Mats Selen

"Then I thought I'd title my talk `Everything You Need to Know About Three Body Interactions' but I thought that people would think that I'm some kind of pervert and I'd get arrested."

Jon Thaler

"Thermodynamics is like going to Las Vegas."

Mike Weissman

"No no no, cows are spherical."

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