QUOTES

Quotable Quotes  by Physics Professor 

Here is a collection of quotations by Science professor and science students. I picked up these quotes from various websites of physics professor and student. It is simply a collection, I promise I won't use these for another purpose. So if I don't attribute the quotes to anyone, they might not complain about it.

It's clear when you think about it...and have enough to drink.


This is when we could make real money.  Not just science money, but real money.


There really is a difference between a person being 5'6" tall and living 70 years, and a person being 70 light years tall and living 5.6 femtoseconds.  Time and space really are asymmetric.


What's a light second? Same as a second with a third fewer calories.


If I teach faster than the speed of light, no information is conveyed.


Let's do rotations first, and everything we learn about rotations, translate.


I bet you're wondering where I'm going with this.  Well, so am I.


This turns out to be easy, but really more complicated.


Suppose for a moment God whispers in your ear in the dark of night the form of the Lagrangian. This is how most particle physicists do field theory.


We can add this because it doesn't matter, but if it did matter, we couldn't.


I think I managed to lose half the class; for those of you I didn't lose, let me repeat it.


If you can read, you can finish the homework. I'll assume you are like the rest of Americans, and can't read.


So I'm transferring my private energy to the rubber band.


That lubricates the surface, sending Tonya to go into her spins.


And this tells you what those little vibrators are up to.


This is a very rich topic, so if you really like algebra, you should go into plasma physics.


Physicists define interesting problems as the ones they can do.  So, a complicated dynamics problem is, by definition, uninteresting.


This, of course, is only useful for scattering AM radio waves off a charged elephant.


This (scattering light off a sphere) is the experimentor's way of taking a Fourier Transform. Theorists, of course, know how to take a Fourier Transform.


You don't actually prove this, but there are ways to motivate it.


Maybe I'll invite you not to think about it too much.


Student: You lost your twiddle. 
Prof: Oh! I need that!



You didn't think I could confuse you about that, did you?


If you close your eyes and squint at it....wait, don't close your eyes, just squint.


One good way to learn about things is to throw things at it.


Where's my nothing? It doesn't contribute much, but I guess I better put it in there.


Photons don't lie.


Now rotate your head forty-five degrees, or have a stiff drink.


These are great things to study if you are re-doing a bathroom.


By thinking of God as a very large photon, you preserve free-will.


Student: My gut says "no" but I couldn't tell you why. 
Professor: Your gut knows physics.
 
Student: The rest of me doesn't.
 
Professor: If you didn't say it, I was going to.



I've always wanted to institute a reign of terror.


In the American spirit, you can't get too large.


This amplitude is technically known as itty-bitty.


That's probably enough to give you a headache...anytime I can help.


Black holes have several reasons for being interesting; one being that black holes are way cool objects.


Let's leave the simple two parameter description of black holes and move into a realm where we can actually dectect them, which means it's back to dirty, nasty astrophysics.


You can do the most general case if you are into algebraic masochism.


At least you can see it written down unclearly rather than just hearing it orally unclearly.


The midterm will cover everything before chapter one.


It's not as bad as using "ain't" in literature I suppose.


As a Douglas Adams fan, I'm glad that the number 42 made it into astrophysics somewhere.


It's an easy first step. Then, well, a cliff.


There's a minus sign here because of Ben Franklin.


I think we can tell that Barb has decoupled from the rest of the class.


These are nasty to model, so theoreists do what people have done for years...they ignore them.


Sometimes doing things wrong can work out well...though, not usually.


This is where you run into trouble, or this is where the physics becomes full and rich, whichever you want to write in your grant proposal.


I can't do this with my cone head on; I can't hear myself in there.


I do most of my best thinking in the horizontal position.


Electrons are smart. When they realize that they can do it, they will do it, unlike students and faculty.


We are now going off to theory-ville.


This is the Malmquist bias. It's named that because, like so many things in astronomy, it disguises what it really is.


It's always good to have neat names for things. That way you can try and get more funding.


That's when you run into problems..er...rather you run into interesting phenomena.


This has driven people to either drink or M-theory.


What could produce this combination of conditions? Neutron stars, of course, because they can do anything.


Watching gamma-ray burst theorists over the years has been like watching 6-year-olds play soccer. There's no adherence to positions, just a clump of children following the ball.


If you've seen one gamma-ray burst, you've seen one gamma-ray burst.


Whenever you have a simple, rational fraction, you should think, "Whoa! There's something deep here."


Student: [After hearing that the professor will be having oral surgery between the last class and the final.] So, will you be in a better mood before you grade the exams? 
Professor: The real question is, will I be in a better mood when I write the exam.



That's what I'd like to have you believe without asking me how it works.


Einstein said that this was his greatest blunder...I wish I could make a blunder like that.  [About the Cosmological Constant]


Equals signs do not go above the fraction line, nor below the fraction line. They go exactly right smack in the middle.

Memorization is good for the soul.

Learning is painful. So what else is new in the world? You have to learn this damn stuff sometime.

Go to any hardware store, and ask them for a piece of wood negative two feet long.

Did you ever read Hercule Poiroit? He talks about using the "little grey cells." Use them. They come in handy for this course.

Questions? Comments? Griefs? Concerns? Complaints? Kudos? Pats-on-the-Back?

I want to see a show of hands. I want you to raise your hands not to tell me the answer, or because you know the answer, but because you have a gut feeling that you *think* you have the answer.

Think about it for ten minutes, and it's just, I-hat.

Notice on this clam diagram that the intake and excretion tube labeling are reversed? This is a literal way of saying, Eat s--- and die!

Your .plan file is way the hell too long.

When you have a monkey sealed up in a wooden crate, and the only hole in the crate is a pinhole, will you see the monkey? No. But the eye of the monkey will be staring at YOU! [An analogy for something in quantum mechanics, I think.]

Lab begins at 8:30, not 8:31, not 8:34 AND NOT 8:33!!!!!!

There once was a farmer, who sold his mule to another farmer. The mule didn't want to move, so, the farmer called the other farmer up. The other farmer came over, got a 2x4 out, and WHAM! whacked the mule over the head with the 2x4. Then the mule started to go to work. 'In order for the mule to work,' the farmer said, 'you must get its attention first.'

You are not here to learn chemistry. You are here to learn how to study.

I'm going to explain this to you in such a way so as you may understand.

Do you follow that? You follow that? You follow that?

I would point to a periodic table, but we don't have a periodic table. We just have Jesus. [V.U. is a Catholic university, and so most classrooms have a crucifix in them.]

One way to find the area under a curve is to get a sheet of paper of the same type that your test (or whatever) was printed on, a scale, and a pair of scissors. Cut out the curve for which you need the area and a square of known area from the blank piece of paper. Weigh the square, then weigh the curve. Set up a proportion to solve for the area under the curve. [I heard this was taught in a lab once.]

Equations are living things.

In true Goldylocks-ian fashion . . .

You let me lead you down the primrose path again. [Said after we would watch the prof derive something that had some kind of mistake in it, but not pick up on the mistake.]

Hi. I'm a professional astronomer. But that doesn't get me a beer at a hog rally. That's why I carry this. *holds up Harley Davidson (owners?) card* [Said in credit card commercial style.]

It's a good thing I don't have to do this anymore. I don't think I could. [response to reading over my PhD qualifier exam]

Electrons are just purple hazes with green racing stripes.

A sandwich is just a sandwich, but a Bromwich is an inverse Laplace transform.

Critters are, as critters transform.

Let's write down who shot Sam.

What's a minus sign between friends?

The author didn't want to blow your little minds with this, so he didn't put it in. But you don't have little minds, you're my students, so I'm going to cover it.

You're not idiots! You may be slow, but you're not idiots.

That just goes to show that you guys are good. I can make mistakes, but you're not allowed to.

A thing of beauty and a joy forever.

This should be enough work to keep you off the streets and out of the pool halls.

If you want to really get rid of an enemy, all you have to do is renormalize his wave function to zero over all space and time. Then, not only does he not exist now, but he never *did* exist!

What is murder but retroactive abortion?

Meddle not with dragons, for you are crunchy and good with ketchup.

I mean well, but so did Hitler.

This works every time, provided you're lucky.

That being the case, we're all set to conquer the universe.

Physicists like to pretend they're mathematicians when they're not doing anything else.

The goal of physicists is to find a use for every branch of mathematics. The goal of mathematicians is to invent a new field of mathematics that has absolutely no practical use.

What the engineers think is useful, is good. What the mathematicians think is useful, is for the engineers.

If you were an engineer and just looked at equations, man, you'd be dead. You wouldn't last 2 seconds.

You can do this integral [x^3/(e^x - 1)] with a contour integral and you get pi^4 / 15. The author says you have to do it numerically. He must be out of his ever-loving mind if he thinks you're going to get pi^4 / 15 by numerical integration. Suuuuurrrre you will! Good luck, buddy!

Numerical integration be damned! [Actually related to the above, but it's good enough to stand on its own.]
Thermodynamics is an experimental science. Statistical mechanics isn't. I can have a griffon flying around the room if I want. [Obviously said in a stat.mech. class.]

Here he's trying to take the derivative of a function with respect to a vector. You can't do that. The French may be good, but they're not *that* good.

The units cancel out no matter what. I mean, if the top is measured in kumquats and the bottom is measured in kumquats, then kumquats cancel kumquats.

Astronomers are just physicists who look up more often than down.

How are we going to do this? Easy, we cheat.

The people in Bosnia have it easy compared to us.

The people in Bosnia and Croatia would kill to get the food we're eating.

If you want a linear fit, just get two data points.

Errrrrrr.... [It's only funny if you were there, but I had to put it in.]

If you put an integral sign in front of Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, then you can really have some fun! [In reference to the changing of Tuesday to a Friday schedule the last week before finals.]

I don't mean to brag, but I am a very good mathematician.

Astronomy is a dyslexic's nightmare.

I call this the astronomer's fit. [Said while showing graphs that fit straight lines to data that could statistically be fit by any number of curves.]

You should eat Bate, Mueller, and White for breakfast. [They were the authors of the textbook for one of the courses.]

Yes? Everyone? Yes? Yes? Yes? I need to see some nodding. Yes? Yes?

I know people at work who can't do a simple Newton's Law F=ma problem, but boy can they write specs!

I'm going to do this with another quick and dirty geometric solution.

Let's vote. Who says yes? Who says no? One yes and one no, and there's 7 people in the class. Now you all have to vote. Everyone has to make a decision. So let's try it again.


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