What to do on rainy days
For your amusement, I present a collection of quotes from Ramamurti Shankar, professor of physics at Yale University.
"You can add vectors, multiply a vector by a number, flip vectors - the fun is just endless."
"In this first problem, there is a car driving along a cliff, and the car just jumps off. This person has decided to end it all. Now, we want to know at what time the car hits the ground. This is the beauty of physics, because if this were a psychology class we'd want to know why the person was jumping, but we are simply concerned with how long it takes."
"That's the beauty of teaching - for 1 hour of the day you don't feel like a complete idiot because you realize that there are many people worse off than you."
"Has everyone in here seen an integral? Good. Because I didn't have a backup plan."
"When you draw a box around something, you know it's time to get serious."
"So Newton said 'I will go invent integral calculus.' After all, he just invented differential calculus the other day, so why shouldn't he?"
"Many people think that, since they're going to be doctors or something, they're never going to need to know about relativity. Well what if one of your patients starts running away from you at the speed of light? Then you really need to know this."
"If we throw a cat up in the air it will be moving its arms and legs all around, and that's not rigid. We want a rigid body, like a dead cat."
“The whole point of the War of Independence was so that we don’t have to use BTUs anymore. So why are we still doing it??”
“If you put your hand on a hot plate, you should say ‘Wow, these molecules are fast!’. That’s what I want you to say from now on, not ‘Ouch!'"
“All we need to solve this problem is Gauss’s Law and several large hand-waving arguments."
“If you are a complete moron, you will take your wire all the way, but as the limit of moron is infinite, you will have wasted all your wire on a loop of zero area."
“There are some things you can always look up, like your social security number or your birthday, but the trig identities you gotta know."
“I know most days after 50 minutes you guys go into little convulsions and send me not so subtle hints that time is up - but not this day."
“Say you are at the bottom of this pool of water. I don’t know how you got there - maybe you missed a loan payment or something."
“The act of observing an electron is very traumatic for that electron. Right now I’m getting hit by millions of photons. I’m taking it like a man. But for the electron, this is not the same."
“You might turn down your light source, but there will still be photons carrying energy that are hitting the particle. You can take a gun and weaken it so that it only shoots a few bullets a day, but if you get hit by one, you’re still dead."
“You can only have a state of definite momentum if you have e to the i dog x over h bar, where you have momentum equal to dog."
“Say you are a prisoner in a jail. If you are a quantum prisoner, your wavelength will be changing. So if you are a prisoner this is what I recommend to you - go back and forth banging into each wall, because there is a slight probability that if you keep doing this, you will find yourself outside of the jail. So even if you are sentenced for 100 lifetimes, it’s still worth a try."
And, for health-conscious individuals in the Connecticut area...
"You can add vectors, multiply a vector by a number, flip vectors - the fun is just endless."
"In this first problem, there is a car driving along a cliff, and the car just jumps off. This person has decided to end it all. Now, we want to know at what time the car hits the ground. This is the beauty of physics, because if this were a psychology class we'd want to know why the person was jumping, but we are simply concerned with how long it takes."
"That's the beauty of teaching - for 1 hour of the day you don't feel like a complete idiot because you realize that there are many people worse off than you."
"Has everyone in here seen an integral? Good. Because I didn't have a backup plan."
"When you draw a box around something, you know it's time to get serious."
"So Newton said 'I will go invent integral calculus.' After all, he just invented differential calculus the other day, so why shouldn't he?"
"Many people think that, since they're going to be doctors or something, they're never going to need to know about relativity. Well what if one of your patients starts running away from you at the speed of light? Then you really need to know this."
"If we throw a cat up in the air it will be moving its arms and legs all around, and that's not rigid. We want a rigid body, like a dead cat."
“The whole point of the War of Independence was so that we don’t have to use BTUs anymore. So why are we still doing it??”
“If you put your hand on a hot plate, you should say ‘Wow, these molecules are fast!’. That’s what I want you to say from now on, not ‘Ouch!'"
“All we need to solve this problem is Gauss’s Law and several large hand-waving arguments."
“If you are a complete moron, you will take your wire all the way, but as the limit of moron is infinite, you will have wasted all your wire on a loop of zero area."
“There are some things you can always look up, like your social security number or your birthday, but the trig identities you gotta know."
“I know most days after 50 minutes you guys go into little convulsions and send me not so subtle hints that time is up - but not this day."
“Say you are at the bottom of this pool of water. I don’t know how you got there - maybe you missed a loan payment or something."
“The act of observing an electron is very traumatic for that electron. Right now I’m getting hit by millions of photons. I’m taking it like a man. But for the electron, this is not the same."
“You might turn down your light source, but there will still be photons carrying energy that are hitting the particle. You can take a gun and weaken it so that it only shoots a few bullets a day, but if you get hit by one, you’re still dead."
“You can only have a state of definite momentum if you have e to the i dog x over h bar, where you have momentum equal to dog."
“Say you are a prisoner in a jail. If you are a quantum prisoner, your wavelength will be changing. So if you are a prisoner this is what I recommend to you - go back and forth banging into each wall, because there is a slight probability that if you keep doing this, you will find yourself outside of the jail. So even if you are sentenced for 100 lifetimes, it’s still worth a try."
And, for health-conscious individuals in the Connecticut area...