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“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”
lol
These are all from Prof Ramamurti Shankar of Yale, maybe the funniest scientist I have ever heard:
There's more of them here: http://pantheon.yale.edu/~rshankar/shankarquotes.doc
You can watch him lecture here: http://oyc.yale.edu/physics/fundamen...tent/downloads
"There's not that much material that I can teach you, actually. I can write all the physics equations in one corner of the blackboard, and then all you need is an IQ of 5000 and you're set!"
"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."
"This is a very important day. You can forget your birthday, forget anniversaries, but you need to remember this day, because this is the day that you will learn Newton's Laws"
"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"
"See, one reason why the Americans fought the British is because they couldn't stand their units. You know they have something called a slug? I mean, what is a slug? I don't know, and I'm proud of it!"
"Say you're in an elevator. I could do two things to you and you wouldn't know the difference. I could pull the elevator up with a rope and you'd begin to feel heavy. Or, I could replace the planet beneath you with a bigger planet and you'd feel heavy. Now most likely I'll do the first one. But you can't tell the difference!"
"People think that when you're weightless, you've escaped the pull of gravity. But when the elevator that you're in slams into the floor, then you'll know that you were wrong."
"Has everyone in here seen an integral? Good. Because I didn't have a backup plan"
"I was teaching a class over the summer, and a student began to get very agitated when I did partial derivatives. He was saying that those weren't a prerequisite for the class, so I shouldn't be teaching them. So I said to him 'you know, the thing about coming to class is- you actually might learn something!'"
"You could write a law and think it's correct, and then you'd publish a bunch of papers, and eventually you'd realize that your parents are the only ones reading them and then you'd know that you were wrong. Now, on the other hand, if your friends are reading your papers, your enemies are reading your papers, and then your enemies are stealing what you've written in your papers, then you'll know that your law is correct"
"I've gotta be nice to my students, because one day one of you could be my physician. I could be lying flat on my back, and you could be coming up to me with a mask on and a knife in your hand. I'd say 'What about my anesthesia?' and you'd say 'What about that formula sheet you promised me?', so that's why I try to treat you guys nicely"
"So Newton said 'I will go invent integral calculus.' After all, he just invented differential calculus the other day, so why shouldn't he?"
"When you're doing problems on the blackboard your intelligence is proportional to your distance from the board, so now I'm at an all time low"
"At the end, I want to make sure that you all understand this. No child will be left behind"
"The question you have to ask yourself is, if your professor drops dead in the middle of his lecture, will you be able to finish deriving the equation he started? If so, then you know you're doing okay"
"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"
"Today we are going to talk about rigid bodies. Like Al Gore."
"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"
"If you look at all the doors at Yale you will notice that the doorknobs are on the opposite side as the hinges, so you get the most action with the least amount of force. Now if you go to Moronland, the doorknobs are all close to the hinges and you can never get anything accomplished"
“Let’s say a bunch of guys are chasing you and they fire a bunch of bullets at you, and then another group of guys runs towards you from the front and they fire a bunch of bullets at you. Now, by in large, your life’s about to get worse. Now if they were firing sound waves at you, this wouldn’t be the case.”
“Never trust a log plot. And especially never trust a log log plot”
“If you miss class you should talk to someone, because I don’t go straight from the book. If you read the whole book you run the risk of learning something you don’t need to know. And who wants to do that?”
“You can talk to Martians, talk to The Planet of the Apes, tell the apes to gather some gas in a jar, and say ‘Hey apes! When PV=0 then T=-273!’”
“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!!””
“There are some congressmen who have physics degrees, so you can’t bull them. You can come up to them and say ‘Hey Congressmen!’ and throw torques at them, and fluids and relativity, and they’re not gonna care. They’re just gonna laugh in your face”
“All we need to solve this problem is Gauss’s Law and several large hand-waving arguments”
(just before leaving on a 10 day trip)
“See you suckers! I’m going where the sun is shining and it’s 75 degrees all day!!! Bye!”
“No, not strings, strings are chapter 9600 of this course”
“The attraction due to the wires is just one big orgy of cross products”
“There are some things you can always look up, like your social security number or your birthday, but the trig iden ies you gotta know”
“Who knows complex numbers? You don’t know complex numbers? Well how do you do your taxes?”
“In E&M it’s harder because you can’t see or feel magnetic fields, unless you’re a duck. I’m told that when they’re flying north they follow the earth’s magnetic field to the pole. I was quite impressed with the ducks – they don’t even have to solve Maxwell’s equations to follow the field, and yet I get lost in Manhattan!”
“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”
“When you have an i on the bottom you replace it with a negative i on the top. This has been known since Biblical times- an i for an i”
“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”
“I forgot what my life was like before quantum mechanics. I know I was playing in a sandbox and someone was trying to beat me up, but I don’t remember when that was.”
“This is very different from a graduate quantum course which I could teach in my sleep and which you could listen to in your sleep. Here, everyone needs to be awake – this causes some added difficulty”
“Mathematicians are always ahead of physicists, and physicists are always a little bit ahead of engineers, although that difference is not always clear anymore. It’s because it takes so much time for our president to catch up with everything. He says ‘How many barrels of oil will we save by you studying quantum mechanics?’ and then we say ‘Well, zero barrels’ and he gets confused. So either you find this quantum stuff very useful or just use it to scare the out of everyone else”
“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.”
Last edited by baseline bum; 01-23-2010 at 05:52 AM.
“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”
lol
He's funny. My physics instructor last year was a comedian as well, but not nearly this funny. This semester I'm taking an ecology class. On the first day of class someone told the professor we're running out of land to raise cows and will soon be eating ground beef made in vats, and she said, "That is the stupidest thing I've ever heard."
“You can talk to Martians, talk to The Planet of the Apes, tell the apes to gather some gas in a jar, and say ‘Hey apes! When PV=0 then T=-273!’”
I'm using this one at my next dinner party.
I don't know what it is about the field, but I've yet to meet a physics nerd who wasn't hilarious.
“If you miss class you should talk to someone, because I don’t go straight from the book. If you read the whole book you run the risk of learning something you don’t need to know. And who wants to do that?”
Yeah, that one's my favorite one too.“You can talk to Martians, talk to The Planet of the Apes, tell the apes to gather some gas in a jar, and say ‘Hey apes! When PV=0 then T=-273!’”
I'm using this one at my next dinner party.
Probably why Big Bang Theory works so well, and physicists actually like it too.
LOL, Hilarious professor! These are some of the best:
--------
"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."
"The question you have to ask yourself is, if your professor drops dead in the middle of his lecture, will you be able to finish deriving the equation he started? If so, then you know you're doing okay"
“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 Absolute Best One:
“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”
Last edited by Scola; 01-25-2010 at 12:27 AM.
Thanks bb, I needed something to make me smile.
Larry, from NUMB3RS:
Applied Physicists are from Venus and Theoretical Physicists wonder why it rotates the wrong way.
baseline bum, thoughts?
Last edited by spurraider21; 06-04-2014 at 12:59 AM.
thank god I decided to quit Physics as early as in sop re year, tbh
I wonder how funny he still is to his former students that now work at Walmart
Or students who're studying completely different disciplines for graduate degrees...
Great stuff. Those are the best kinds of teachers.
Logarithms...
Didn't realize so many of you enjoyed physics
Physics? I thought this was Cal 1.....If I was a Physics teacher I would say that b^x is the girl you date and e^x is the girl you marry....
Ha!
I had to take a year of physics, I enjoyed good chunk of it. kinetics was simple and high school level stuff. didn't care for E and M, but optics was always really fascinating
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