Winter 2008 Quotes
Condensed Matter with Dr. Trivedi:
I’ll tell you my shortcut: Don’t remember it. - 2/13
Many-Body Physics with Dr. Randeria:
Anyway, I can’t solve all the world’s problems in a quarter. - 1/4
We’re not going to have an Iowa style caucus, where one group goes over here, and another group goes to the other side. - 1/4
Nick: Is there going to be homework this quarter? Randeria: Uh, sure? - 1/4
It’s obviously something very formal because what the hell is imaginary time. - 1/4
Like the Spanish do, let me put an inverted exclamation mark, which I love. They tell you at the beginning of the sentence, so you know right away, otherwise you get to the end of the sentence and go hmm. - 1/4
What is the algorithm? One algorithm could be ask Gokul. But that might not be very good. He might not be around. - 1/7
Unfortunately, I don’t think one quarter of many-body physics will have prepared you for what happened there. - 1/14
The Russians live in the complex plane. If you read Landau and Lipschitz, you know, that’s their natural habitat. - 1/14
z equals 0 is not a good place to check, because z equals zero is not a pole. - 1/14
And you say the hell with theorems in complex analysis. I could write down analytical continuations and you must be wrong. - 1/23
You get these analogous, awful integrals, which I would push away with a large pole if I could have but I have to do it. - 1/28
I can tag this electron. It lives at 191 W Woodruff, and so on. - 1/30
I’ve not checked in Jackson. I’ve not looked in Jackson since I left graduate school, but you’re in graduate school, so you should check. - 1/30
He says, ’I know this has no solution, but being Landau, I’ll just guess the answer.’ - 2/6
For once in my life I’ll put k Boltzmann squared, just to make you happy. - 2/11
Landau is very smart, that’s why he said ’I’m going to let my students work out metals. I’m going to work out Helium-3.’ - 2/11
You should do this only if it’s directly related to your work. Otherwise, this is not bedtime reading. - 2/11
Pauli had a theorem that all theories of superconductivity were wrong. - 2/11
He probably didn’t say as much because Bardeen was a man of very few words, so he probably said ’Wait’. - 2/11
I don’t know how many p’s in suppressed, I’ll let you decide. - 2/11
This is longer than the lifetime of the universe. Certainly longer than the lifetime of any graduate student who would be willing to measure it. - 2/11
This is going to be hard for me to draw, because it requires me to draw lots of parallel lines, which is never an easy task. - 2/13
You’re asking me, could I have waved my hand and gotten into a mess? The answer is always yes. - 2/13
This is a general statement of life. If you wave your hands, you can get it wrong. It depends on who YOU are. - 2/13
No one uses diagrams when you don’t know where you’re going. Diagrams are used when you know where you are going and want to get there quickly. - 2/13
You cannot put more than 1 fermion in a given state. I’ve tried to put 1023. Pauli would go pa-choo (exploding sound). - 2/13
I think I have a negative sign error, and probably that negative sign error will plague me for the rest of my life, but I’ll let you deal with it. - 2/15
I’m going to correct this on the fly and see if it works. We’ll see. If it doesn’t work it’s homework. - 2/15
This also I got wrong. Boy, if this was an exam, I would have failed. - 2/15
What we have to do is check, and this is fun stuff, because it’s extremely boring. - 2/15
Mathematica could probably do it. Or any Russian. Just ask a Russian friend. - 2/18
Something the theorists like. Less data allows you to make progress. - 2/18
One of the most important papers in this is John Wilkins’ Ph.D. thesis. Scalapino, Wilkins and Schrieffer. That tells you how old this is. - 2/18
There could be hundreds of reasons why you could get a stupid result like zero resistivity. - 2/18
Since we majored in math, not miracles, to paraphrase an eminent contemporary of ours, we will supplement the miracle with the math. - 2/18
But, since you’re not asking that question, I’m not happy to answer it. - 2/20
The relevant journals may have been dumped into a harbor, because who wants to see Red Propaganda? - 2/20
What you need is a picture like this. This picture I won’t try to draw. It will challenge me. - 2/20
It’s what all good people should do. Don’t create first and destroy at the end, because then you’re left with nothing. If you destroy first and create at the end, then you’ve done something good. - 2/27
Since I'm done with classes now (woo-hoo!!), I might start posting fun things said in the lab (invariably by Donghun). Or it might mean that after this weekend, I'll abandon my livejournal forever. We'll see.