Quotes from PHYS 311 Statistical Physics Fall Semester 2006

• We are always interested in things that are of no interest.
• There is one plus a little bit, but now that little bit is really huge. (Why e^x doesn’t equal 1+x at large x)
• It’s difficult to visualize a billion dollars, but we hear about it all the time.
• If you think you life is a mess, just wait… unless a mess is your normal equilibrium state.
• The fact that we don’t understand 90% of quantum mechanics doesn’t really bother us because we have the means to calculate it anyways.
• My cat and I have 3 legs on average. Now, what have we learned about my cat or me? (noting that the average of the BE & FD distributions (Boltzmann distribution) is pretty much useless)
• Three is really close to two pi. We’re talking orders of magnitude!
• That’s the philosophy of it. Now let’s try to calculate it…. now we have a problem.
• Red eyes are not black bodies.
• If you ask a kid on the street if energy is continuous or quantized he will say “quantized, sir”.
• Let’s assume the cow is spherical and discuss the properties of the cow.
• I will be hiding some things under the rug to get Bose Einstein condensation…
• Well, “now” really means “for the last ten years”.
• We are in the world that we are in, so our mind has learned to think about the world in terms of things of our world – that is, waves and particles.