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.

So I wasn’t completely out to lunch with my previous entry, Hiebert is still rewriting the record books for being the slowest marker on the face of the planet but Drs Dai and Gortel did get their grades onto beartracks today.

I’m a bit choked with my Stat Phys mark =( I guess I had pretty high expectations of myself after pulling out a 106% grade on the midterm and seeing how bad everyone else felt after the final exam. I guess I really did poorly on the “Ice in a Jar” problem, I only managed to do the easy first part and had to leave the bit with V / Vquantum out because I couldn’t remember. That can’t be the sole explanation for loosing so much ground to everyone else in the class so I must have really screwed up another problem that I’m unaware of.

I can’t really complain about missing a 4.0 from Complex calculus because my complete lack of interest in the teaching style and content did hinder my ability to show up for class on time and pay attention once there. I mean, I can evaluate any integral the guy wants to throw at me but when it comes down to stupid tricks and proofs I’m just a few steps behind. I certainly hope that the USRI feedback will step things up for future EnPhys. The other kids in the class seemed to be content with the garbage but I think that covering some real course content would have been a good idea.

I knew that the ridiculously high marks by everyone else in the class weren’t to my advantage. 1.5 marks off on the midterm, a sprinkling of half mark-deductions on homeworks and a single sign error on the final exam could all legitimately add up to an A- when the class average is a whopping 85% or higher. I’d like to hear how some of my friends did, if they’ve all got 4.0 and 4.3 then I’ll be pretty sad.

High class averages (MATH311) are certainly not my style of education but stinking hard courses (PHYS311) aren’t reaping me great grades either. I guess I’m best suited to trivial material (EE280 and EE338) with tricky exams, I certainly collected the trophies there!.

So, It’s three weeks since I wrote my optics test and I still don’t have a mark… Guess my emotion, you’re likely correct.

I’m also not completely happy with Gortel and Dai for not getting those marks done but I’ll admit Gortel had a big class where almost everyone wrote 2 full books. What’s going on up there in Edmonton? I mean I leave for a week and no-one in that city can manage to get any work done?