Quotes from School

Here are some amusing quotes I've gathered over the years I've spent in academia. Most come from professors and students in classes relating to my area of concentration, as well as quotes taken from conversations and colloquia. Some are more humorous than others, but all of these statements were actually said or written. These are kept anonymous so no one gets upset. If you were ever in the same department as me, see if you can identify the sources of any of these!

"What'd you use, the phonebook?" (after E&M students couldn't find an integral formula needed on an assignment)

"Let's line up our ducks before we start shooting them."

"What do you guys do when you get stuck on a physics problem? Put it away and work on your English?"

Teacher Writes on Blackboard: "The Method of Guessing"
Student: "What! There's a method???????"
Teacher: "Yeah, there's even a proof!"

"Is there a lab for this class?" (asked at an undergrad curriculum committee meeting while discussing a course on extraterrestrial intelligence)

"Your story of your experiences with Jackson remind me of the story of how good it feels when you stop hitting yourself over the head."

"Where's my medicine?" (upon making yet another transcription error)

"It'll be your worst nightmare."

"I got stopped for going the wrong way in the CAR PARK!"

"Eye of newt." (muttered upon writing I of nu on the board in modern physics)

"It was a good model of the atom. If it wasn't, you never would have heard of Bohr."

"You can think of it as a semi truck barrelling into a crowd of students. The truck is unimpeded, and the students scatter."

"I was wondering when you were going to ask me what a spurion was!"

"Put this with the numbers you memorize, like your girlfriend's number."

"Holy ceiling fans, Batman!" (from a professor's lecture notes.)

"It makes no sense to have any prerequesites for this course."

"Dear John, I love starting letters that way."

"You are CRAZY!" (overheard lecture)

"Hello, puppy." (after a stray beagle puppy wandered into class and hopped up on the professor's leg)

"It doesn't work. It doesn't work. It doesn't work." (referring to astrology)

"How many people think this sucks like a Hoover?"

"Omarr did slightly above random." (results of a poll on an astrologer's accuracy of predicting the outcomes of the students' day in introductory astronomy)

"An hour ago, I got married to the woman sitting back there." (A small prize will be given to anyone who can actually identify the person who said this.)

"As a general rule, stars greater than 10 solar masses do not have PMS." (a lecture on the pre-main sequence evolution of stars)

"He is bringing a GIRL with him?"

"You have several names, too. You just don't know them all."

"Welcome to the department of psychics and astrology!"

"If you have tickets to `Star Wars', then you may leave whenever you want." (Colloquium speaker on the day that `Star Wars' was re-released)

"I've never been in a room with 10,000 flying ping-pong balls. Who knows, maybe it would be fun!"

"Where's the pizza?"

"I can't believe I just wrote R2D2."

"It would take sadist to put that on exam!"

"Where is the other half of the class?"

Student's Exam: "Then a miracle happens."
Teacher's Response: "Yeah, you get 15 points." (The problem was worth 25 points.)

"My family is not even on this continent." (In response to being asked if the family was coming for Thanksgiving.)

"Our makeup lecture will be at 5:00 p.m. on Friday, February 14" (Yes, we really had a lecture then. The instructor had been called to jury duty.)

"Are there any questions or comments? Does anyone want to voice any opinions or political statements?"

Student: "Do we get points on the final for writing our name?"
Teacher: "No, I think we've tested that one enough."

"I met my wife in judo class. She threw me."

"Now folks, positively charged ions are called `cat ions' (pronouncing it out). They're not `cashuns'. They're `cat ions' as in `cats'! I don't ever want to hear you pronouncing them as `cashuns'!" (Referring obviously to cations)

"You need to go home!"

Student: "Gee, chemistry's got a lot of labs."
Advisor: "Yeah, that's kinda the point."

"The author is an astrology professor."

"What movie did we just see? `Sling Blade' or something?" (This didn't come from class, but it happened after a showing of "Blade Runner" at a local theater. I loved it so much, I had to include it!)

"I'm as lost as last year's easter egg."

"This instruction manual actually uses the word `whilst'."

"This weiner isn't going in."

"You you go wowie for Howie?"

"Nick? His first name is Nick? I was so sure his first name was Nigel!"

"Them's some thirsty physicists!" (Reaction to a student newspaper article in which students were polled about the contents of the silo beside the physics building. One student thought it was a water storage tank,)

"Fluons are the particles that cause flu!"

"We have to go up to the observatory and watch a pencil burn!"

"This tells me . . . Well, actually it tells my advisor and then he tells me ..."

"Those #$&% government people are trying to look in on me again! :)" (A memo to me after I kept forgetting to reset the display on an account I was using remotely.)

"Ma'am, did you mean to hit the car?"

"Watching those two was like watching matter and antimatter come together."

"You know, astronomy in Vegas really sucks."

"Have you ever made Jello?"

"You could tune a bagpipe to her."

"Here's a speech that's guaranteed not to put Dr. Farley to sleep!"

"Freeway just ate a VLA proposal!"

"Have you been abducted by aliens? If so, we want to talk to you." (from a flyer outside a convenience store in Nevada. Guess what folks, some of the phone number tabs at the bottom were taken!)

Person in Truck: "Hello there! Are you guys here to see the UFO?"
Us: "No, we were here last night to do some stargazing."
Person in Truck: "Oh. Well, we're from Idaho. This is our second trip here. We've seen the UFO."

"Mmmm ... e-mail"

"Grrrr...Okay, I'll be there in a minute."

"The v-squared grows faster than the m!"

"Sounds like SUMO is gonna have a weight problem."

"Abandon hope, all ye who program here."

"It's the end of another thrilling day here at Goddard Space Flight Center."

"What! You broke MINT?! Oh god, I need fresh air."

"Hey, if it runs through CHECKER, you might as well start writing your paper now."

"Hey, you're project's done! Now where's your map?"

"These hackers are TELNETTING in! Even worse, they're using a mainframe!"

"Dear Mr. Hacker. Please learn how to hack!"

"Dear Coke Man. Please fix the dollar bill changer on the machine. I'm having trouble coming up with the change to buy $1.00 cokes. If you do not fix it soon, I may have to resort to that `other' drink." (from a note on the Coke machine)

"Dear Coke Man. Sigh, you have failed me again." (Seen several weeks later.)

"You get an A." (from colloquium)

"It could be pink elephants jumping up and down on the disk." (from colloquium)

"BUGS: Systematic error estimates are still mostly meaningless and in any case they are output in a format such that there is only one person on this Earth who knows what they mean." (ftools helpfile for pcabackest task).

"Questions? Comments? Rude remarks?"

"I'm an ASTRONOMER, not a PHYSICIST!!!!!!! If you want an explanation, we have a huge physics department over there."

"Ladies, I have not actually done this problem, but I can assure you that it is entirely doable and it gives you the correct answer."

"Schrodinger equations fall into one of three types: those that cannot be solved at all, those that can only be solved numerically, and the hydrogen atom."

"You'll notice that the authors alternate between f and i for final and initial, 1 and 2 for states 1 and 2, and u and l for upper and lower. Now, if that d stands for denture, I suppose u and l would make sense."

"You see, he likes girls. Well, at least he used to. He might have outgrown that by now."

"It's now the 7th inning stretch so it's time for a story."

"One should integrate this to infinity. In practice, infinity is five."

"I get paid to be bored."

"Don't forget stimulated emission."

"Don't forget the Gaunt factor."

"Nice graph." (From colloquium notes regarding a graph with only one tick mark labeled on the x-axis.)

"Aah, the innocence of the young."

"Uh, uh, . . . . I'm sorry, I can't remember your name." (Keep in mind that this instructor already had this student the previous semester!)

"I had a student go to work for the CIA. After he started there, we published a paper in the PASP about the metallicity of Vega. In it, there is a statement saying that the results and opinions presented here are those of the authors and does not reflect the opinion of the CIA."

"One day I arrived and was told that there was a young, attractive woman looking for me. She finally found me, and I found out that she was from the CIA. She said that she knew that I had done a lot of foreign travel, and that if I saw anything suspicious, that I should let them know. And she gave me her business card."

"Did I write this upside down? I'm sorry, I'm upside down. It must be a southern hemisphere thing."

"Don't ever remember this."

"Folks, this isn't rocket science. It's just tedium."

"If you're making a model of a Cepheid, you jolly well want it to pulsate."

"If it were not this way, the sun would only last a few seconds, and we wouldn't be here to talk about it."

"There was this brilliant man from Estonia who got his degree from the University of Moscow during the Czarist era. We often invited him to give colloquia. An hour-and-a-half into one of them, it was obvious that he was nowhere near done, so I took precautions. I had a class conveniently scheduled in that room an hour into the colloquium. He waved them away."

Student: "I've seen question marks under that column in textbooks."
Teacher: "That's my kind of textbook."

"The program worked fine from the main sequence to the turnoff point. However, when it started up the giant branch, it would plot points infinitesimally close together. It ran incredibly slow, slower than the actual sun."

"Jim, you're distracting me. The people who are awake can leave." (One of the students tends to be sleepy during class.)

"I think the diversions are actually more interesting than the material that is supposed to be covered." (Yeah, like the seventh-inning stretch?!)

"Now that he's dead, I can tell you this story."

"If you come across the PASP from 1934, look for `nuclear goblins'."

Student: "It's amazing how much you can learn from rubber balls!"
Teacher: "I want an explanation of that remark when I get back."

"I'll be gone on Thursday."

"Are you writing on the book cover yet?"

"I realize the midterm exam was a little long." (Yeah, the exam ran for two hours and no one finished!!!!)

"The topics that are near and dear to my heart we don't get to spend much time on."

"That was painful." (In reference to a bad colloquium.)

"You guys are looking pretty saturated." (Near the end of a double lecture.)

"I'm telling the truth here - this model may or may not work."

"Does anyone believe these models?"

"What? You don't like French accents?"

"For how many of you is this your first exam in graduate school?" (You could probably figure out why this question got asked.)

"It's written a little differently in my notes, but this looks right."

"The equation knows about the complex plane."

"We're only physicists, and it's good enough for us."

"I did this wrong on an exam once. It was a disaster. It took me hours to solve it. It would have taken far less time if I had rotated my coordinate system by 90 degrees. It was one of the worst days of my life."

"You would be out of your mind not to choose the center of the sphere as the origin."

"The ring is at the center of the sphere. Otherwise, we're dead."

"These problems are supposed to be not too easy." (referring to Jackson homework)

Teacher: "So at what distance do we need to place the image charge?"
Student: "At d prime." (The expected answer was supposed to be some multiple of d.)
Teacher: "You're gonna go far in physics."

"1. e. You suffer a mid-life crisis when you discover that your world is really not 1-dimensional but that your conductors and charges are actually circular discs with a total surface area A."

Teacher: "So, has anyone started studying for the exam yet?"
Student: "I redid all of the homework."
Teacher: "That's pretty brave."

Teacher: "You're sitting there, taking the exam. Are you really going to remember this formula?"
Student: "Well, yeah, I just happened to."

"It's the trivial stuff that will get you."

"Does anyone remember where we are?"

"Jackson problems are boring."

"Physics is not discontinuous!"

"Wow! Complete silence."

Teacher: "How are we going to calculate the energy?"
Student: "With the equation we're not supposed to forget."

"You can do this in a totally brainless way."

"Oh, I forgot to give you a problem concerning dielectric waveguides. Oh well, I'll just put it on the exam."

"You can figure this out for your microwave by making a cheese sandwich."

"Why not just take it all the way out to infinity?"

"Absolutely boring."

"The only reason they teach you this is because it's cute." (Referring to the method of images in electrostatics.)

"That's a bloody quadratic isn't it?"

"I'm just doing what any physicist would do. I'm choosing the path of least resistance."

"You stay away from her! Don't you DARE tell her how much harder this course is going to get!"

"The sun is pretty bright. You won't have much trouble finding it."

"`Scintillation' sounds more professional than `Twinkle Twinkle Little Star'."

"We are now going to review the stuff that Donna hates."

"This is why you learned this stuff three years ago, Donna."

"I need a drink. Unfortunately, there's no scotch around."

"Graduate students were made to suffer."

"Adjust your eyes to my handwriting."

"It's an absolutely spectacular nothing."

"I want to be gone when you get frustrated!"

"We have coordinates xi and eta. That's x and y for non-Greek speakers."

"Don't everyone fall asleep at once."

"No scaring the first year students! I'm already doing that!"

Student: "We don't really need nametags at the open houses, do we?"
Professor: "Yeah, astronomers have a weird, distinctive look to them."

"Half of me will talk to half of you."

"I managed to talk myself into believing I saw it."

Student: "We have way too much fun."
Professor: "Yes, I know. That's why I'm watching you. I want to have fun, too."

Student: "I can't believe I did that. I'm sure I'll never hear the end of this from you."
Professor: "Yes, you will hear the end of this one. We'll find something else to tease you."

"I'm here. Are you there?"

"You're only allowed to fall off the bridge if there's water underneath it."

Student: "I'm tired. My back hurts, and I'm in a foul mood."
Professor: "I'm tired. My back doesn't hurt, and I'M in a foul mood."

Student: "Oh, dear God. It's AGN!"
Professor: "Quick! Erase it before Donna passes out!"

Student: "I can't win with you, can I?"
Professor: "No, you can't."
Student: "I don't know what's worse: you or entropy."
Professor: "You can't win either way."

"You have two choices. You can either be teased or yelled at."

"Why does size matter? I know why - do you?"

"You can be a student instead of an impactor tomorrow."

"Just shove the cake in your mouth, eat it, and shut up!"

"Hi Homeless"

"I only demand instant gratification. I don't actually expect it."

"My colleague and I are off to take the clean room class at Ball Aerospace. (Learning not to clap the blackboard erasers in the clean room.)"

"This quick summary will allow all those who want something quick to worry about, to get started with their worrying."

"I haven't used an outhouse in 28 years. Just because we haven't been there in a long time is not a good enough reason to go back."

"There's three things an astronomer can be certain of in life: death, taxes and gravity."

"Holy begeebers! This star has just called it quits."

"Let's say you and your friend have just graduated with bachelor degrees in physics. You excelled at relativity and gravitation, and your friend never took it. Then, you say, `Let's go study black holes.' Your friend says, `Ok. That sounds like fun.' So you go to a star that is about to collapse into a black hole. You tell your friend that you will watch him from far away while he stands on the star and shines a light at you."

"The first thing a mathematician does when he/she sees Einstein's equations is to put them in a form that no one can recognize. Then, he/she will publish a paper that no one will recognize."

"I think the artist is having fun at this point."

"Plant the black hole bomb next to the house of someone you don't like, and run like hell before the thing explodes. You can watch the destruction from afar."

"If you believe all of this, then I'll try to sell you beachfront property in Nevada."

"In principle, you have an infinite number of equations here which will take you awhile to solve. In practice, one only takes this up to maybe n = 10." (Only awhile?)

"You're probably wondering where I'm going with this."

"You should remember the things that I think are important."

"You should do this exercise in some compiled language. FORTRAN is probably one you might use. I understand J, but no one else does."

"Well, no one has come to me complaining about the computer assignment yet."

"Today is a nice day, so we'll quit here. I don't want to talk anymore."

"Where am I going with this? (Pause) Oh, yes!"

"Hmm. I'm beginning to realize that you can't solve this problem with the information I've given you here. What did you get for the answer?" (nervous laughter from class) "Well, that's the last time I assign a homework problem without doing it myself first."

"I hope I'm not lying too much. That's the problem with the ISM. It's such a mess."

(Phone rings in middle of class) "Would someone get that?" (it stops ringing before anyone can get to it) "Alfven must have called me." (We were discussing Alfven waves in class.)

"Only God knows what happens if it's propagating this way. This is so rich. If you like algebra, you should go in to plasma physics."

"As you can see, even in a static case, introducing magnetic fields makes things messy."

"Ambipolar diffusion. Now, that's a weird name. Where does it come from? It's like many terms in astronomy. Take planetary nebulae. Where did that one come from? And right ascension? They have stories behind them, but they're not worth telling."

"If I had a computer named Fifi, I wouldn't be able to get any work done because it would be so distracting."

"Predictions are much better than postdictions."

"I'm rather disappointed. I've been here twenty years and I've never gotten the toppings I've requested: lemming entrails and komodo dragon."

"Do you want the lights on to take notes, or do you want the lights off so you can sleep?"

(Puts up a picture of the moon) "This is the planet Mars. Normally, it is red, but you can't see it in this picture."

"Astro 100 is an extremely labor-intensive course." (said while continually running back and forth between overhead projectors.)

"Aah, here's a gentleman on the front row willing to volunteer. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you're a gentleman."

"Now, seventeen years ago, most of you were babies. You were small, helpless, noisy, and just being a general pain."

"I have mouths to feed. I have three postdocs and a graduate student. I can hear sucking noises on my grants every month."

"Physics is a bunch of things, all equal to zero."

"Now all that's left to do is an infinite number of integrals. No problem!"

"You're doomed! Have you ever been doomed before?"

"What's a factor of two among friends?"

"How can you ask these questions before I even discuss the topic?"

"No, I don't care that much about it." (when asked if he had a proof of a theorem)

"Life isn't full of completely satisfying things."

"There's no known way to derive it. I don't know why it works. I don't even understand it. It just works."

"It's just something to know. It's not even something you should know."

"I'm not going to do this by example. This is why you didn't learn this in the third grade."

"No real person would ever do this."

"There is some question as to whether that's a realistic model. Almost by definition, it's not."

"When I make a mistake like that, I'm testing you. When you make a mistake like that, you're wrong."

"This is an example of abusing the notation, but not feeling too bad about it."

"Is a square circle the same thing as a unicorn, or is a square circle equal to five?"

"You can do whatever you want to. I just want to make sure what I write on the board is true."

"Let's not deal with this concept of useful. This method is useful to you, because if you don't do it this way, you won't get a good grade."

"Bummer."

"Jackson is good for the soul."

Student: "Does that mean that Schrodinger's Cat is wrong? If the cat is observed to be dead, you could do something to make it alive again?"
Teacher" "Well, you could give it an electric shock."

"Zero, one, infinity. That's the way physicists count, isn't it?"

Teacher: "Have you done this in mechanics?"
Students: "We haven't done it yet."
Teacher: "Well, you'll just have to believe me."

"Under my notation, if you got 8/10, it means that of the ten problems you attempted, you got a reasonable answer for eight. Note that 8/10 is a better score than 8/9 because you attempted more problems. It's like your report cards from elementary school: `Works well with others.'"

"At some point in the semester, I may take you up to his lab so you can see where the experiment was performed. This will be the first time I've taken a graduate class on a field trip. We can also stop by the zoo."

"When you can't do experiments, you have philosophers. It's like those guys over in the philosophy department who give the same exam questions every semester but change the answers."

"This is what I like to call the `creature-under-the-rug model'. Let's say you have a large rug, and a mouse is crawling underneath it. The wave in the rug tells you where the particle, i.e. the mouse, is."

"This has the units of Joule seconds. Now, if you are in nuclear physics, this might be MeV seconds. Of course, the best units are the ones in which h-bar is one."

"An elephant isn't going to diffract around a tree in the woods."

"I'm now going to show you the proof that elephants don't diffract."

"One of my mathematics professors from undergrad knew Wronski. My professor couldn't believe that this determinant got named after him, because he thought it was trivial. My professor referred to him as `Ze great professor Vronski!'"

"I was going to give you a copy of the solutions, but my computer decided to refuse to empty the trash. It's just like a teenager."

"So how do you explain the connection between conservation laws and symmetries to sophomore engineering students? The answer is `you don't'"

"I encourage you to learn more about Lie Algebra. It is eloquent, and it is one of the few math topics I would tell a physics student to learn for its own sake. Another nice thing is that many of the books containing this material aren't very long. You can keep a copy by your bed and read it at night. (Turns back to the board, pauses, turns back to us) Well, maybe not."

"Boy, teaching this class is becoming a real challenge." (said as he was moving a filing cabinet to get some chalk that fell behind it.)

"You should work this out in spherical coordinates once in your life. Then you've earned the right to look it up in a book every time after that."

"The author was my officemate when we were in graduate school at Johns Hopkins. He's also a rabbi, and he's very orthodox. Every day, he would sit in the office and pray. This drove me crazy. So one day, while he was praying, I hid behind the door, and in a slow, deep voice, I said, `Please stop bothering me'. He was mad at me for a long time afterward."

"I have trouble getting Mathematica to abort. It must be pro life."

"Photons are like teenagers. They hang out together. Fermions, on the other hand, are like Trappist monks."

(Instructor picks up a sign on the table that says "Please Wash") "Please wash. I did that last night."

"This is one of those many abstractions that mathematicians have come up with."

"I'll sing the whole song for you if we ever have a party." (Instructor sang a stanza of a song written by a mathematician whose work was relevant to class discussion.)

"Things like minus signs go when your nervous system starts to deteriorate."

"The proof of the pudding is in the eating."

"I'm dying to see the dossier the FBI has on me. I'm positive I was being followed in those days I was helping out Bohm."

"We have to take the derivative of this awful thing, and then we have to subtract that awful thing . . ."

"Are there any other questions I can't answer?"

"For the engineers in here, think of it as adding masses in parallel."

"What happens when c is complex? I don't know. Maybe it forms the basis of warp drive."

"The molecules in the air are travelling along at 600 miles per hour." (ducks to avoid an imaginary molecule passing by)

"Let's pick a particle moving in an e-m field, just to pick something at random" (professor really likes these problems)

"It's not looking good. Maybe a miracle will save us."

Teacher: "How far do I have to back up to find the last point where you were not confused?"
Student: "F = ma"
Teacher: "Are you sure that's far enough?"
(In the middle of the semester!)

"Would you trade a headache for an upset stomach? Well, that's just what we've done here."

"This is called the Lamb Shift. Chemists aren't concerned about this too much. We have other problems."

"The nature of this is mind-boggling, so we'll stop here for today."

"H-psi equals W-psi."

Student: "Wait! Don't erase that! I'm not finished writing it down!"
Professor: "You shouldn't need to see it. This is a straightforward equation, and you know all of the individual pieces."
Student: "Obviously, you haven't graded my exam yet."

"For those of you who arrive early, would you kindly take seats over on this side of the room? I'll be sure to walk over to that side of the board so I can reward you with my presence."

"This is a trivial calculation. However, if you had done this in the 19th century, you would have your name attached to it."

"Wow, this is a really quiet group!"

"I have a demonstration prepared for you." Instructor walks over to apparatus and turns it on. Instructor fiddles with knob, and we hear a loud clunk. Instructor looks up, smiling nervously, "Well, I had a demonstration prepared for you. Looks like we'll have to wait until next week to do that one."

"The one I got is all gooey and full of stuff." (the donut, that is)

"I've been (in this position) for eight years, and it has ruined my life."

"We can't hide anymore. Now, everyone will know we have this crazy guy in our department."

"My last name means `Enlightened One' in Yiddish!"

"These [equations] are your friends. Use them, know them, love them."

"Anything extremely curvy is a circle or an ellipse. Anything only slightly curvy is a straight line."

"One can get the ass of the comet by watching chunks of ejecta decelerate as they leave the impact crater."

"Any idiot can stand here and give you an exam."

"Now if I were teaching a course in orbit dynamics, and my students were in the audience, I would probably tell them that this would be a good final exam question."

"Students are creative. Faculty are boring."

"Do you like to point with photons?"

"Setting values such as h and c equal to one is fine for the kinds of calculations you make when you're in your bathrobe. However, when you come to work, you get dressed."

"I have been here since 1974, longer than all but a few faculty members, and I'm slowly getting rid of them."

"I'm going up to the roof to play."

"I'm going up to the roof to shoot drugs."

"I'm going roller blading on the Beltway."

"I'm going to Florida to count ballots."

"I need drugs. (Turns to secretary.) Do you have any interesting drugs?"

"I'm going to get my tongue pierced."

"Astronomy is just one big proposal."

"The light at the end of the tunnel is a light from an oncoming train."

"The word `color' without the `u' is naked."

"Don't worry, you'll be fed intravenously."

"Prerequesite: an outstanding undergraduate background in physics" (the prerequesite for graduate-level quantum mechanics at the University of Maryland.)

"Are you having trouble with Netscape?"

"Graduate students, if you discover an incredible phenomenon, my advice to you is to give it a catchy name as soon as you find it."

"I'm sorry the students have to witness this." (Overheard at the 1997 October Astrophysics Conference in Maryland in which some astronomers broke into a bad rap about gamma ray bursts)

"So, Donna, I hear you might be a T.A. this spring. . ."

"It is difficult to do that with a statistic of 1."

Student 1: "I can't pronounce his last name! I call him either by his first name or I call nim `my advisor'.
Student 2: "Watch that be the first question at your defense."

"You're not supposed to ask me that. Have some more coke."

Student 1: "Yeah, he was the one who dealt with conservation of everything."
Student 2: "Yeah, even transparency space!"

"This result was like having a pink elephant come charging through this room."

"The colloquium speaker tried to take my coat!"

"I just got out of the first shotgun thesis defense!"

"I almost broke my maser laser!"

"This is some advice for the graduate students in the audience. When I was in graduate school, we always sat in the back row and fell asleep during boring colloquia like this one. Here is a way to do that and still ask a good question. Go to sleep during the talk, and wake up during the applause. Raise your hand for the question and answer session. When you get called on, ask `Well, what about magnetic fields?'"

"If I've screwed anything up, ask my student about it."

"Going to the bathroom on the planes to Antarctica is not too bad if you're male. If you're female, you have to go talk to one of the pilots and have them assemble the toilet for you."

"Inside this box is a University of Maryland astronomy graduate student. When I tweak these knobs, the student has to crank out a power spectrum. No power spectrum, no coffee."

"Here in this picture you'll notice these brown spots surrounding the probe that just landed. The local bovine population has become increasingly interested in cosmology."

"Well, we've asked our speaker a lot of questions. Now, I'd like to ask one of my own."

"When I was waiting at the bus stop, I realized the perfect object on which to test this." (I'm still waiting for someone to admit that an idea hit them while they were in the bathroom!)

"If people ignore me, I can't fool them."

"Dead stars go to heaven."

"Here we have a cat in a ket."

"I find that introductions bore the experts and puzzle the rest."

"For those of you who study stellar astronomy, ignore my next statement. It looks sort of like a blackbody."

"I've been a department chair, and I still don't know what carbon stars are."

"There are roughly three classes of people associated with universities: faculty, students, and alumni. The general concerns of each group are different. Students talk about sex, alumni talk about football, and faculty talk about parking."

"These days, if you're studying galaxies at z = 0.1 or 0.2, you're considered a planetary scientist."

"A rubble pile is what you get when gravel falls off a dump truck."

"He thinks that stellar interiors are just really deep atmospheres. That's why the courses overlap so much."

"The history of tofu is really exciting!"

"For your safety, seatbelts will be installed. For my safety, refreshments will be served."

"See.
See Fert.
See Fert One.
Do you see Fert too?"

"Our teacher wants us to be spontaneous. So I smeared a bunch of glue on the paper, took pencil shavings out of my pencil sharpener, and threw it on top of the glue. Then, I slung different colors of nail polish all over it." (overheard hallway conversation)

Student 1: "I have a weakness for cool mechanical pencils. Whenever I go to the bookstore, I always spend time browsing through the wide variety of mechanical pencils. I keep forgetting that with all of the variety out there, all you have to do is push down on the eraser and the lead comes out."
Student 2: "I have this new mechanical pencil that's really sturdy, and it's designed so that it's easy to hold."
Student 1: "Hey, mine may not be as sturdy as your's, but it's not so bad that my hand tips backwards when I hold it."
Student 2: "Yeah, but you have a fat hand!"

Student 1: "I have never understood this. Why do mathematicians say that something `diverges' while physicists say it `blows up'?"
Student 2: "'Cause physicists like the word `blow'!"

Student looks through window in classroom door, turns around to his friend, and smiles: "There are GIRLS in there!"

"If we are doing the midterm exam, we won't be doing physics." (in reference to a quantum mechanics exam)

"Physics is a real bitch!" (overheard hallway conversation)

"Just think of this exam as part of the long process involved in joining a weird religious order" (overheard hallway conversation)

Person 1: "My computer doesn't like W. It really hates Ws."
Person 2: "Must be a Democrat then."

"If you publish that, you'll stir up a hornets' nest, but it's a hornets' nest that needs to be stirred up."

"To conclude, we've discovered a lot of crap out there."

Person 1: "What broke the axial symmetry in that figure?"
Person 2: "The artist."

And some bonus quotes from my friends:

Teacher: "Do you buy this? I can derive it."
Student: "He buys it."

"I can't really give you a coherent picture of everything, so I'll give you an incoherent picture of some things."

"The yellow points are data points, none of which you should probably believe."

"When people get up and pontificate about their galaxy formation models with star formation, they don't know what they're talking about."

"Twenty-five-sigma things don't just happen."

"Cosmology on an empty stomach is not good."

"Astronomy is knowing a little bit about a lot of things."

"This is rather painful in curvilinear coordinates. You should do it, though, just so you know that it's painful in curvilinear coordinates."

"There are people who write papers saying inflation could lead to omega less than 1. You would not want these people to babysit your children."

"The mu here stands for reduced mass. I am always in search of reduced mass."

"I have no idea if this homework is possible to do or not."

"This arrangement may be a bit fishy, but we're dealing with Poisson statistics."

"Today's lecture will probably be a little boring."

"You can impress your friends if you know how to do canonical transformations and they don't."

"So you see how we can make a simple problem very complicated."

"I'm surrounded by cosmologists!"


"Hi [TA name deleted],

My roomate tripped over my alarm cord this morning, taking it out of the wall, therefore shutting it off. Because of this, I didn't wake up for class and missed a test I was ready for and hoping to do well on. Would there be ANY opportunities at all for me to either make up the test or make up that grade in general? And if not, is there any extra credit? I had no intentions of missing this class, and I'm really irritated my roomate didn't wake me up when she tripped. She just got back from her 10 and woke me up and said," [Student name deleted], do you have a class you need me to wake you up for? I broke the alarm." To which I looked at the clock and that puts us where we are now.

I am very very sorry, and I hope there is some way for me to make this grade up to you.

Thank you.

~[Student name deleted]"

If you liked these quotes, you will also like some other quote pages that are out there:

Jim Marshall's Professor Quotes

Barb Mattson's Professor Quotes

Katie McGleam's List of Andrew Wilson Quotes

Amanda Proctor's Professor Quotes

These quote lists were compiled by friends and fellow graduate students. Since we have had some courses in common, some of the quotes overlap.

I would like to thank Steve Perry, Jim Marshall, Linda Harden Newman, and Leslie Brice for helping me compile this list of quotes.

To all of my instructors and colleagues: Thanks for many years of of entertainment. May you continue to amuse me!

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