Annoying Quotes From Physics Texts

[darkmatter4brains]

Do any of these annoy other people too at times. feel free to share others

(1) "It's easy to verify that ......"

(Easy my a$$!)

(2) "Obviously, ...."

(obvious to who? not me, apparently)

(3) "The derivation will be left as a homework problem"

(that I won't be able to figure out I'm sure ... thanks)

Another one that isn't a specific quote, but don't you hate when they have pages of way more detail than you need on something, usually review, then they get to the new and tough part, and they just skip right over it with the skimpiest of details?

 

[drwayne]

I like to have fun and turn around a common line into:

"It is casual to the obvious observer"

When I was in graduate school, one late night working on a homework set, we came up with a scale
of how many pages of derivation were required to demonstrate the contents of phrase like:

"It is trivial to show"

"This is equivalent to"

etc. - damn I wish I kept that.

 

[drwayne]

Another night, a friend of mine mangled the United Negro College Fund motto into a phrase we used
for several years:

"A terrible mind is a thing to waste"

 

[ramparts]

Do any of these annoy other people too at times. feel free to share others

(1) "It's easy to verify that ......"

(Easy my a$$!)

(2) "Obviously, ...."

(obvious to who? not me, apparently)

(3) "The derivation will be left as a homework problem"

(that I won't be able to figure out I'm sure ... thanks)

Another one that isn't a specific quote, but don't you hate when they have pages of way more detail than you need on something, usually review, then they get to the new and tough part, and they just skip right over it with the skimpiest of details?

I love those!! When they're not obvious, they motivate me to be more awesome, and when they are, they're a great ego boost.

 

[drwayne]

I had a couple of homework problems in E&M and QM where the instructor asked us to show those "it is
easily shown" steps from Jackson and Schiff.

:evil:

 

[Yuri_Armstrong]

I just started taking this class and it really is pretty simple. We haven't started in the book yet but right now we're just dealing with motion, acceleration, etc. The sad part is that I think I'm the ONLY one in my class who understands any of it :lol:

Reminds me of some of the people on this board.

 

[darkmatter4brains]

I had a couple of homework problems in E&M and QM where the instructor asked us to show those "it is
easily shown" steps from Jackson and Schiff.

:evil:

Is that John David Jackson? The edition I have desn't have a 2nd author? But, that is a tough book! At least I thought. Major step up from the Griffiths undergrad text.

 

[ramparts]

I'd imagine it's the same one - how many Jacksons are there writing notoriously hard E&M texts?

 

[drwayne]

Sorry, Jackson was our E&M text, with Schiff being the book we used for QM - the latter was a legitimately
bad book, judged by the fact that I have never opened it after grad school to help me with some work related
problem - I have for books like Anderson,Liboff, CT et all and of course Goldstein.

 

[drwayne]

I used Jackson to help me with a polarization problem a few months back.

 

[ramparts]

Fun I actually haven't taken a Jackson-based E&M course yet (the standard E&M course for first-year grad physics students, at least in the states) but they don't sound fun. I end up doing an American physics PhD program (rather than astro) I guess I'll have to....

As for a good quantum book, have you used Griffiths? That's the standard these days, and it's very well-written, though it's a first-year quantum text so it might not be helpful for your work-related problems. Though it might be!

 

[drwayne]

I have a copy of Griffiths around here somewhere. Liboff as well. These are my two favorites though:

http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Mechanics ... 481&sr=1-1

http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Physics-Qu ... 555&sr=1-1

I go the latter one for free when a relocating professor left a bunch of samples. I was put off for a while by
the title, then I turned to it in desperation one night for help with a homework set, and the rest is history.

Hard to believe E&M (and associated suffering) was almost 30 years ago.

 

[darkmatter4brains]

R Shankar's Principles of Quantum Mechanics - now THAT is a good quantum textbook!

 

[darkmatter4brains]

Goldstein.

Classical Mechanics? That is a really nice one too!

 

[drwayne]

Goldstein.

Classical Mechanics? That is a really nice one too!

and Symon (from undergraduate Mechanics) help me from time to time.

This:

http://www.amazon.com/Mechanics-3rd-Kei ... 491&sr=1-1

Looks just like mine - which is natural when you see the date for the book.

 

[drwayne]

Somewhere between tangentially related and not:

I re-met the professor who I took APL from almost 35 years ago, and who wrote a book used in a
high school math class where I learned logic and programming - on Facebook