Entry posted by Akano
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I have posted before about the genius of physicist David J. Griffiths. I thought I'd post a few quotes by him to share why I think he's awesome.
"…You can always tell the particles apart, in principle—just paint one of them red and the other one blue, or stamp identification numbers on them, or hire private detectives to follow them around."
"...And, of course, if you’re in a really bad mood you can create a state for which neither position nor momentum is well defined..."
"It is traditional to write the Bohr radius with a subscript: a0. But this is cumbersome and unnecessary, so I prefer to leave the subscript off."
"If you think this is starting to sound like a mystical numerology, I don’t blame you. We will not be using Clebsch-Gordan tables much in the rest of the book, but I wanted you to know where they fit into the scheme of things, in case you encounter them later on. In a mathematical sense this is all applied group theory—what we are talking about is the decomposition of the direct product of two irreducible representations of the rotation group into a direct sum of irreducible representation (you can quote that, to impress your friends)."
"I’m not at all sure what I’m supposed to say today. Maybe you’re expecting a grand philosophy of education. But I learned very early as a parent that almost any philosophy of childrearing is worse than no philosophy at all, and I am inclined to think the same applies to teaching."
"Personally, I never bring notes to a lecture unless I am egregiously ill-prepared, for they break a very delicate and important bond of trust with the listener: If B really follows from A, how come he has to refer to his notes?"
"There are a thousand ways to get a problem wrong—not all of them bad—and many ways to get a problem right—not all of them good."
"Above all, I think studying science—and especially physics—is a tremendously liberating experience. I don’t happen to know how a carburetor works; I’m not even sure what a carburetor does; let me be frank: I don’t know what a carburetor looks like. But I do know that the behavior of carburetors is perfectly rational; somebody understands them, and if I really wanted to I’m sure I could understand them too. For I have confidence, grounded in the study of physics, that the world is rationally intelligible, and this, to me, is the most important—and most profoundly liberating—idea in human experience. The universe is comprehensible..."
"A colleague of mine in Chemistry likes to boast that ‘‘anyone can teach; the important thing is to attract good researchers.’’ I think it’s exactly the reverse: competent research physicists are a dime a dozen, but good teachers are few and far between. Please don’t misunderstand: I’ve got nothing against research—I do a certain amount of it myself, and I think it goes hand in hand with good teaching. But I regard myself as a professional teacher, and an amateur researcher, whereas most physicists are professional researchers but amateur teachers, and it shows. In my opinion by far the most effective thing we can do to improve the quality of physics instruction—much more important than modifications in teaching technique—is to hire, honor, and promote good teachers."
There are many more wonderful quotes, but I don't remember them/don't have the sources on me. Perhaps I'll add to this in another blog entry.
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