Another year, another edition of... THINGS Jonathan P. Dowling SAYS IN CLASS:

You can’t see day with the lights off.

Don’t ever ask a Dutch person to pronounce Huygens because they will spit on you.

Infinity minus infinity equals negative twelve. We will prove this rigorously.

Only when Dowling the Great teaches this course does the second semester run, because I am ever popular.

What we proved here by eyeball in two lines, I reproved here by eyeball in 26 lines.

In D.C. there was a bank robber, John Dillinger. When they asked why he robbed banks, he said that’s where the money is. When they ask me why I go to D.C., that’s why… to rob banks.

Depending on who you ask, there is either infinite energy or zero energy.

What I’m going to do now is strike fear into your young hearts.

 

Hold on my phone just made a weird sound…(checks phone)… 30 seconds to impact.

I’ll torture you only a slight amount.

I’ll give the half-ass proof. The zero-ass or full-ass proof requires much more work.

In quantum optics we brush the infinities under the rug at the beginning. In QED you stare at the infinities for a while then brush them under the rug at the end.

I can do whatever I want because someone will complain no matter what.

This is standard procedure, which means you don’t question it and just do it.

Aha! Three is equal to three!

It’s not mysterious, it’s optics!

The density operator allows you to combine all that is horrible about QM and all that is horrible about stat mech into horrible squared. But if horrible is less than one, that is an improvement.

My goal this semester will be to get … what’s his name… to laugh.

Whenever you see something you don’t like, put a hat on it.

What color is math? Math is purple.

Limbo is like heaven, but you don’t get to see the face of God.

Hell will come sooner than you expect, but not right now.

I want to give some more meat to the blob.

Teaching is the science of ever-improving lies.

This should be familiar from statistical mechanics, or S&M as we used to call it.

The point of physics is to embarrass yourself over and over again until you just don’t care anymore.

There’s actually a journal of irreproducible results. I submitted a paper there and it got rejected. I’m not sure if I should be happy or upset.

I’m on antibiotics and decongestants. I can literally hear the boogers popping in my head. It’s delightful.

He didn’t have a computer so he used a pyramid of male hair dressers.

You have to choose between mentoring, tormentoring, and dementoring.

Never go to third order perturbations unless you hate your own existence and want your life to end.

Beer’s law: if you have too much beer, there is no law. …which was proved by Galois the night before he died in a duel over a prostitute. But that’s another story.

That’s perfect! I need to make it crappy, so I put in a crapization factor.

The sun is not a telegraph.

 

Now you have known me for several weeks. You know that I lie!

First, LIGO’s laser goes through a mode cleaner. It’s like a vacuum cleaner; cleans up the vacuum.

They’re just beamsplitters! Everything is BS in this course, which you should have learned on day one.

Your grade this semester will depend on whether or not you register for next semester.

Now this is up to convention which means it varies from book to book and also that I will do random things from class to class depending on how I feel.

The whole point of the previous discussion was to prevent that question in the first place. Please go back in time and don’t ask that question.

Jon:…we have to start off easy because you can still drop the class until Monday.
Student: We can still drop the class today, you know
Jon: I can still not sign your paychecks for another year when the grant runs out

We have a lot of sandwiches. It’s time to go to lunch. We have to knock off some of these sandwiches. …but if you have trouble just turn one sandwich into two sandwiches and then you’re less hungry.

We use the regular rotation matrix that you will recall from kindergarten.

This is simple, it’s just Pac-man sandwiches.

The phase-state is an infinitesimally thin, and infinitely long slice of phase pizza. It’s not known whether it’s filling or not.

…n-bar is this function, which could be anything since you can’t read it.

[long story about making soap chips back into bars by placing them in plastic containers to be microwaved]

When you make a sandwich, you have to—tediously—pull something interesting out of it.

We’re going to start with the half-ass theory, then move to the quarter-ass theory, on to the one-sixteenth ass theory and so on until the no ass theorem, which I assume is the best.

I feel like I was run over by a truck, and then people dumped coffee on me.