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Physics Humor from College

Despite the fact that I wasn't, nor ever aspired to be, a physics major, there were three long semesters of college where I felt, at times, that physics was consuming my life. Quite a bit of humor floated around via email, and I captured some of it on my web site.

The Official List of Doc Brown Quotes

 This document contains quotable quotes from CWRU's ever-loved PHYS 123 professor, Dr. Robert Brown. Apologies if these are not exact, but most of these were taken down in my own cryptic shorthand during class when I was otherwise paying attention.

"What does that give us? A good old sinusoid!"

"All Calculus teachers suck... seed."

"That is another omega coming into our lives."

"Brown's First Golden Rule: Don't be so smart!"

"2 is infinity."

"An exam is a strange thing -- It's not the way things are done in the real world, and once you realize that, it's called cheating."

"Mandelbrot and Feigenbaum have such delicious names."

"It doesn't matter if this was connected to your Aunt Martha, the scale would still read 10 pounds."

"Draw a graph of this violent, but realistic, example."

"Let's say I'm standing on one side of the road, and let's say that you're standing on the other side of the road, and let's say that you want to throw a rock at me."

"Good old maximum range problem."

"Dribs and drabs."

"Commit yourself to the pendulum today."

"Your wonderful golden fact is..."

"She wants to play the Newton game."

"And if next Wednesday comes and you still don't know how to do this problem, then you should drop the course."

"I will not try to bludgeon you with this."

"Mandelbrot doesn't like Feigenbaum."

"You can take this problem and incline it!"

"There is a cute way to see this..."

"The adjective 'lousy' was just hyperbolic."

"This is the cute way I would like to introduce the Coriolis force."

"Just think about the wheels as blocks."

"I think I can abuse you."

"Ye olde logistic map."

"Smallish value of A."

"And think of it in its full vector glory."

"Don't connect the dots, okay?"

"Unit vectors!!!"

"If I can somehow make you see the beauty of the last page of these notes..."

"Imagine a little vector..."

"Slippery seat."

"I don't know what I'm more surprised about -- that someone won the Nobel Prize and it wasn't me, or that the Indians lost."

"Let's complete our numerical calculus experience by investigating... where I can get more chalk."

"You can approximate infinity by ten."

"The proof will be in the accuracy pudding."

"...without worrying about the detailed crap in between."

"Oh, crap!"

"Now for the olde finger in the dike problem..."

"Nonconstant F!"

"Your answer is the final change in Aunt Martha minus the initial change in Aunt Martha."

"This problem here is a problem that will scare you to death."

"Today we have a potpourri of convivial wit and companionship."

"Do you know what a "millihelen" is? The face that launched one ship."

"This page makes me very happy."

"Suppose we live on a cylindrical world."

"If it's Aunt Martha, then the acceleration is two times Aunt Martha."

"A motivational example."

"Sam cannot move by himself!"

"In the following two problems, you can concentrate on calculations involving changes in position a'la the skaters problem."

"If you were gonna set up integration for this, you would really want to look for other employment."

"Squish."

"This gives us a motivation for introducing torque."

"Torque direction is really reminiscent of omega."

"You can choose to go over to Aunt Martha's house and calculate the torque at her house. But why do you not do that? Because you're not a masochist!"

"We will take advantage of the freedom to choose our own points of rotation."

"There are some words we use that are not in anybody's spell-checker."

"Concentric pancakes."

"Proooooooooooof!"

"If you set up integration for this problem, it would be a painful experience."

"Find any old y(t) satisfying these conditions."

"Family of straight lines!"

"Everybody's got the same omega."

"Don't be so constipated about this."

"The unit vectors are the hat guys."

The Ghost of Dr. Browns Past

 Here's the list that got me listening even more carefully to Dr. Brown's lectures in class. This was authored by past groupies - er, students of his that were just as in tune as I have become. Enjoy!

101 Cultural Comments: Bob's Best Handy-Dandy Quotations

Original Developers: Bruce Mlinar and Mike Franzinger

100 muddles of Dears in the fall,
100 muddles of Dears,
And if one of those "Dear people" should make sense at all,
99 muddles of Dears in the fall!


  1. I'm getting a little bonkers.
  2. Every lousy point on the rope feels the same forces pulling on it.
  3. Ignore table friction for two weeks.
  4. Reading, but gently.
  5. Infinitely ziggy.
  6. Today's lecture is in the nascent stage of note development.
  7. Positive, definite guy.
  8. We can represent the lollipop kids.
  9. Centripetal repertoire.
  10. Bang! You're in quadrant two.
  11. Please bear with us and hit this fly with a hammer.
  12. One more day of muscle building.
  13. R(theta) is consistent with what you remember from kindergarten.
  14. I gotta bite my tongue here.
  15. Good old G.
  16. Our R.
  17. All hell breaks out!
  18. Ultra-quickie!
  19. Integrate the slop.
  20. Take that sum there and knock it silly!
  21. I can swallow this cosine theta or I can suck the cosine theta out.
  22. Path: That's another word that I want to introduce.
  23. What you do have is something completely incomprehensible to you.
  24. An example that's rich enough to satisfy all of our needs.
  25. If I were talking now.
  26. Ye olde stopping distance formulae.
  27. All the work done by non-conservative guys is negligible.
  28. You can choose it to be under your nose.
  29. You could take any god forsaken direction, if you were a real masochist.
  30. Perfectly vertically upwards.
  31. If Betty were infinitely massive, Sam would be doing all the moving.
  32. This thing for which we paid thousands and thousands of lira.
  33. Leave the I=1 tacit.
  34. Skooshed.
  35. Our handy dandy formula for today.
  36. I will just use abbreviations like crazy today.
  37. Fasten your seat belts for today.
  38. My head hurts me to tell you something.
  39. They will trot this thing out to use.
  40. The vestige of a vector.
  41. I could be rotating this way or that way.
  42. That's the way you wash your clothes.
  43. No matter what terrible things Sam and Betty might do.
  44. Mandelbrot was jealous of Feigenbaum.
  45. There now can be discussed.
  46. Kindergarten moment of inertia.
  47. Build up the whole world from that single point.
  48. That's all fairly transparent to you.
  49. Statics redux.
  50. You've got the trees out of the way so that you can see the forest of the problem.
  51. For your own edification.
  52. C is your freedom.
  53. One point two, blah, blah, blah.
  54. You can convince yourself by thinking about it, or reading it in the homework hints.
  55. I don't care how grotesque it may be.
  56. Set it and forget it.
  57. The game is over.
  58. A major, major caveat.
  59. The torque thing.
  60. You were doing calculations like this in your sleep.
  61. If the guts are not rotating with the rest of it.
  62. You can read for yourself.
  63. Oh boy, this is deep.
  64. That's been word processed for you.
  65. Two small masses attached to the same rigid rod.
  66. Announce: What's the point?
  67. Radius of gyration.
  68. In order to enhance learning and minimize wheel spinning.
  69. A'la the skaters' problem.
  70. First off, solve the incredibly hard problem x = x^3.
  71. I must confess that I do like talking about this stuff, and even more, because of, rather than in spite of, my old friend Mitchell Feigenbaum's important role in the discoveries!
  72. The network has not been my best friend this weekend.
  73. Take it as a rule of (green) thumb that plants grow opposite to the direction of the effective gravity!
  74. Foucault Fun.
  75. What do we have to do with our hand to change the above conclusion?
  76. A lion of mass 120 kg leaps with a horizontal velocity of 12 m/s at a hunter. The hunter has an automatic rifle firing bullets of mass 15 g with a muzzle velocity of 630 m/s, and she attempts to stop the lion in midair. How many bullets would the hunter have to fire into the lion to stop its horizontal motion? (Assume the bullets stick inside the lion, but note that they don't all have to enter at once!) We must have the lion momentum equal to and opposite to the sum of the momenta of the bullets in order for the whole shooting match (sorry!) to come to rest and thus have zero total momentum.
  77. The shark weight is,...oh, the heck with it, just make sure your answer looks sensible!
  78. I will be back Saturday night for closer touches.
  79. What's the deal with this business?
  80. Pell mell
  81. Hallmark equation
  82. Perturbing wiggle
  83. There's nothing sacred about that, we do it for convenience.
  84. Are my clothes falling off or something?
  85. Begs us to decompose the forces
  86. A huge big fat rope a la problem four
  87. As big as a big fat F
  88. We're torquing it, but we're getting ahead of ourselves.
  89. Everything is one dimensional today.
  90. Again redundancy!
  91. No mass to eat them up.
  92. An arithmetic morass
  93. Right here is where I see a 20% problem.
  94. Now comes the algebra which says to you you have to solve this guy for something or another.
  95. It's just a little embroidered form of what we had before.
  96. Crassly thinking about the exam.
  97. You don't have to be in a straight jacket about it.
  98. Horizontal centripetal acceleration and vertical nothing.
  99. It becomes almost just sort of pedestrian.
  100. Best, rwb.
And the grand finale requires a little background information. A few years back, so Kathy says, the entire class was waiting for Bob, who was having lunch with some other professors (I think), to come teach a review session. He showed up an hour late with a big grin and the following handy-dandy excuse:
"The world looks a whole lot clearer after three Bloody Marys."

Doc Brown Joke

 From Mike Pirnat...
Q: How does the honors P1 teacher get to class?
A: Brownian motion!

More from the CWRU Physics Department...

 Dan Alt has a similar page for another professor in the CWRU Physics Department.

You might be a physics major...

 Created by: Jason Lisle

Due to the enormous workload involved in physics classes combined with stress and lack of sleep, physics students often forget (either by accident, defense mechanism, or intentionally) what their major really is. Thus, as a physics major, I took it upon myself to create a small list of indicators to help us all remember what we really are.

YOU MIGHT BE A PHYSICS MAJOR...

if you have no life - and you can PROVE it mathematically.

if you enjoy pain.

if you know vector calculus but you can't remember how to do long division.

if you chuckle whenever anyone says "centrifugal force."

if you've actually used every single function on your graphing calculator.

if when you look in a mirror, you see a physics major.

if it is sunny and 70 degrees outside, and you are working on a computer.

if you frequently whistle the theme song to "MacGyver."

if you always do homework on Friday nights.

if you know how to integrate a chicken and can take the derivative of water.

if you think in "math."

if you've calculated that the World Series actually diverges.

if you hesitate to look at something because you don't want to break down its wave function.

if you have a pet named after a scientist.

if you laugh at jokes about mathematicians.

if the Humane society has you arrested because you actually performed the Schrodinger's Cat experiment.

if you can translate English into Binary.

if you can't remember what's behind the door in the science building which says "Exit."

if you have to bring a jacket with you, in the middle of summer, because there's a wind-chill factor in the lab.

If you are completely addicted to caffeine.

if you avoid doing anything because you don't want to contribute to the eventual heat-death of the universe.

if you consider ANY non-science course "easy."

if when your professor asks you where your homework is, you claim to have accidentally determined its momentum so precisely, that according to Heisenberg it could be anywhere in the universe.

if the "fun" center of your brain has deteriorated from lack of use.

if you'll assume that a "horse" is a "sphere" in order to make the math easier.

if you understood more than five of these indicators.

if you make a hard copy of this list, and post it on your door.

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