Quotes of the day

"Peter Paul Rubens, spelled R-U-B-E-N-S. If you spell it R-E-U-B-E-N-S, you get the guy who played Peewee Hermann. You guys know who Peewee Hermann is, right? Oh my gosh. Okay, one day we'll have a Peewee Hermann Day... I'm kidding. We will NOT have a Peewee Hermann Day."
- Dr. Kristen Todd

"h is very small: that's ok. If h=1 then you in trouble. You have hard time grabbing your food."
- Dr. Albert Chen

The theory of everything

I've been working on the Schrödinger equation a whole bunch in Modern Physics in the past few days. It's amazing. And even more amazing is that no physicist in the last 70 years or so, including Einstein himself, has been able to figure out how to make this:


equal this:



String theory, quantum loop gravity, all that stuff is ultimately designed to make Einstein's general relativity (the top equation) work with quantum mechanics, as dictated by Schrödinger's wonderfully nebulous equation (the bottom one).

"I heard Al Qaeda causes night to fall."

I could listen to Keith Olbermann all day long.

Ernest Rutherford wrote equations with way too many variables

Case in point:

It's the little things that make life go 'round

So on Monday in inorganic lab we were running vacuum filtration on a ferrocene sample we synthesized. Unbeknownst to us, somebody put a whole bunch of soap in the aspirator's water tank, so about a minute after we turned on the aspirator pump, the whole thing started foaming over all over the table. We laughed for a solid minute. I think that was the last thing any of us expected to see.