As I've started studying more complicated physics, I've met along the way so many physicists who understood more than I ever thought possible. So much, in fact, that they had forgotten just how dumb the rest of us still are. I vowed I would never, ever become that way. No matter how much I studied physics I would always remember what it was like not to know anything about the subject, so I would never respond to a future student's question with my advisor's favorite phrase, "Oh, that's trivial." (And of course his explanation following that ominous response is ever-faithfully NON-trivial.)
Today in my office, as the five graduate students in there were studying for our qualifying exams next week, I suddenly realized that I was already a good way up that ivory tower I so dreaded ascending. Two specific examples jump out at me. First, we have started using LOTS of slang for things that at one time seemed far too nuanced to merit such language. Second, I noticed that we complete one another's sentences in ways that must seem completely nonsensical to the non-physics student. A conversation this afternoon perfectly embodied both of those:
Tom: "Hey, when you do the potential of the grounded cube thing, do you end up with an infinite series?"
Me: "No, because they give you V on that last side so you can do the integral. So you can do the orthogonal thing and get a real number... Oh wait, no, sorry, you still get the series but if you know V you still get all the coefficients. Otherwise you're stuck with the integral."
Tom: "Yeah, ok."
We had this exchange sitting about ten feet apart, without writing anything down or pointing at anything on a chalkboard. The contexts of these problems have become so familiar that our brains automatically set the stage, complete with props, so it's perfectly acceptable to resort to using words like "thing" repeatedly and with regard to different abstractions --- Thing #1 was the conducting cube, but #2 was the orthogonality property --- with no loss of clarity.
