*E&M*
Sept 2003 - April 2004
"To make a long story short..." -Wong
*Ooma*
10-13
"A kilogram. Now that's something you can pick up and eat." -Ned
11-3:
"What Emily is saying...is smart." -Ned
"Well, Betelgeuse is a supergiant. And it's called a
supergiant for a reason, cuz it's bigger than a giant." -Ned
11-10:
"That should be a squiggle." -Ned
"You seem to want the drag coefficient...you keep wanting
that." -Ned
"Everything has the same density - iron's five, you are one."
-Brad
11-22:
"You're getting prematurely numerical." -Ned
"The units aren't just correct - they're perfect!" -Brad
"You don't need to go all numeric on us!" -Ned
"When you are up at the board dithering, you shouldn't say
that g is going to be a function of radius." -Ned
Dialogue:
Ned: Yes, De Broglie, the famous prince....or duke or
something....something royal.
Brad: He was French.
Ned: Ah, the French! They don't count because they got rid of
them all!
Brad: They chopped all their heads off!
"Ahh, the 5/3 power of 1.67! It makes my heart glad!" -Ned
"Over all, this is not ridiculously wrong." -Ned
"So today we accomplished the destruction of the sun by two
different methods and the destruction of the solar system by
three different methods - so it was a very good day!" -Ned
12-8:
Dialogue:
Brad: How much extraterrestial dust have you inhaled in your life?
Chun: Does that include drugs?
Brad: Well, if it's extra terrestrial drugs...extraterrestrial cocaine.
1-7:
"We're a supernova remnant, but we don't think of ourselves as
one." -Ned
"The ISM is multiphased. Generally we tend to think of the
sexier bits like the dark clouds." -Brad
"Yeah, one atom per cubic centimeter - an excellent choice!"
-Ned
1-14
"No actual work allowed." -Ned
"That's true, BUT..." -Ned
"No, no, I'm asleep." -Ned
"Yes, omega-squared-r!!" -Ned
1-20:
"Draw a circle - you've drawn a stupid egg there." -Ned
"Oh, you know...Ptolemy's tables were crap." -Ned
"I mean, it's a damn simple triangle here." -Ned
"Msun, write down the Msun again....MSUN!" -Ned
"It could be right, but you are writing it wrong." -Ned
"That's a particular star...one that we know and love." -Ned
1-27:
"It's proportional to the answer...at least, one of the
answers." -Ned
"All you want is to see the star move - you don't want to see
it move across the whole DAMN sun." -Brad
Dialogue:
Karen: Quinn, how big is the Oort Cloud?
Quinn: Your mom!
Brad: Yes, your mother.
2-3:
"Space is a nasty place." -Brad
"Go to this part of the ship and jump up and down!" -Brad
"What is the physical manifestation of pushing?" -Brad
2-10
Dialogue:
Ned: If H is equal to 71 screwball units - km/s/Mpc - what is
the critical density?
Mark: Where are you drawing that 71 from?
Ned: WMAP, of course!
"A hun-derd? Try that again." -Ned
"First thing to do is what Ryan's doing right now - erase the
board, give yourself some time." -Ned
"This density, is it all matter, or is it weirder junk?" -Ned
"Let's break out thermo or something." -Ned
"Uhhhh....no. That's never right." -Ned
2-17
"Draw the Earth as an egg, for instance." -Brad
"It's not like somebody lives on the tidal bulge." -Brad
"In order of magnitude you're allowed to do cheap and dirty
things." -Brad
2-24
"That's my confusion limit." -Brad
"There's no uh-oh as long as you remember your units." -Brad
Journal Club:
"Well, if I were a factor of two bigger...you'd pay more
attention to me." -Mike Jura
"In magnitudes, for all you astronomy wonks." -Ned
Galaxies:
"He found two classes of clusters, but he defined three, just
to be an astronomer." -James
"Way to go Marc, now his bladder is going to explode!" -James
"I can't let Ned show me up...we're going THREE hours!" -James
"My cosmology is a little different from other people. I
still believe in the steady state universe." -James
"We could crawl around our universe." -James
"There were no wrong answers." -James
"A little ant would basically do funny dances ... forget the
ant, let's take a break." -James
"Ok, let's get back to our spheres." -James
"Aww, screw it. The diagram's not worth...the diagram."
-James
"You guys are funny to look at - half of you are bored and
half of you are writing furiously." -James
(written on the board) "Omega knot." -James
"This gas can see all those photons and we can't - waah."
-Matt Malkan
"This has to be a HUGE donut...more like a weird pastry
thing." -Matt Malkan
"There are one or two people in the world who argue against
cosmological redshift - thankfully, they're going to die
soon." -James
"Sand da floor!" -James
"Oooooo, good pennnnnn!" -James
"Omega metals is a small fraction of everything except you -
but you're not in the equation." -James
"You'll miss me when I'm gone!" -James
"The universe is 90% dark matter and we're the crud on top of
it all." -James
"They [galaxies] are not all chocolate chip cookies." -James
"How low can ya go!" -James
"Obviously, you have to know the relative fraction of hydrogen
and helium, but you learn that on your mother's knee." -James
Dialogue:
Eddie: Your pen is reaching the contrast limit of my eyes.
James: Get new eyes.
"Right now there doesn't seem to be a way out of this dark
matter hole." -James
"So it's 120 orders of magnitude off from the physical
interpretation - that might possibly be true." -James
"I don't have the book. Shoot, I lost my crutch." -James
*Cosmology*
"There is an area where you can't count galaxies and that's
called the Milky Way." -Ned
"They went in and cleaned out the pigeon poop and still had
noise." -Ned
"We need a way to separate the sheeps from the goats here."
-Ned
"We're speaking prose all our lives without knowing anything
about it." -Ned
"When people talk about the killing fields in Cambodia, if you
know General Relativity, you always get confused." -Ned
"W is equal to coshine." -Ned
"This is a famous epoch in the history of the universe, marked
by holiday parades and marching bands." -Ned
"I should explain what I mean by top hat - of course, that's
one of these hats with a tall cylindrical thing." -Ned
"That's my complaint about newspaper stories - they don't give you
the redshift." -Ned
"You're going to violate their preconceived confusion no
matter what." -Ned
"The universe used to be a much brighter place." -Ned
"What's the redshift this morning?" -Ned
"But that's only a factor of a million - you'd need a million
nights of Keck time." -Ned
"We don't think this is a viable model for the universe, but that (chuckle) isn't all that important." -Ned
"We can measure z to a gnat's eyelash." -Ned
"The hardest part of measuring z is getting the time." - Ned
"SWIFT didn't slew over there because part of its programming is 'don't point at the sun.'" -Ned
"We can rest assured that we've not done our calculations completely crazy." -Ned
"Much less infinite" - Ned
"Then we have c-squared flipping out." -Ned
"So that is what happened to particle physics in the last 30 years." -Ned
"What happens in the universe? Well, potentially nothing." - Ned
(about topological defect/magnetic monopole) "...so it's little thing with a mass" -Ned
(written on the board at the beginning of class and left there for the entire 2 hours) "SOUND WAZE" -Ned
"Of course, l=4 is an octapole, l=5 is a hexadecapole, and
beyond that, who can remember?" -Ned
"Well, there are sort of two classes of people in the world -
those that know that H_o has always been really uncertain, and
those that were born too late." -Ned, to Marc
"Guys just slap down some equation that is different from
somewhere else. And it turns out to be wrong! But it could
be right. We don't know." -Ned
"Guys at Princeton using different normalization than Peebles,
and Peebles is at Princeton! I just don't understand!" -Ned
"We're averaging over an ensemble of a gazillion different
universes." -Ned
"We're averaging over a bunch of galaxies. Of course, it
doesn't have to be galaxies - it could be pumpkins or dark
matter particles." -Ned
"And then we have a double sum - sum sum." -Ned
"The anisotropy of the Cosmic Microwave Background will tell
us if inflation is good or all wet." -Ned
"Then you've gone and made yourself a black hole" - Ned
"This is high density, medium density, medium-rare density,
and rare...so this [high density] is well-done." -Ned
"A non-Gaussian distribution is sort of like a non-dog."
-Zeldovich, paraphrased by Ned
"As it get denser, it gets denser." -Ned
"Then the matter sinks down into a blob, otherwise known as a
cluster of galaxies." -Ned
"What is it like, what can we say? Well nobody smokes
anymore, but it's sort of like listening to loud rock music."
-Ned
"This is all based on the collapse of spherical top hats, which
has absolutely nothing to do with reality." -Ned
"The Mars Rovers kind of aren't good for this purpose, because
they keep driving around!" -Ned
"If it was infinite magnification on scales of measure, then
we'd all be dead." -Ned
"We're just gonna use a crummy-ass approximation." -Ned
"Meanwhile, your seeing has changed and various airplanes have
come by." -Ned
*During the Final*
"This is at least as bad as the SATs." -Ned
"The significance of the graph paper being stapled in upside
down is...none." -Ned
*Infrared*
During Ned's Visit:
Dialogue:
Quinn: Need a pointer?
Ned: No, I've got an arm.
Sarah: You've got two!
"If you slew your telescope over here, and you stop, it goes
'blubb blubb blubb', like that." -Ned
"So it's basically like orange segments and we're putting the
segments back together." -Ned
"Ben and Eric, or Beric." -Ned
"We told NASA we wanted a Torus, but NASA said, 'You will fly
on a Delta.' So then after we did the preliminary design,
NASA said, 'You will have a friend. Carpooling.'" -Ned
"We don't have enough money to go through the Space Telescope
School of False Colors." -Ned
*Astro Coffee*
5/19/05
"You should talk to Vladimir about that. Well, we have to build an instrument first, but after that ..." -Steve of VERITAS (about looking at a galaxy of Sarah's)
"We want to do better than 'reasonably worthwhile.' We want
mountains of Euro showering down on us." -Mike Jura
"Well, Ned has this smart-ass attitude" -Mike Jura
"Many years ago he decided he would go into infrared astronomy because there were photons there." -Ned about his thesis advisor G. Fasio
"This 'back in the day' stuff is horrifying!" -Quinn
6/2/05
"Well, I'm not on the committee, either, I'm just mouthing
off." -Mike Jura