My third year thermodynamics course opened with a similar quip by the lecturer. Entropy is actually depressing. You can't fight it. You can't not fight it. It just wins.
143So.. that's why I never tidy up my room. I'm just too smart!
43All we have to decide is what to do with the entropy that is given us.
11To quote The Star Child, "What, you haven't planned that far ahead?"
7Life is a temporary win over it, just enjoy it while you can.
5Well I mean yeah. It wasn't my first existential crisis - you get used to them eventually. Or you do what those guys did I guess.
4
One opening line that's always stuck with me is:
"The doctor said I was a paranoid schizophrenic. Well, he didn't actually say it, but we knew he was thinking it."
111So... is Goldstein still around or did he...?
70Don't worry, he's alive: His wiki page
61Apparently still alive at 85: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Goodstein
41There's still time
39
We are all gas with a slightly denser particle distribution.
🔫
50We all are vast collections of harmonic oscillators.
23
Ah yes, joke #3
30Thank you for this, it was new to me
6
My favorite class in grad school. I absolutely loved deriving the laws of thermodynamics from first principles based the random motion of atoms. It was beautiful.
21I don't know. I like Griffith's Quantum Mechanics which opens saying if you think you're starting to understand this stuff, you really haven't.
19Electrons, why do you behave differently when I'm looking at you?
2Because you're touching them with your eyes
5
Weed out the riff-raff who can't hack it
17Boltzmann is "riff-raff" now?!? I get what you're going for, but c'mon.
9
This is beautiful and I must study this subject now.
You know; so I have an excuse.
10I dunno, I usually open a textbook by turning over the front cover 🥁
10Why do we have a 🌫️ emoji instead of a cymbal? It would compliment the drum emoji so well.
5
Statistical mechanics is so fucking brutal \m/
9...and then we take the partial derivative of the log of this infinite sum wrt molar volume to find that--
- Why?
Why what?
- helplessly gestures at the whiteboard
Oh, yeah, it's so the math works out later! Anyway, for small Θ, the derivative has a nice closed form that we can Tailor expand in f-
13Yeah lol, lots of physics and math was invented by multidisciplinary geniuses who saw equations that seemed to have no answer and said "oh yeah, this looks like a problem from biology that I've seen solved with this bit of fluid mechanics, and that problem can be solved with this complex trick from differential calculus. And you know, after we do that the whole system is starting to look like a circuit that uses properties from thermodynamics..."
Then your teacher and the textbook throws it on a white board and says "some smart dude figured out this was the way to solve this problem. It looks like this and it boils down to this equation. Don't ask questions."
16
There's a mechanics textbook called "there once was a classical theory" and it opens with:
There once was a classical theory Of which quantum disciples were leery. They said, “Why spend so long On a theory that’s wrong?” Well, it works for your everyday query!
8you could always just stop studying that field.
6So you are just going to live forever?
6Of course, but then the book isn't for you.
5
Meanwhile, a strong contender for the best opening line in fiction is: "There once was a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubbs, and he almost deserved it."
- Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C.S. Lewis.
2Thanks Thiccle Rick
0does statistical mechanics help explain how often this gets posted here? 🙃
0
