# The Physicists' Bill of Rights



## mrhnau (Apr 18, 2007)

Only a few of you guys will get this one 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

We hold these postulates to be intuitively obvious, that all physicists are
born equal, to a first approximation, and are endowed by their creator with
certain discrete privileges, among them a mean rest life, n degrees of freedom,
and the following rights, which are invariant under all linear tranformations:

1.     To approxomate all problems to ideal cases.
2.     To use order of magnitude calculations whenever deemed necessary (i.e.,
       whenever one can get away with it).
3.     To use the rigorous method of "squinting" for solving problems more
       complex than the additions of positive real integers.
4.     To dismiss all functions which diverge as "nasty" and "unphysical".
5.     To invoke the uncertainty principle whenever confronted by confused
       mathemeticians, chemists, engineers, psychologists, dramatists, and
       andere schweinhund.
6.     To the extensive use of "bastard notations" where conventional
       mathematics will not work.
7.     To justify shaky reasoning on the basis that it gives the right answer.
8.     To cleverly choose conveniant initial conditions, using the principle
       of general triviality.
9.     To use plausible arguments in place of proofs, and thenceforth refer to
       those arguments as proofs.
10.    To take on faith any principle which seems right but cannot be proved.


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## exile (Apr 18, 2007)

:lol:

Especially the bastard notations. There are about a zillion different ways to write vectors: standard boldface, italics with little arrows over their heads, German fraktur lower case, German fraktur lower case with little arrows over their heads...

...and that's just standard US practice! I have a book on electromagnetic fields written by a couple of Russian physicists and if I didn't have the accompanying prose commentary in text, I would not recognize Maxwell's equations to save my life...

and when you get to QM stuff, it's hopeless. I have a theory: physicists love the way their mathematical derivations look on the page, and they want the fanciest, most recherché symbols they can find, all in one place, so they can leave copies of their latest _Phys. Review_ paper on their desks casually open to a double-page layout of choice reductions-to-solvable-form (using some of the other, ahem, _techniques of convenience_ mentioned in the PBoRs you provided), so that their colleagues popping in for a quick word will notice and be suitably impressed....


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## MBuzzy (Apr 18, 2007)

It makes me feel good about my nerdity that I only understand about 75% of these.....


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## Ninjamom (Apr 18, 2007)

Q: How do you tell an engineer, a physicist, and a mathematician apart?
A: Put them, one at a time, in a room with an empty bucket on a table, a sink, a stove, and curtains behind the stove which have caught fire.
- The engineer will run to the table, grab the bucket, fill it with water, throw the water on the flames, douse the fire, and leave a mess.
- The physicist will do some rough order of magnitude calculations, fill the bucket one third of the way up with water, throw the water on the fire, douse the flames, and think himself clever for solving what would have been a messy problem elegantly.
- The mathematician will walk in the room, observe the fire, observe the bucket and the sink, and comment, "The solution is trivial," then walk out, leaving the proof as an exercise to the student.

Q: If you are still not sure, how can you tell them apart?
A: Place them each, one at a time, in a room with a bucket filled with water on a table, a sink, a stove, and curtains behind the stove which have caught fire.
- The engineer will douse the fire with the water in the bucket, leaving a mess.
- The physicist will do some calculations, throw 1/3 of the water on the flames, and douse the fire.
- The mathematician will empty the water from the bucket into the sink, place the bucket back on the table, then announce, "The problem is now reduced to one previously solved."


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## JBrainard (Apr 18, 2007)

MBuzzy said:


> It makes me feel good about my nerdity that I only understand about 75% of these.....


 
I'm in the same boat, dude. I guess I've been away from school to long...


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## mrhnau (Apr 18, 2007)

Ninjamom said:


> Q: How do you tell an engineer, a physicist, and a mathematician apart?
> A: Put them, one at a time, in a room with an empty bucket on a table, a sink, a stove, and curtains behind the stove which have caught fire.
> - The engineer will run to the table, grab the bucket, fill it with water, throw the water on the flames, douse the fire, and leave a mess.
> - The physicist will do some rough order of magnitude calculations, fill the bucket one third of the way up with water, throw the water on the fire, douse the flames, and think himself clever for solving what would have been a messy problem elegantly.
> ...


cute 

And how does the Statistician handle the problem? Start more fires. "We need a larger sample size"


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## Ninjamom (Apr 18, 2007)

mrhnau said:


> 1. To approximate all problems to ideal cases........


 
A breeder hired an expert trainer, a biologist, and a physicist to help him improve the performance of his newest race horse.

Within one week, the Trainer had a written plan in place, outlining ideal exercise techniques, order of workout, mix of anaerobic/aerobic capacity training, recommendations for jockeys, recommendations for alternate jockeys, and a schedule for use of area tracks with different types of starting gates and field conditions.

Within two months, the biologist had an extensive research paper delivered, identifying the specific breed characteristics and peculiarities of this line of race horse, recommendations on indoor climate control, lighting, and types of music to be played, lists of recommended feed types and supplements, and a schedule for sleep and daylight conditions.

After six months, the breeder had not heard from the physicist, so he paid him a visit in his office.  

"So, " asked the breeder, "have you figured out how to make my horse run faster?"

The physicist answered, "No, but I've solved the problem for the case of a sphere!"


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## Ninjamom (Apr 18, 2007)

mrhnau said:


> And how does the Statistician handle the problem? Start more fires. "We need a larger sample size"


 Yeah!!


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## mrhnau (Apr 18, 2007)

exile said:


> Especially the bastard notations. There are about a zillion different ways to write vectors: standard boldface, italics with little arrows over their heads, German fraktur lower case, German fraktur lower case with little arrows over their heads...
> 
> ...and that's just standard US practice! I have a book on electromagnetic fields written by a couple of Russian physicists and if I didn't have the accompanying prose commentary in text, I would not recognize Maxwell's equations to save my life...
> 
> and when you get to QM stuff, it's hopeless. I have a theory: physicists love the way their mathematical derivations look on the page, and they want the fanciest, most recherché symbols they can find, all in one place, so they can leave copies of their latest _Phys. Review_ paper on their desks casually open to a double-page layout of choice reductions-to-solvable-form (using some of the other, ahem, _techniques of convenience_ mentioned in the PBoRs you provided), so that their colleagues popping in for a quick word will notice and be suitably impressed....



Dude! I know what you are talking about! QM was a handful... Another odd course was numerical analysis (eyeballs Arnisador: its all your fault!). I got a textbook from a bunch of german authors, and it was incomprehensible!


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## exile (Apr 18, 2007)

(supposedly true story)

The great Russian theoretician Landau runs into an experimentalist with some scattering results in graph form, snatches it out of his colleagues hand, eyeballs it a few seconds and announces, `Yes! Exactly as we would expect from current calculations of the strong coupling constant in second-order field quantization! You see?'

His colleague delicately replies `But Lev... you're looking at it upside down. The chart goes _this_ way!'

Landau turns the graph upside and without missing a beat, replies `Yes! Exactly as we would expect from current calculations of the strong coupling constant in second-order fieldquantization! You see?'


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## mrhnau (Apr 18, 2007)

exile said:


> (supposedly true story)
> 
> The great Russian theoretician Landau runs into an experimentalist with some scattering results in graph form, snatches it out of his colleagues hand, eyeballs it a few seconds and announces, `Yes! Exactly as we would expect from current calculations of the strong coupling constant in second-order field quantization! You see?'
> 
> ...



LOL! That's awesome!


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## Shaderon (Apr 18, 2007)

I'm not sure I understood most of that but I laughed anyway..... just proves I have SOME sheep still left in me.... "BAAAAA"


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## exile (Apr 18, 2007)

mrhnau said:


> LOL! That's awesome!



Yeah, you really gotta watch them physicists... sneaky devils!


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## Ping898 (Apr 18, 2007)

mrhnau said:


> Dude! I know what you are talking about! QM was a handful... Another odd course was numerical analysis (eyeballs Arnisador: its all your fault!). I got a textbook from a bunch of german authors, and it was incomprehensible!


 

I actually liked numerical analysis, it was Partial Diff EQ I couldn't stand!


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## jdinca (Apr 18, 2007)

The preamble made my head hurt...


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## exile (Apr 18, 2007)

Ping898 said:


> I actually liked numerical analysis, it was Partial Diff EQ I couldn't stand!



Really???? PDEs are really OK, because either (i) you can solve them with separation-of-variables tricks or (ii) they're insoluble. Either way, you're cool!


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## mrhnau (Apr 18, 2007)

exile said:


> Really???? PDEs are really OK, because either (i) you can solve them with separation-of-variables tricks or (ii) they're insoluble. Either way, you're cool!


or numerically

I actually liked numerical analysis, just the book I hated


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## exile (Apr 18, 2007)

mrhnau said:


> or numerically
> 
> I actually liked numerical analysis, just the book I hated



Right, actually a lot of physically important PDEs require numerical solutions... my problem with NA is that I kind of lose patience with the whole process. I kind of feel cheated. My conception of nature is that it runs on nice, mostly continuous functions and is generally describable by `pretty' solutions... a numberical analysis solution seems to imply that nature Herself hasn't got an elegant story here. That's one of the things that's so interesting about both classical and quantum physics&#8212;the great, profound general laws are usually expressible in PDEs like Poisson's Equation, or the general form of the wave equation, or Maxwell's equation or the eqs for current flow or osmosis, or Schrödinger's eq.... nice, well-behaved second order PDEs that typically can be solved by elementary methods like separation of variables. They typically yield lovely exponential solutions that make you feel, yes, it's all very tidy and neat. Even the Dirac equation, the first-order equation that predicted antimatter, has a nice analytic solution. But the ones that we just don't seem to be able to come up with general analytic solutions for and have to do NA for instead... I get a kind of vertigo... sort of, `what d'ya _mean_, "that's the best I can do"'???

Trouble is, of course, so many real physical situations wind up yielding only NA-type solutions....


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## Ping898 (Apr 18, 2007)

exile said:


> Really???? PDEs are really OK, because either (i) you can solve them with separation-of-variables tricks or (ii) they're insoluble. Either way, you're cool!


 
I just couldn't do them, now Intermediate Diff EQs I like   Chaos Theory


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## Rich Parsons (Apr 18, 2007)

mrhnau said:


> Only a few of you guys will get this one
> 
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> 
> ...


 

This is great!

I remember arguing with a couple of Ph D's who designed some new algorithm and software that just did not work. All of their models worked though! Their assumptiosn were always room temperature with no humidity, ... ,.

Explain to me just once when a vehicle in particular an engine or transmission will be under their initial constraints.


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## Rich Parsons (Apr 18, 2007)

Ninjamom said:


> Q: How do you tell an engineer, a physicist, and a mathematician apart?
> A: Put them, one at a time, in a room with an empty bucket on a table, a sink, a stove, and curtains behind the stove which have caught fire.
> - The engineer will run to the table, grab the bucket, fill it with water, throw the water on the flames, douse the fire, and leave a mess.
> - The physicist will do some rough order of magnitude calculations, fill the bucket one third of the way up with water, throw the water on the fire, douse the flames, and think himself clever for solving what would have been a messy problem elegantly.
> ...


 
Was the fire Gas or grease or electric?  the solution will depend upon the initial source, unless just putting out the flames on the curtains is the goal.

I do agree with the comment about the Mathematician and it is trival and let the student prove it.


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## Ninjamom (Apr 18, 2007)

Rich Parsons said:


> Was the fire Gas or grease or electric?  the solution will depend upon the initial source,.....


Drat!  Foiled once again by the initial conditions and the boundary values!


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## arnisador (Apr 18, 2007)

Lol!


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## Flying Crane (Apr 18, 2007)

mrhnau said:


> 5. To invoke the uncertainty principle whenever confronted by confused
> mathemeticians, chemists, engineers, psychologists, dramatists, and
> *andere schweinhund*.


 

Is that "any pighound"?


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## MBuzzy (Apr 19, 2007)

Assumptions are wonder.  With the right assumptions, ANY solution is correct!


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## Ninjamom (May 14, 2007)

My father just emailed me this one:

Every Friday after work, a mathematician went down to the Ice Cream Parlor, sat on the second-to-last stool, turned to the last stool, which was empty, and asked a girl, who wasn't there, if he could buy her an ice cream cone. The owner, who was used to the weird, local university types, always kept quiet. But when Valentine's Day arrived, and the mathematician made a particularly heart wrenching plea into empty space, curiosity got the better of him, and he said, "I apologize for my question, but surely you know there is NEVER a woman sitting in that last stool. Why do you persist in asking out empty space?"

The mathematician replied, "Well, according to quantum physics, empty space is never truly empty. Virtual particles come into existence and vanish all the time. You never know when the proper wave function will collapse and a girl might suddenly appear there."

The owner raised his eyebrows. "Really? Interesting. But couldn't you just ask one of the girls who comes here every Friday if you could buy HER a cone? Never know... she might say yes."

The mathematician laughed. "Yeah, right. How likely is THAT to happen?"


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## tellner (May 14, 2007)

A physicist came home, disheveled and unshaven at four in the morning to see his wife standing in the foyer. 

"Where were you?"

"Honey, I can explain everything. There was a group visiting from MIT and went out afterwards. One of them was a really pretty woman. We got to talking, and, and, and I... I... went back to her hotel room and we had sex."

"You lying son of a *****! You were in the lab working again!"


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## tellner (May 15, 2007)

Then there were the physicist, the engineer and the economist stranded on a desert island with a bunch of canned food and nothing else.

By the end of the first month the physicist had calculated the optimal trajectory and velocity to break open a #2 can, was well fed and had bulked up her throwing arm. 

The engineer had improvised a can opener out of the stuff in his pockets and was hard at work on a canoe.

The economist was a starved corpse. On the sand in front of him he had written "Assume a can opener..."


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