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.
So.. that's why I never tidy up my room. I'm just too smart!
All we have to decide is what to do with the entropy that is given us.
To quote The Star Child, "What, you haven't planned that far ahead?"
Life is a temporary win over it, just enjoy it while you can.
Well 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.
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."
So... is Goldstein still around or did he...?
Don't worry, he's alive: His wiki page
Apparently still alive at 85: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Goodstein
There's still time
We are all gas with a slightly denser particle distribution.
🔫
We all are vast collections of harmonic oscillators.
Ah yes, joke #3
Thank you for this, it was new to me
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.
I 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.
Electrons, why do you behave differently when I'm looking at you?
Because you're touching them with your eyes
Weed out the riff-raff who can't hack it
Boltzmann is "riff-raff" now?!? I get what you're going for, but c'mon.
To quote twitch chat: "monkaS"
This is beautiful and I must study this subject now.
You know; so I have an excuse.
I dunno, I usually open a textbook by turning over the front cover 🥁
Why do we have a 🌫️ emoji instead of a cymbal? It would compliment the drum emoji so well.
Statistical mechanics is so fucking brutal \m/
...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-
Yeah 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."
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!
you could always just stop studying that field.
So you are just going to live forever?
Of course, but then the book isn't for you.
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.
Thanks Thiccle Rick
does statistical mechanics help explain how often this gets posted here? 🙃
