Dear Professor,

Dear Professor,

I sometimes think that physics professors
don't even live in the real world.
It's like you live
in some hypothetical world.
Do you ever look out of your window
and see a hypotheses?

I love this question because I think it's the reverse. I think most of us non-physicists live in a hypothetical world, or rather a world made up of misconceptions about how things actually work. I suspect that physics professors have to spend a lot of time trying to get their students see what they are actually seeing.

I remember a drawing class in college in which the professor had us draw without looking at the page. He wanted us to learn to look, really look, and trace what we saw, as it is, not as we think it is or should appear.

To quote Einstein:

"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."

Einstein also said:

"The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility."

Museum of Beautiful Humans

Another Climate Change Comic

A first post for a week of Climate Change Comics

Two Types

Dear Professor

Dear Professor,

I was on this very small airplane
from Charlotte to Richmond,
and this XL man sat in the back
until the stewardess made him move
to the middle "to balance the plane."

I was pretty nervous
when he went to the bathroom.
But the stewardess said not to worry . . .
as long as he doesn't stay in there too long.
How long would that be?

The Fiddler from the Boonies

The Fiddler of Dooney
by W.B. Yeats

WHEN I play on my fiddle in Dooney,
Folk dance like a wave of the sea;
My cousin is priest in Kilvarnet,
My brother in Moharabuiee.

I passed my brother and cousin:
They read in their books of prayer;
I read in my book of songs
I bought at the Sligo fair.

When we come at the end of time,
To Peter sitting in state,
He will smile on the three old spirits,
But call me first through the gate;

For the good are always the merry,
Save by an evil chance,
And the merry love the fiddle
And the merry love to dance:

And when the folk there spy me,
They will all come up to me,
With ‘Here is the fiddler of Dooney!’
And dance like a wave of the sea.

Dear Professor,

After great pain a dismal feeling comes

Emily Dickinson:

After great pain a formal feeling comes--
The nerves sit ceremonious like tombs;
The stiff Heart questions--was it He that bore?
And yesterday--or centuries before?
The feet, mechanical, go round
A wooden way
Of ground, or air, or ought,
Regardless grown,
A quartz contentment, like a stone.

This is the hour of lead
Remembered if outlived,
As freezing persons recollect the snow--
First chill, then stupor, then the letting go.

Two Legs . . .

I was having trouble drawing legs with my mouse. Not a problem I have with a pencil, but . . .
So I thought this one up to test out some legs.

Dear Professor,

I thought I'd start rotating in some physics comics -- based on the emails and comments students give my husband and friends who are professors.

It always amazes me to read student emails . . .

Torso of Marilyn Monroe

Apologies for this one. But it is what I always think of when I read . . .

Archaic Torso of Apollo
by Rilke

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

A Certain Kind of Sickness

There's a certain slant of light,
On winter afternoons,
That oppresses, like the weight
Of cathedral tunes.

Emily Dickinson

Dear Professor Do You Live in a Vacuum?

can now be ordered on Amazon. It's a collection of poems based on emails, comments, and notes students sent to my husband, a professor of physics.

When I first started collecting these, I sent a few to Lawrence Krauss at Case Western Reserve University, and he encouraged me to put them together in a book. I had this fantasy then of a mini-book of physics humor--and if it ever took off, I'd use it to promote science education . . . (Oh, such fantasies I have from time to time . . . )


Here's a sample:

Dear Professor,

You gave us that problem
about driving down the freeway at 60 MPH
in a VW bug and hitting a truck
that was driving at 75 MPH,
and you wanted to know what happened next . . .
I figured the answer was simple.
Drive a truck from now on.