Burdens Lifted: Rejoice!

My direct supervisor is this really erudite (although I can't say he's a scholar, haha, for reasons only those in our course will know) and well-learned Irish man called Professor David Logan (Coulson Professor, Department of Physical and Theoretical Chemistry, Oxford):

Professor David Logan, Coulson Professor,
Oxford University, Chemistry Department

He's really really nice and funny, and I quite like him actually, haha!

And I've some of my favourite quotes of his to share with you today:

The Mickey Mouse Conjecture

"... and this you see here, is the Van der Waals equation of state, completely derived from a simple ansatz via a mean field theory. Of course, in your undergraduate days, you might have attended some mickey mouse undergraduate courses that gave you a mickey mouse derivation of it. But as you see, we've derived it completely from first principles here..."

The You-Should've-Known-It-Since-You-Were-Five Statement

"... and here we know that the result given in the classical limit when we move away from quantum statistics simply collapses to the simple Boltzmann factor - of course, this is simply what we have always known, that the molecular partition function raised to the power of N and divided by N! gives us the partition function, which of course, can be derived from the particle-in-a-big-box energy levels, which you all have known since the age of five..."

The It's-Stupid-But-It-Is-Ingenious Approach

"... and you might ask, are we crazy? Why would we do such a silly thing? Well it's silly, but as it turns out, it allows us to generalize the n-state-Potts model to a plethora of phenomena, like the adsorption of krypton on graphite..."

The It's-Just-A-PhD-Thesis Statement of Faith

"... and we shall now go through the Ising Model, which of course, is simple! After all it was just his PhD thesis!"

The I-Am-Not-Having-Examinations Proclaimation of Joy But That's Because Tutorials Are Hard

YYK: "Professor! Are we going to be examined for this module?"

Professor: "Oh don't worry, there's not going to be an examination... how're the Problem Sets?"

YYK: "They're long!"

Professor: "Oh yes, I expect you to take a week or two with each Problem Set."

My Professor's a lovely fellow, and I'm always kept entertained by his jokes in class, haha!

And yes, there are no examinations for Statistical Mechanics, thank God so so so much! :)