Remembering our teachers

[HW Mueller]

How about quotables from our teachers instead, bert?
A start:

It must have been the first lecture in General Chemistry at the University of Denver (1961?). It was Fall. The prof. (can we name them??) lit a match, held it up and asked: What do you think has more heat, this match or the radiator (pointing to the radiators heating the lecture hall). We had a bit of trouble answering. He made it very clear that it was the radiators. It was his way of explaining extensivity and intensivity. In intensiveness the match was the winner, the temperature being much higher. The bulk (extensivity, total amount) of the radiators as well as their heat capacity was so much more that we were quite embarassed about having to think extensively about that ...(how many matches would it take to heat that water to 35° he asked further.)

This was the same prof. who, after explaining that if acetic acid was neutralized by NaOH one gets acetATE, asked what we will get when dropping NaOH on our shoes. We had no idea. His answer: Sodium shoeate.

[Uwe Neue]

Here is one from Istvan Halasz, a pioneer in HPLC and my teacher:

I am not interested in the stupid baby babble that I pronounced yesterday. Today, I got new results, and I know more and therefore am much smarter than I was yesterday.

[tom jupille]

I seem to have had a more cynical group of teachers. Ted Neubert at IIT would quote an earlier department chair: "PhDs are a dime a dozen . . .
. . . a good stockroom man is hard to find"

On a more relevant note, John Perry (who gave me his well-thumbed copy of Giddings' book), drummed in to my head: "Chromatography is about differences, not similarities. Like may dissolve like, but unlike often separates better."

[Russ]

I had a physics prof who, while talking about magnetic flux, forgot a letter when he was trying to say flux. It was a 7 am class and he talked in a monotone so if he had just continued, no one probably would have noticed.