I took a
quantum mechanics class in
Edinburgh with
an
Italian professor, Vittorio DelDuca. It was quite a large class,
about 180 students. It was also a nice quantum class, the
previous year we had baby quantum mechanics, playing with
the
Schroedinger equation in various
potentials but this year
we were doing it properly,
operators,
Dirac notation,
generating functions the whole shebang. Vittorio would go
quite quickly through the material and most of the people in the
the class got lost pretty quickly. They would continually ask,
is this going to be in the exam,
is that going to be in the exam?.
Finally one day Vittorio just stopped and turned and look at us and he said
I used to teach in New York at NYU. I had a student there and he was
the most brilliant student I ever had, and he used to ask "is this going to be in the exam?"
, he was an engineer and that was ok.But you, you are physicists,....
sometimes it is just good to know
Then he went back to teaching.