Boulder School 2025: Quotes from #quote on Slack
#quotes
Various quotes from the lectures submitted to the BSS2025 Slack group.
July 1st
Nandogopal Manoj
"You cannot split a log with a screwdriver; it is not the fault of the screwdriver." - Dmitri Maslov
Josephine Yu
"We're going to probe this medium in a way that no experimentalist ever could" - Senthil
"You can ask me about that if I'm violating your favorite family member" - Steve Kivelson
"Last time, I put the fear of God into you against using the RTA" - Dmitri Maslov
July 2nd
Junkai Dong
"I am a simple person" - Senthil
Archisman
"I don't do exotic things" - Senthil
"The calculaitons are trivial" - Dmitrii Maslov
"So, we have a real problem in our hand. If we cannot explain Fermi liquid, we have something to worry about. " - Maslov
Felipe Reyes Osorio
"Maybe later we will do exotic things" - Senthil
Josephine Yu
"Maybe I am weak because I am doing perturbation theory" - Maslov
Akshat Pandey
But also, "I am not weak. But I am doing perturbation theory" - Maslov
Friday, July 4th
Junkai Dong
"later later later" - Senthil
Yiming Wang
"Steve's theorem: Real materials are more disordered than we expect (cf. Anderson's theorem)"- Steve Kevlson
Vlad
"Gaussian integrals are not the only things we can solve. We can also solve two-level systems."- Steve Kivelson
Archisman
"You need to pick your experimental friends carefuly" - N. Peter Armitage
"AI is not going to replace theoretical physicists for at least three years" - Steve Kivelson
Saturday, July 5
Bo Zou
"If there were strong interaction effects, there would be strong interaction effects." - Steven Kivelson
Monday, July 7
Jaewon
"If you close your eyes a little bit you get what you want to get" - Chubukov
"Absence noted" - Lucas
Tuesday, July 8
Nandagopal Manoj
"deltaalphabetadeltagammadeltaminusdeltaalphadeltadeltagammabeta" - Chubukov
Tixuan Tan
"There are many theorists here, you should appreciate how much time your experimental colleagues spent in making these devices" - Lee
Wednesday, July 9
Jaewon
"Short answer yest. Long answer let's talk" - Chubukov
"Before you start your joke" - Akshat
"More people should stick with bule and forget about the red" - MacDonald
Marcus B
"Now we dim the lights and start asking real questions" - Chubukov
Thursday, July 10
Joesphine Yu
"Despite my every effort, we couldn't keep democracy down" - Leo
Junkai Dong
"I know how to sum up diagrams. I will sum up infinite series of diagrams. I will take 3 hours to sum up the diagrams... but we can do this in 2 minutes" - Chubukov
"...In fact I did but I don't know why." (shortly following)
Archisman
"(We'll see) why good guy becomes larger than bad guy. By good guy I mean lambda 2 and bad guy means lambda 1." - Andrey Chubukov
"Why do these things happen? For that, we need to look into the elephant in the room ... Lambda 4!" - Chubukov
"I want to show simply, how to get attraction" - Chubukov
"... coolest dude Piers Coleman who put in his book some version of this." - Chubukov
Aaditya Panigrahi
“You just take a bad guy, convert it into a good guy. Imagine that!” -Chubukov; to which Archisman replied "Before that, he said, 'This is the power of spin density wave.'."
Akshat Pandey
"Whoopsies" - Chubukov
Jaewon
"With this simple trick, you can ..." - Chubukov
"I have five minutes with translates into ten." - Chubukov
"You ask your best friend, computer" - Chubukov
Andrew Hardy
not a quote, but Chubukov saying something incredible and Jaewon immediately reaching for his laptop is an equally iconic part of the school so far.
Friday, July 11th
Emil Pellett
"What is small enough in physics is decided by god." - Allan MacDonald
"There are three types of materials: magnets, superconductors, and vegetables." - Allan MacDonald
"You have a weekend, just write a paper for Monday." - Chubukov
Archisman
"I leave it as an exercise that next week you send me a preprint of why this is a superconductor" - Allan MacDonald
Monday, July 14
Nandagopal Manoj
"Even more collective" - Luca Delacretaz
Jaewon
"He's smiling because he's watching the sunset. A rare event in his life." - Levitov
"Quasiparticles will be horses dressed with horses and antihorses" - Levitov
Archisman
"This was to demonstrate that theoretical physics is useful for something." - Levitov
Tuesday, July 15
Tixuan Tan
"No, it's dark magic" - Debanjan
Wednesday, July 16
Peleg Emanuel
"We don't get the bound we want, we get the bound we deserve" - Luca
Jaewon
"Just academically" - Akshat
Andrew Hardy
"As my friend who wants to annoy the audience says, 'it follows from analysis'." - Levitov
Archisman
"Are you asking if there is a superconductor where the entire spectral weight goes to the delta function? That would be phenomenal. This is homework for you" - Debanjan
"You don't need to use words" - Levitov
Emile Pangburn
"Yes I need to do the right thing" - Levitov; Archisman replied, "The right thing is what we derive." - Levitov
Tixuan Tan
"You don't need to apologize since there is no specialists here" - Levitov
Junkai Dong
"I am writing horrible expressions just to impress you" - Levitov
Andrew Hardy
But it is also true
Archisman
"I'm writing horrible expressions just to impress you. But it's also true..... Initially we guessed it without understanding where it comes from." - Levitov
"It is not new. At least, not new to me" - Levitov (talking about renormalization of cyclotron frequencies by Fermi liquid's Landau parameters)
"Tomorrow I want to talk about something else. I am fed up with hydro." - Levitov
Thursday, July 17th
Jaewon
"This is the best evidence! That's not to mean it's good. It's the best 'yet'." - Sachdev
"He also got the Nobel prize but this is not important." - Levitov
Junkai Dong
"If you are gonna make any progress in physics, reduce it to Hartree Fock"
Rafael Alvaro Flores Calderon
"If you want to make progress in physics do Hartree-Fock." - Subir
Akshat Pandey
"Next time it falls I’ll wrap it around my neck." - Levitov
Archisman
"In any experiment there are statistics and systematics. And almost always the systematics are dominating." - Daniel Dessau
Friday, July 18th
Andrew Hardy
Anarchy: "You have some parameters in your theory.", Subir - "Everything is free"
Will Liang
"Everyone's on this paper." - Subir
Matthew O'Brien
"I don't know if I agree with you" - Akshat
"Fine" - Subir
Jaewon
"Last one" - Akshat
"Sure" - Subir
"I know you guys theorists work really had too, but ..." - Minhyea
"You think I didn't think about that?" - Minhyea
"Never (Give up)" - Levitov
Amogh Anakru
"I guess my computer just wants to go to lunch" - Minhyea
Tixuan Tan
"Trump cancelled my funding，after the initial shock，I start to enjoy it" - Subir
Monday, July 21st
Amogh Anakru
"It may not be convergent but it's still exact" - Umang
Luke Kim
"This is an abstraction on Mondrian. We can see that it is a product state." - Pollmann
Archisman
"I hope this will be all whimsical and fun." - Andy Lucas
"Let's try to avoid this theorem." - Andy Lucas
"If I lose these, maybe I am not really doing physics anymore." - Andy Lucas
Junkai Dong
"physicists are kind of annoying" - Andy Lucas; Archisman replied, "'If you are told this is the way nature works, you want to find a counterexample to show off'." - Andy Lucas
Benjamin Sappler
"Formally this is a bit sus." - Andy Lucas
Tuesday, July 22nd
Josephine Yu
"can you explain again the point of introducing the pants." - Katherine; Archisman replied,
; Luke Kim replied, "'Funnily enough the official term for that is a pair of pants lol'. See, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair_of_pants_(mathematics)."
Archisman
"Some people have a reaction that this has nothing to do with reality. But I think that is a very misguided reaction" - Mike Hermele
Thursday, July 24th
Archisman
Frank Pollmann - "... how I do it."
Siri - "Could you say that again?"
Frank - "Let me say that again."
Akshat Pandey
"You have to find a way how to get the dog into the quantum computer." - Pollmann; Josephine Yu replied,
Friday, July 25th
Andrew Hardy
Pollman: "the advantage of the fuzzy sphere regularization is that, well, it is on a sphere."; Da-Chuan Lu replied, "You can have more flavors if you got the fuzzy onion: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.14205, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.00576."
Tixuan Tan
“What problem do you find most interesting？looking forward” “check out my paper on arxiv”—Leo
Saturday, July 26
Andrew Hardy
up for debate if it applies to physics, but seems a fitting end to the month
