Physics professors have a charming sense of humour by Anna H. '14

I’M DONE WITH FALL CLASSES! and am now back home in London, doing British things like drinking tea, spelling humor ‘humour,’ and hiding indoors from the rain.

One of the classes I just finished taking is 8.033, Relativity. Relativity is a great class to teach, if you enjoy designing problems that involve infinitely stacked carts, people running at 80% of the speed of light, people falling into black holes, and people stretching out into strands of spaghetti. Our professor obviously had a good time writing our problem sets, so I thought I would share some particularly amusing excerpts with you.

Enjoy!

(The point of the problem was to show that this is not the case, using the fact that velocities don’t add linearly at relativistic speeds.)

(Again, the problem was to prove that your uncle is in fact crazy.)

Cutest observer ever:

A note on one of our psets, which refers to “Professor Alan Guth,” father of inflationary cosmology and Anna H.’s academic advisor :D

And now, onto black holes!

Assigning problems from the textbook:

And from our final pset, which was optional and intended for final exam review:

^ That’s what I like to see on a problem set. :)