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The Wisdom of Dr Bowler

But rising above them all is the inimitable Dr Bowler. This is a man who can lecture for an hour, producing a perfect copy of his lecture notes without ever looking at them. But it is not for his amazing memory that he is admired by his students. Rather, it is his idiosyncratic lecturing style that keeps us wondering what he'll say next. Collected here are some of his best quotes....

He can state the stunningly obvious without flinching:

• "That is what a fast breeder is. It has nothing to do with rabbits."
• "It is very nice to know theoretically that the sun can exist."

He has a colourful turn of phrase:

• "I am left-handed, although most people prefer to use the word 'sinister'."
• "If you were prepared to suspend disbelief for a while, disbelief should be flooding back right now."
• "If we want to be a little whimsical, imagine that S is inhabited by an observer, who traditionally rejoices in the name of `O'."
• "The core is radiating neutrinos like billy-o."
• "... a deeply bound electron cruelly removed from its hole."
• "Proof of pudding is in eating."

He has a firm grasp of the importance of safety:

• "That would be equivalent to instantaneous loss of control [of a nuclear reactor]. No. We don't want that."

He has a healthy disrespect for authority:

• "There are things which you need to know for the purposes of physics, and there are things you are required to know for the purposes of exams. These are not quite mutually exclusive."
• "Whether the term [barn] is approved by the International Union for the Protection of whatever, I don't know and I don't care."

He has novel ideas about teaching methods:

• "One of the things you should learn at your mother's knee is the integral of the density of states in a box of volume V."
• "We learn at our mother's knee what the relationship between these coordinates is."

He isn't as old as some lecturers:

• "I wasn't around at the time the universe was built."

He is quick with his maths:

• "It's the good old tan-theta substitution. Doing this in our heads, it is immediately obvious that..."

Perhaps because of this, he has a rather cavalier attitude to algebra:

• "I simply get sick of writing one-over-four-pi-epsilon-nought into all these goddam formulae and I'm just not gonna do it." (Note the tough-talking use of "gonna".)
• "There's a one-over-H-bar in there as well but I'm tired of writing it down."
• "I'll put the integral... there."
• "... equals H₂₁ - or maybe that should be H₁₂. I don't care."

And as a result, this statement came as a pleasant surprise:

• "That's one in which the calculation should actually be reliable."

He has a good grasp of magnitudes:

• "10^-20 is almost - but not quite - nothing."
• "These last forever: 10^-16 seconds or longer."

He is thoroughly competent:

• "I don't think I've said anything which is actually false."
• "We can put a great big beautiful tick next to that necessary condition."

He looks down on other disciplines:

• "Even mechanical engineers are capable of designing heavy machinery capable of responding on such a timescale." (Twenty minutes.)
• "Like most pictures in books, they're almost useless for giving you any idea of what's going on."

He doesn't let students snub him without comment:

• "If you want to be dramatic, that event could be the explosion of supernova 1987A in the Large Magellanic Cloud in late February 1987. If you don't want to be dramatic, that event could be the leaving of the theatre by someone just a moment ago."

He's always looking for ways to help the students:

• "Let's put little hats on those to tell us they're operators."
• "If you can't remember [this equation], you can derive it trivially." This was followed by several lines of working, including some seemingly random approximations. But no doubt some people would find this easier than memorizing an equation.

He manages to lecture despite the obstacles in his way:

• "They don't make the blackboards wide enough."
• "I'm close to the board and I'm wearing my long-distance glasses."
• "Some of you may be awake, even though I'm not."

He is into good science fiction:[1]

• "These silhouettes [two crude triangles, in line, pointing the same way] look rather familiar. They are, of course, Imperial Star Destroyers. Not the local ones, the big Corellian ships.[3] This one [the one in front] has been hijacked by the Rebel Alliance and carries Princess Leia. This one in hot pursuit has on board Darth Vader. And because of Lorentz contraction, she gets further and further from his evil clutches."

He is good at characterization:

• "Mr Newton is trying to collapse the star. Mr Pauli is trying to save it. Who wins? Mr Chandrasekhar is the referee."

He is on drugs:

• "We don't want O' (wearing a brass ring in her nose to add to her attractiveness) to be counting in coconuts."
• "That's a great big enormous E."

He likes to challenge his students:

• "Simple harmonic motion? No! Why should it be simple? Let us introduce this anharmonic term here..."

Describing a steel rod:

• "Let's make this rod a blimmin' fat one!" - (note lovely use of the word 'blimmin', a true master at work)

He is generous at Christmas:

• "And here I have the Bowler Bumper Fun Christmas Edition of Questions for you all!!!!"

His question sheets had a certain amount of lateral thinking attached to them. I gave a couple of them to the fellows in the department here and they found out that one question was actually the title of an Oxford thesis! I kid you not...

We got Bowler in his third year of lecturing (1992), just as he was coming out of his shell, so to speak. The first year he ever lectured, he didn't face the audience *at all*, preferring the company of a thin cloud of chalk dust. In the second year he performed a most stylish manoeuvre. The lecture started with him walking into the room and without breaking his stride, he placed his coat and unopened briefcase at the right hand side of the theatre. He then proceeded to dictate the whole lecture, walking steadily back and forth along the front row, never looking up.

At the end of the lecture, he finished the last sentence with "...and that concludes today's lecture." and at that moment without breaking stride, he picked up his coat and briefcase and walked uninterrupted out of the lecture theatre.

He got a round of applause for that one.

Notes:

1. Trumping Dr Taylor's[2] Star Trek s**** by a mile. Treaty of b***** Shalimar, indeed.
2. Senior member of OUCofA, as it happens. This site is as incestuously interlinked as hypertext was always meant to be.
3. Not an exact Star Wars quote, but pretty close.[4]
4. Don't you just love footnotes?[5]
5. Although this may be overdoing it.