I have a question. How did he write at the top of the board? I don’t see any sliding panels and I don’t see a ladder.
@Rhett: It’s a dream sequence in the movie.
My dream is to teach in a classroom with sliding panels, but my institution has other dreams. Not only do the current classrooms not have them, but the new lecture hall they just build doesn’t have ANY sort of blackboards or whiteboards.
As long as we’re on the topic, I’ve got a physics-teaching question about the movie that image was taken from (A Serious Man).
At some point in the movie the protagonist (a physicist at a teaching university, awaiting his tenure decision) is saying writing the following:
The square of the uncertainty in p is equal to
the expectation value of (p squared)
minus
the (expectation value of p) squared.
This caused me to laugh, as I was just teaching quantum this year, and I remember saying the same thing, but always I make a big deal out of putting pauses in the sentence to denote the parenthesis.
However, when the actor wrote the equation on the board, I could have sworn that he wrote the first and second terms identically (and hence incorrectly). After the next cut, however, he was standing in front of the board with them written correctly!
Was I suffering some Milk-Dud-induced hallucination the first time? Or did the actor screw up but the on-set physicist corrected things between takes?
Or is this something the Coen brothers put in intentionally, what with one of the themes of the movie being uncertainty?
I have a question. How did he write at the top of the board? I don’t see any sliding panels and I don’t see a ladder.
@Rhett: It’s a dream sequence in the movie.
My dream is to teach in a classroom with sliding panels, but my institution has other dreams. Not only do the current classrooms not have them, but the new lecture hall they just build doesn’t have ANY sort of blackboards or whiteboards.
As long as we’re on the topic, I’ve got a physics-teaching question about the movie that image was taken from (A Serious Man).
At some point in the movie the protagonist (a physicist at a teaching university, awaiting his tenure decision) is saying writing the following:
The square of the uncertainty in p is equal to
the expectation value of (p squared)
minus
the (expectation value of p) squared.
This caused me to laugh, as I was just teaching quantum this year, and I remember saying the same thing, but always I make a big deal out of putting pauses in the sentence to denote the parenthesis.
However, when the actor wrote the equation on the board, I could have sworn that he wrote the first and second terms identically (and hence incorrectly). After the next cut, however, he was standing in front of the board with them written correctly!
Was I suffering some Milk-Dud-induced hallucination the first time? Or did the actor screw up but the on-set physicist corrected things between takes?
Or is this something the Coen brothers put in intentionally, what with one of the themes of the movie being uncertainty?
Not an hallucination. It’s listed as a goof, though a possibly deliberate error, on imdb
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1019452/goofs