Studying physics is not always fun and games and winning Nobel Prizes.

Firstly, there's the maths. You actually have to know more maths to do physics, than you have to for maths. In first year physics they'll assume you know what surface integrals are; in second year physics they'll assume you know all about Hilbert spaces; and in third year they'll assume you've remembered everything you've ever learnt and are able to use it.

Then there's the language. You have to know at least five different languages:
1. English. This is to communicate with fellow classmates.
2. Lecturerese. This is so you can understand your lecturer, who will speak in a dialect not unlike, but subtly different from, normal English. Lecturerese has never been mastered.
3. Greek. By your second semester of physics you will have learned the whole Greek alphabet and even learned to draw letters like xi (ξ) and zeta (ζ).
4. Extended English. This is a subset of the english language exclusive to nerds, and includes phrases like "orthogonal diagonalisation" and "the backwards triangle inequality of Lorentzian geometry, allowing the hyperbolic angle to be defined between two forward-pointing timelike vectors".
5. Mad Mathematical Shorthand. A simple example will suffice:

This reads: ' "xn converges to L as n approaches infinity" means that for every ε greater than zero, there exists an integer N such that taking n greater than N means the absolute value of (xn - L) is less than ε.'

And then, once you've mastered all that plus the actual physics, your lecturer will give you a set of notes in which he takes dot products with scalars, partial derivatives of functions of one variable, and defines theta and phi in spherical coordinates as being the 'other way around'.

Yep, physics sure can suck sometimes. But you're not the only one going through it. That's why nerdling is creating an archive of the lecture notes of despair, a collection of lecture notes sent in by readers and the editorial staff. Don't hide your anguish - send it to ubernerdling@yahoo.com.au and let the rest of us laugh at it.

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