Tom Eagar quantum mechanics final exam revelation (Kistiakowsky)

Autobiographical. Used to introduce Tom's "guess the outline" theory of teaching — only one or two themes per lecture, the rest is fluff.

I wanted to tell you the story about the revelation I had in my junior year here. I took a course, Introduction to Quantum Mechanics. It was an elective for me. I didn't have to take this course in the physics department, but I was told that for electronic materials, you needed to know quantum mechanics. I was a materials scientist, so I took it. The lecturer was Vera Kistiakowsky. She was the first full woman professor of physics at MIT. Her father won the Nobel Prize at Harvard in chemistry. Vera was very smart, family very accomplished. She always brought her great big dog to class. She was a very nice woman, and I was flunking the class. I always got 15s out of a hundred when the average on the homework sets was 85. I just didn't have a clue what was going on.