Great moments in physics writing

I typically don’t do this, but I’m lifting this whole post (because it’s so brilliant) from here, the (not very frequently updated) blog of one Tom J., a CM physics grad student at Yale:

The award for best use of the word “potty” in a graduate physics textbook goes to Binney et al., The Theory of Critical Phenomena, page 260:

“‘Well, come on,’ you will be saying. ‘Who are you trying to fool? This argument is clearly potty. For surely, if lambda-hat diverges near the critical point and g-hat does not, there is no way it can be legitimate to make the substitution (lambda-hat goes to g-hat) in the vicinity of T_c? The expansion is divergent, and no amount of shuffling of variables is going to change this.’”