Coming from a professor, I, myself, would always presume that there was a worthwhile lesson in those kinds of short remarks. It sounds like they were possibly s

Coming from a professor, I, myself, would always presume that there was a worthwhile lesson in those kinds of short remarks. It sounds like they were possibly steering students away from questions that could not be resolved empirically, which would place them outside the scope of physics; those kinds of questions could also be debated endlessly and derail the class.