After fiddling with Blogger and Wordpress for a while I have decided to stop using Blogger and import this blog to Wordpress. I believe that Wordpress is sexier since it has LaTeX support. So this blog will remain like this forever.
The new home of QC is here: http://melvineloy.wordpress.com .
In this post I will try to convince myself that I have a lot of stuff to do and that I should start working ASAP.
Merideth left today. This brings an end to four weeks of rest and relaxation. I should not feel bad about anything since I am able to say I have done a lot of stuff, including
And maybe more... But sometimes I felt guilty, like if I should have been doing something more productive related to me learning some physics during the summer.
It was not all fun, since I spent some time discussing some physics with my girlfriend. She was thinking about (as she calls it) the "rain drop problem". The idea is to calculate the optimal speed a person should have in order to minimize wetness under falling rain. My girlfriend argues that running causes some sort of effective cross section and one calculate the amount of drops one encounters while running a specific distance. I am trying to convince her to post her result here so stay tuned.
I have the rest of the week and next week to work on stuff. That stuff includes reading some of Srednicki's QFT and trying to go through some section of Carroll's relativity book. I kind of want to read the appendices on non-coordinate basis and sub-manifolds and hypersurfaces. Hopefully some of this will happen.
Another thing on my mind are next semester's courses. I am currently registered in field theory, relativity and group theory. This might be to much to bite on, but I need to take something touching on breadth, so I also registered on graduate laboratory. But I have been thinking that this lab course might be REALLY to much. So an option would be to take a course on atomic physics that will count for breadth and then take the lab class during the spring term.
Yet one more thing on mind is the comprehensive examination. I have the opportunity to take that exam this coming September. The thing is, I AM NOT PREPARED FOR THAT. So I could try reading a lot of stuff during the remaining days, but I really do not think that is going to take me anywhere. There is a lot of stuff to cover in those exams, most of the stuff that I do not have any idea.
So I believe that the best course of action would be to take that atomic physics course, and really try the comprehensive exam during the January offering and take the graduate laboratory during the spring term, along with field theory 2, another breadth course and maybe Warren Siegel's advanced field theory.
A minor concern is getting a new computer, and the money for it. The question would be, another Dell or a new Apple?
Yesterday I went through some of the comprehensive examinations. In total I had three exams, which meant 36 questions. Out of those, I only had a good idea about one of them: a question about covariant derivatives and the curvature tensor. In fact, I do not think I can work out that problem...
Since I've noticed there were so many questions about particle physics, and I do not know much about particles in general, so I tried reading some of Huang's Quarks, Leptons and Gauge Fields. It is a bit full of jargon, so I have a feeling I need another good source.
Besides particles, I have not being up to much. Just watching lots of ALIAS and Netflix. Oh well...
Today I finished reading the last book of the Harry Potter series. I am happy to say that none of my predictions turned out to happen. It was a good book. The epilogue was kind of disappointing, but anyways. I guess now my amusement will come from Netflix...
I cannot wait anymore to read the last book of the Harry Potter series. Almost 2 hours and 25 minutes! I guess I will not blog now for a while. Tomorrow I will go to Central Park for some outside reading. Should be fun!
In the meantime I have been reading an article on torsion gravity. It is kind of interesting, since the article claims that torsion might be important to understand spin angular momentum in general relativity theory. More on this later.
