Hell Week!

Oh man, it was! This past week was very exhausting. On Tuesday and Thursday I presented some demonstrations about Electromagnetism to kids from junior high through high school. It was fun though. I had a great time telling kids about the Electric and Magnetic Field. On Wednesday night we saw the documentary The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene. I think it is pretty good, but to some point it sells the ideas of String Theory as something like a new religion or dogma. I want to learn this and know where all those crazy membranes come from. Today, Friday, my fellow SPS members drove to the center of the Puerto Rican island, to a town called Morovis. There we gave lots of demonstrations to high school students.

It is a dirty job, but someone has to do it...

Scientology? Whatever!!!

Lately I have been reading a lot about Scientology. There is a controversy going on now about Scientology and South Park. I find all this Scientology stuff so cool. My friends and I have had such a great time reading all the Wikipedia articles about this religion and its doctrine.

I believe that it can be shown, mathematically, that a scientologist is equivalent to a Star Wars believer.

(Since Scientology is so serious about their stuff, maybe I just became one more of its enemies...)

Electromagnetic Field Quantization

One of my Quantum Mechanics professor did a really nice derivation last week. He started with the four Maxwell's Equation and applied the Coulomb Gauge. Then he develop this long process aiming at the quantization of the electromagnetic field. It was pretty nice. Sadly, this coming week I may not be able to go to class since I have to work on the preparations for the Physics Week.

(I saw this professor in the beach surfing on Wednesday... They too have lives!)

The 2006 Physics Week

Next week (March 27 through 30) the SPS in Mayagüez is celebrating the Physics Week. We are getting lots of school visits on Tuesday and Thursday. On Wednesday night we are watching the documentary The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene. On Thursday night we have the Physics Awards. I am in charge of some of the preparations and I also have to do some demonstrations to the little kids. Should be pretty good.

Julio

Julio is my Math of Modern Science II professor.

There are everyday humans beings, and there are special persons. Some special persons are good, kind persons that one will always remember for their help and support. There are also jerks and assholes, that one will also remember for their pain and work they brought to one lives. Julio is kinda a neutral medium. Let me explain.

In my opinion Julio cannot be measured by this. His class cannot be understood in any way. He talks and sometimes mumbles. His "handwriting" is very bad. His handouts are poorly prepare. Julio does not have a good, clear way to communicate with students. He lives in a very different and far away world.

He graduated from Stony Brook University. This is the place I will go for my Ph.D. Julio is also one of the few who works with Geometry in my college. And he appears to know a lot about the history of mathematics. Sadly, nowadays he just reads the textbook. Maybe old age has made him forget all that he learned someday, since he just copies, word by word, the textbook on the board. He was lecturing one and got stuck in a problem. He realized the textbook had different notation and decided to stop the class cuz he had to prepare the problem again.

For me it is sad to see Julio. His office is very disorganized. Nobody in his classes pays attention to him (including me...). He also has a lot of health problems, hence he often misses work. Rumor has it that he lives alone. It is sad, because I can sense some enthusiasm in his part to teach mathematics. Is sad that the way he tries to communicate it is not the best. I guess that after all, he tries.

Julio will always be an example and will always be remembered.

Interaction Picture and S-Matrix

Besides the Schrödinger and Heisenberg pictures, there is a third picture in quantum mechanics. This is a time evolution of states and operators were both objects have time dependence. This time dependence is use for interaction processes and the like. With this time dependence one can find an object that givesinformationo on interactions, and given an initial state that object can give you the possible outcomes and probabilities. This object is called the S-Matrix.

Today I got to talked about this in my class. I felt better prepared than the time I talked about Plane Wave Solutions to the Dirac Equation. It was pretty awesome.

The ringing

Lately everywhere I go there is a phone ringing. They all ring for a long period of time. My neighbor's, at college, in the street. Maybe I am not noticing something...

Forever!

My MATLAB programs are taking forever to run! Hope my laptop is ok...

I never thought of solving 100x100 or 200x200 systems. Those crazy experimentalist and their big chunks of data!!!

Mathematics vs. Physics

While my presentation of the AQM class, an interesting question came up. My professor claimed that since Mathematics is based on logic, the sole fact that a theory is mathematicaly correct does not imply that it is physicaly correct. Nature is not logic. For example, one can work on Klein-Gordon theory and get all the mathematics correct, but the numbers are wrong.

This made me think about who would be right, the theorist that belive that nature and mathematics have differences because of their incapacity of accurate measurements; or the experimentalist that claim that nature is not logic and some of it aspect cannot be explained by mathematics.

This, for me, is indeed a deep question

Plane Wave Solutions of Dirac Equation

Today is my turn to present topics in the Advanced Quantum Mechanics course. I'll be covering Lorentz covariance of the probability current of the Dirac equation and finding plane wave solutions. Yay!

Forget about Seminar!

My part on undergraduate seminar is over. Yay! Ican forget about it and work on more "relevant" issues (ahem, Dirac Theory, etc.)

SUNY @ Stony Brook!!!!

This past two days have been surreal. I received a call from a guy at Stony Brook who said I was accepted! I am so happy! I am still waiting for official notifications, but still it is very exciting!

Weekend Warrior 2

I have noticed now that mostly I think of all the stuff to do over the weekend. Already for this weekend I have to:

1. Organize notes for the classes I am giving on AQM.
2. Get SPS candies.

Oh well...