Physics humor

I'm not doing homework this afternoon on account of nice weather (I was just out juggling) and I needed to kill a few hours before I head off to the theater for work this evening. As a consequence, I've decided to add some more pictures.

When I was buying my books at the beginning of the semester I noticed that the back cover of one of them (see exhibit A) had a sleeping cat on it. "Aw... how cute," I thought. I turned it over to reveal a non-sleeping cat on the front cover (see Exhibit B).

I stopped to think for a minute: "Sleeping cat... awake cat... Quantum textbook...Aha!" So, of course the cat is supposed to be Schrodinger's Cat. The story of Schrodinger's cat for anyone unfamiliar with it is that Schrodinger was making fun of the interpretation of quantum mechanics in which one believes that a particle doesn't have a position until one goes to measure it. So he came up with a thought experiment where there's a cat in a box with a sealed vial of poison gas, a radioactive isotope and a hammer. If, during the time of the experiment, the isotope decays a mechanism will detect this and cause the hammer to break the vial thus releasing the poison gas and killing the feline. There is some known probability that the isotope will decay during the experiment, but there's no way to tell whether it has or not in one particular period of time without measuring the outcome (i.e. opening the box and checking on the cat). So Schrodinger pointed out that we would have to say that the cat was in a superposition of dead and alive states and it wouldn't decide which one to be until the box was opened. Clearly, Schrodinger had a warped sense of humor.

So getting back to my book, this means that the cat on the back isn't actually sleeping. It's dead. I have a textbook with a picture of a dead cat on it; it makes me laugh whenever I think about it. Clearly, I'm a physics major.

On Why Mathematica is Awesome...

Or how I finished my quantum pset in under six hours.

So there was this one problem with this really annoying 3-part integral... and it had lots of constants to keep track of and positive and negative signs (and we all know how awesome I am at keeping track of those). After ten minutes of scribbling work of decreasing legibility I decided I was fighting a losing battle. Rather than staying the course I plugged the whole thing into Mathematica and got the answer out in less than a second. With all the constants in the right places. And the negative signs all right. Woohoo! Then I spent two and a half hours getting coffee with friends and don't feel even slightly guilty about it.

Wow... that was cool

So my hellishly busy day from hell is almost done. After Mechanics, I sprinted back to my dorm to shower and grab lunch and then sprinted back to Pupin for lab. At some point I may explain some of the experiment I'm working on, but the important facts at this moment are that lab is 4 hours long and in an un-air conditioned room with a bunch of heat-generating electronics and no openable windows (they're very old and technically they do open a little bit, but not enough to get a breeze). So much for my having showered.

Anyway, my lab partner didn't show up, so the professor in charge spent several hours helping me to set stuff up. Then he had to go to a meeting or seminar or something but he felt bad about leaving me by myself in an overheated room, so he left money with the TA to give me to get soda. Sweet!

Now to enjoy my victory Dr. Pepper before going to work...

Tired, oh so tired

Wow. So it turns out that spending about 18 hours across two days doing physics homework without making significant progress (or at least not feeling like progress has been made) is kind of draining. I learned this fall semester last year but obviously forgot in the ensuing 8 months because here I am surprised at how much I feel like watching TV instead of doing more work. Perhaps part of the problem is the 3 hours (!) I spent outside juggling in the hot sun without enough water... whatever. And tomorrow I get to look forward to:

10-10:50 - Strength Training
11-12:15 - Mechanics
(forty-five minutes off in which to shower and grab lunch)
1-5 - Lab
(two hours in which to recover, eat dinner, and get ready for work)
7-11 - Work
11-?? - Figuring out last problem for QM problem set
?? - Sleep

I'm looking forward to next weekend.

Classes... week 2

So I've just finished my first week (plus one day) of classes. The verdict: doing research is more fun. *sigh* And the worst part is that if I slack off in my classes to spend time doing research I'll end up doing badly and not getting into grad school, thereby killing my chances of getting to do research later.

Anyway, enough of that or I'll start prematurely worrying about GREs. My classes are as follows:

Quantum Mechanics - Pretty good. I actually caught myself excitedly taking notes and wondering what was going to come out at the end of a long derivation. I'll ignore the fact that I would have been less surprised/entertained if I'd read the book before class like a good student.

Mechanics - Mechanics is far and away the least interesting topic in physics. Fortunately, getting anything resembling the correct answers on problem sets requires keeping track of directions and negative signs and factors of 2 and being able to read your own handwriting and other similarly mundane things. What's this? I've got an object falling upwards?? At twice the speed of light??? Crap.

Intro. to Comp. Sci. and Programming in C - This class wasn't held last week, so I've only been to it once. I'll suspend my judgement until later.

Intro. to Atmospheric Science - After four semesters of attempting to fit an atmospheric sci. class into my schedule I finally succeed. It's taught in a building off main campus... and run by NASA... so I get to wear an ID badge for security purposes. So far the subject matter is mostly stuff that I only vaguely remember from the thermodynamics section of my intro physics sequence.

Physics lab - Not sure how this is going to go yet. My first day in the lab is Monday. The organizational meeting for the course would have been amusing if I didn't know that I need three semesters of lab to graduate... With all the filling out of things and signing up for things and having large numbers of unnecessary (and redundant) things explained it was almost like watching some maladjusted brainchild of the payroll bureaucracy and the academic advising center fail to save itself from drowning.

Strength Training - Remind me in my next life to not go to a school with a PE req. I think I have tendonitis in my elbows. And I can't find my IcyHot. :-(

Pictures!

I finally got around to taking some pictures for everyone's viewing enjoyment. There will hopefully be more to follow. First we have the lovely view from by the elevators on my floor. This is the beginning of my campaign to have someone provide me with a digital SLR (and not one of the "cheap" ones)... ;-) I could take much nicer pictures and I could use a wide angle lens to avoid the unsightly seams at the edges (not to mention the hour I could save if I didn't have to use the GIMP to minimize the appearance of said unsightly seams). Anyway, this is a view of Harlem as seen by everyone on the other side of the hall. For anyone curious, I'm also including a view of the law school as seen by everyone on my side of the hall.

Right. I didn't bother attempting to get the panorama there. It's not particularly impressive. It's not going to be part of my Buy Christine a Madly Expensive Camera campaign either.

Argh... you can't win

So if I leave my window/door closed my room gets too warm. If I leave them open the smoke blown out the window of the people down the hall comes in the window and cheap beer smell comes in from the hallway. Lovely.

It's now official

I'm moved in. My stuff is unpacked and organized, there are iced teas in my fridge (no food yet, but that will be remedied momentarily). My room is clean. For the last time before May. I bought two books this morning to the tune of $242. Fun.

Anyway, I've got a day and a half of freedom and I'm enjoying the things I missed about the city while I was away: my friends, huge lists of potential recreational activities, relative independence, absence of tree pollen, immediate access to my checking account, Central Park, etc. With the nice weather and all I'm in such a good mood that I'm not even going to complain about the single-ply toilet paper or the Wein showers (which are roughly equivalent to having buckets of water dumped onto one's head from 30'... apparently no one has seen fit to replace the showerheads since 1924), or the exposed pipes all over the place, or the paint fumes in my room which become overpowering after an hour of having the window and/or door closed, or, oh wait, I said I wasn't going to complain, didn't I? Sorry about that.

The advantages of low expectations

I was completely prepared for my room this year to suck. It's in an un-airconditioned building with one bathroom per floor, no lounges and no kitchens. In fact, I was so prepared for it to be awful that I was pleasantly surprised to find it downright livable. Unless my neighbor (I've only got one as I live next to a stairwell) is really loud and obnoxious life should be ok. Here's a quick summary of my new cell's... oops, I mean room's... defining characteristics:

• Dimensions: ~6' x 18'


• View: into the law library, but can also see sky without sticking head out window


• Light: western exposure, hours of direct sunlight in the afternoon


• Floor: Tile... my feet will freeze in February, but at least I have no more damp, foul-smelling, mysteriously stained carpet


• Light: as I sit, I could read a book or make tiny solder joints or tinker with computer hardware without turning on a light


• TV: Gets reception. Hooray! I'll be able to watch West Wing episodes when they air instead of two months afterwards


• Utilities: have two ethernet jacks! I lack only a second ethernet capable computer.


• Utilities (cont.): Sink. This might have been annoying, but it's a nice sink. It will partially make up for the single coed bathroom on this floor


• Light!! Did I mention I can tell what the weather is doing without checking online?

At some point this weekend I may try to put up pictures. I will try to restrain myself and not make a time-lapse movie of the sunlight traveling across my walls as I realize such a movie would be utterly uninteresting to people who have and take sunlight for granted and unspeakably cruel to anyone who doesn't. :-)