It's the internet, why be myself? ;)

True, true

Somehow, the holidays are boring the crap out of me right now.

Anyone have something to cheer me up?

what holidays?

It's a German thing ;)

We have a great big holiday in spring (same length as the summer one)

it isn't spring though

@Danu I was hoping that this page would be a bit cheery, but it's all really sad:

nytimes.com/pages/science/index.html

Summary: Death, death, climate change. . .

lol

The world is messed up

@JimdalftheGrey It's spring!

@Danu You were complaining all semester that you had so much to do and now you're bored?

:(

doomed, aren't I?

Yeah, probably

Read a book, play a game, meet some friends, answer some questions

there's enough to do ;)

Write a book, make a game, ask some questions. . .

I guess I'm just not 100% happy in a more general sense :P

lol, nice n creative @HDE226868

@Danu Seriously, writing helps.

maybe

@Danu you could try watching beer commercials on the internet. Always makes me laugh

I'd suggest some, but mostly my favourites are Canadian beer commercials. Not sure if you'd appreciate them as much as I do

I'm pretty intimately familiar with Canadian culture: Gimme what you got

Jimdalf the Grey knows how to party, apparently

He's not as exciting as SaruManishearth.

I couldn't resist.

lol

the post-season is legendary isn't it

yes

this is actually helping a bit

thanks

@ACuriousMind I guess the fact that I was so busy before is partially the reason why I'm missing it so much now.

It's like... empty nest syndrome

Also, does any of you know a good/comprehensive list of summer/winter/other timeperiod schools in (some subfield of) theoretical physics?

@ACuriousMind I just saw your instanton answer. When referring to the Pontryagin classes, exactly what bundle are you referring to?

@JamalS The principal bundle that you have to define to set up the gauge theory.

@ACuriousMind So the fibre is the Lie group of the theory?

Yep

If the spacetime manifold admits non-trivial bundles, you get instantons

Because you essentially have to sum over all possible bundle structures in the path integral.

It's actually very difficult to find someone discussing this in detail, I pieced my picture of gauge theories together from various sources when I wrote my Bachelor's thesis

Most either never talk about the bundle structures, or they somehow assume you already know it, and just give the shortest intro possible

Yes^

Weinberg's book I believe does the latter

So, your thesis is now the main literature reference then, @ACuriousMind?

@Danu Hah, no, because I don't talk about instantons and the bundle classes at all

Aww, I was just about to ask for the thesis until ^

I was abstractly planning to try to write something about that up, though.

Well, it would certainly be appreciated!

@JamalS I have "holidays" now, too, so I could find the time. Will let you know if I produce something I am certain enough of to share ;)

Yessss!!!!!!!!!!! Princeton contacted me saying I should expect an interview soon!!!

I had my doubts about whether they had an alum in my area.

Congratulations

These US admissions departments are much better than the UK. I got a reply in an hour, whereas all my UK choices took 5-7 days to reply to e-mails, yet they had less applicants :)

@JamalS College or grad school (or higher)?

Undergrad

Nice.

@JamalS they have people everywhere :-P

@DavidZ it's unbearable what you do to me. You promised help, and after that you said "I told you how to make the formulas visible". I am trying to help. Can you understand this simple good will?

I'm not quite sure what your point is here

I understand that you're trying to help someone through a calculation. And in light of that, I've offered to help you view formulas in chat so that you can work through that calculation in the chat room.

@JamalS Congrats!

@KyleKanos Thanks, looking forward to it. Maybe I'll get lucky and meet a physicist!

Although, the MIT alumnus I met had nothing to do with physics, but I enjoyed talking to her endlessly.

George Shultz ('38) apparently has a tiger tattooed on his bottom.

@Jiminion he's probably not the only one

I don't see the appeal of tattoos, other than to record useful formulas or tables for convenience.

@JamalS Do you ever see the appeal of anything if not to record formulae or tables? :P

@ACuriousMind lol. Well sure, git :)

(And no, I'm not calling you a git, I mean the software git!)

Touché

@ACuriousMind If you had to have one equation tattooed on your hand, what would it be?

(Don't worry about size, you have an infinitesimal pen.)

Now that is a difficult question

That should be a question on the MIT application! haha

Perhaps $\mathrm{d}^2 = 0$. Then I can lecture everyone who asks about (co)chain complexes.

Good choice, there are a lot of remarkable things to be said about $\mathrm d^2 = 0$.

F=MA. You can just derive everything else from that......

@Jiminion I'd like to see you derive the Calan-Symanzik equation from that

@Jiminion But it has no beauty, no deep idea behind it!

^ Exactly

It's just two vectors being proportional to each other. It's boring

Euler's Identity, not terribly useful, but cool.

Also overrated, at least in my opinion.

tough crowd. Wave Equation in Spherical Coordinates?

@JamalS Not only yours

(from the homepage of Loop Space)

@ACuriousMind Is that your opinion too?

@Jiminion Why would you pick that?

@JamalS I'm not sure. It is an amazing thing when you see it at first, but when you think about it, what you found so amazing is really rather defined into it, so... shrug

I think Poincaré duality is pretty cool, $H^k(M) \cong H_{n-k}(M)$. Stokes' theorem follows from it.

The Ramanujan equation is kinda ghastly, and not horribly interesting. He's done better stuff, like the nested root thing he submitted that no one could solve.

@Jiminion Number theory just completely escapes me. I don't think it is uninteresting as such, but every time someone shows me "cool" number theory, all I can think is "Why would you even care?".

@JamalS Euler's? Well, because it has three math-derived constants in it, e,i, and pi, and it is kind of an odd result, as you don't think of them relating that way. But in the end, it's kind of a trick....

@Jiminion No, the wave equation - seems odd to pick that.

@ACuriousMind I know, that's happened to me, and all I can ever think is 'oh, that's cute...'

@JamalS Oh, just cuz it looks cool. Remember it's a tattoo right? So it should be appealing to people who have no idea what it means or represents.

@Jiminion Heh, if I'm gonna ink something on my body for eternity, it better be something that appeals to me first and foremost

Ramanujan IS number theory to me.

@ACuriousMind Aye.

@ACuriousMind I think most people ink for externalizing, and yes, fashion.

Most people are doing it wrong, then. (As with almost everything)

^ Yes, us physicists are doing it right :)

And everyone I know with a tattoo usually has not done it for externalizing, because it is rarely visible :P

o.O

I suppose some simple physical statement such as the Einstein field equations or fluctuation theorem might be cool. Realistically, though, I'd probably put something that looks more intimidating and has appeal in the calligraphic sense.

Well, gtg (The thought experiment was for the hand, remember?) [Changing the conditions of the test again......]

Maxwell's equations, possibly even quasi useful.

@Jiminion Ah, but the crucial question is, which form?

$\delta F = dF = 0$, is the most compact.

$\delta$ is of course the codifferential.

The original, with quaternions, of course.

Ah, that's messy.

@JamalS Uh, you might have gotten a wrong impression there :D Regions such as your ankle are also not very visible ;)

Phew...

@JamalS Congrats.