I've done some chemistry at home and I can definately tell you that I wouldn't try to make a bomb without preparing some things first
I caught fire once just trying to extract essential oils
I'm not messing around with explosives willy nilly
IIRC nitrocellulose was historically very prone to exploding factories and warehouses
Sometimes I want to try to do particle physics at home, but otoh from what I can read cathode ray tubes without a vacuum will 100% radiate X rays all over the place
So short of learning glassblowing, I'm probably not doing it
I think if I want to learn more about spacetime structures I'm gonna have to bite the bullet and read Weyl's book
He seems hard to avoid in the field
"Since the human mind first wakened from slumber, and was allowed to give itself free rein, it has never ceased to feel the profoundly mysterious nature of time-consciousness, of the progression of the world in time,—of Becoming."
@Slereah ahahahah I'm at the point where I have to choose who my advisor will be, so sadly that's not an option
The two paths that unfold in front of me are: - numerical resolution of PDE to calculate the velocity of the "true-vacuum bubbles" in the early-universe phase transition - study the Complexity=Volume conjecture in a BTZ geometry for a global quench
@ACuriousMind I do: I'm not an expert of it, but every time a colleague needs something done on Python or Mathematica calls me for help, and I enjoy the feeling of finding ways and commands to "get things done" with a computer. For some mysterious reason, I find the same thing IRL (experimental physics) borderline repulsive, and I wouldn't want to stick my hands in that
in that case I don't support Slereah's maligning of the numerical path ;P
the "study the XXX conjecture" thing will very much depend on your advisor, I'd say - it's very different if they have a detailed plan for how you're going to do that or if they just throw you a bunch of papers and go "read these and see if you can come up with something"
(which of these two extremes is the better case also depends on you :P)
nowadays when lecturers give lectures, they seem to tend to assume the students know some programs, like Python or Mathematica. But physics curriculum never has a compulsory course teaching these.
also, doing some physics experiments is easier with some knowledge of electronics, but electronics is not a compulsory course in physics curriculum, so graduates from electronic engineering or other related engineering may be better suitable to teach physics experiments than graduates from physics are.
You don't have to be a programming genius. You just need to know enough to follow the code being used. Programming in physics and maths rarely reaches the levels of abstraction that is required for professional programming.
@fqq we have electromagnetism lab as compulsory course, but electronics is never one, but physics department isn't strict on experiments - it's easy to pass a laboratory course. it's only strict on theoretical courses.
for me, I feel like we only need to know theoretical physics rigorously, as for experiments, we can just do thought experiments because we don't have engineering knowledge to do a lot of experiments.
@Mithrandir24601 Heh, I took a class on numerical simulations where they just started the first lecture with "Y'all know C, right?". Attendance of the second lecture was 10% of the first. :P
@JohnRennie the main problem is that this leads to situations where some postdoc wrote a spaghetti code script 10 years ago that runs some critical piece of data evaluation and no one knows how to change it because the author is long gone
these days I seem to get eyestrain easily from reading on the monitor, but I am not sure if there is a difference from the past because in the past, I didn't usually read on monitor that much - I usually printed out to read or the teacher always gave us paper version to read. After I used phone to get online to read serious texts or watch videos having a lot of words, I found I get eyestrain easily - I feel: how could one design so eye-unfriendly a phone for us to get online?
One of the few advantages of being myopic is that the screen is effectively at infinity so your eyes are in their most relaxed state when staring at the screen.
I think at least one programming course as undergraduate should be mandatory, just to introduce you to that world. I remember that during my first year I was more worried of the C++ course rather than the maths or phyisics exams.
@ACuriousMind does a bright or dark room where you read on monitor cause eyestrain easier? I like to keep the room bright while using computer or phone but people here seem to like to keep the room dark when they use computer or phone.
@Ratman we had a compulsory computer course in undergraduate, but that course isn't target on programming but general knowledge of computer-related subjects; it did teach us a kind of programming, which is fortran.
@MauroGiliberti no idea if you are interested in this sort of stuff, but going by where you are placed, you have a few people that do quantum information there which I know are very good
Presumably those of you lucky enough to have 20/20 vision could buy glasses designed to bring your relaxed plane of focus in to 80cm or whatever the screen distance is.
it's easy as a short-sighted person to underestimate how much of your poor vision is "automatically" compensated for by adjusting your eyes in various ways
I actually asked the glasses maker to make my glasses lighter than my real myopia, because wearing too heavy glasses really makes my eyes uncomfortable, like headache or eye pain.
@MauroGiliberti no, I'm into quantum information/computing stuff, don't know many qft/string theory people. I've worked with Leonardo Banchi which got back there a couple years ago, and I know for a fact that he's top notch from a scientific point of view. Lately working on topics between machine learning and quantum information, but he's also very strong on the more abstract mathematical formalism. No idea how they're organised for taking students though
Filippo Caruso is another well known name in the community
@glS I see, I know him! My professors told me about him and suggested to ask him for a thesis, but unfortunately I'm not that interested in technical quantum computing/machine learning stuff
@MauroGiliberti obviously, it will depend on what you are most interested in. But just know that he's/they're not only interested on computational/ML-related stuff. He's actually very mathematically sophisticated, so to speak. Might be worth dropping them an email imo
or maybe I'm just trying to pull people away from doing string theory stuff haha
eh, we'll see. But on a more serious note, I do think it's a hard path to take from a practical point of view. There's not that much funding, and it's hard to get a lot of papers out during the phd, which makes it harder to remain in academia afterwards. Or so I've been told from a few people that did it
people around here might know best on that front though
but AdS/CFT has something that nothing else that I've studied has. Or I mean, General Relativity and Renormalization both had that same "glow", but I couldn't pick one of the two, and AdS/CFT just seemed to fit the bill
@DIRAC1930 given a representation $(V_\rho,\rho)$ of $G$ and $(V_\sigma,\sigma)$ of $H$ you get a representation of $G\times H$ as $(V_\rho\otimes V_\sigma, \rho\otimes\sigma)$, where $\rho\otimes\sigma : G\times H\to \mathrm{GL}(V_\rho\otimes V_\sigma) = \mathrm{GL}(V_\rho)\otimes\mathrm{GL}(V_\sigma), (g,h)\mapsto \rho(g)\otimes \sigma(h)$.
(This is a lot of symbols for what in physics notation is just "you just give the field one index for $G$ and another for $H$ and they transform independently".)
