@TobiasFünke because people cannot behave appropriately :P i think over break there's more time so people engage more on stack, so behaviors should be amplified
i quite like the feynman approach to the 2D ising model, for instance, which looks very much like a "path integral" inspired approach. the onsager and etc. approaches seem very computational, harder, and not illuminating...
I think it depends. I did my bachelor (4 years), then I applied for PhD programs in my 4th year. But I think a non-negligible number of people do Bachelor -> Master -> PhD route even in the states (I have heard especially for people in hep-th).
@TobiasFünke I think it is generically true that US PhD programs have 1-2 years of courses before starting research. I am not sure when exactly one needs to have their thesis topic decided though.
and so when you apply for the PhD, do you have to fix a topic already? or how is it going? to you apply for a certain position in a research group or at some uni?
@TobiasFünke i think one's outcomes are better if they have a specialization in mind and experience in that specialization already. in my experience, one is asked to state (though not required) what people they want to work under in the written statements for the application.
but for instance, at one school i was rejected because none of the professors i expressed interest in had funding for more students. but they emailed me and asked if i wanted to be accepted anyways to see how it goes.
i am hoping to go to nyu. thats like my top choice
@Relativisticcucumber he seemed really nice
im meeting him this week to talk about his research and stuff, he already said he thinks id be a good fit for his group and i think his stuff is really interesting
because i dont want to spend too much time on this, im not a physicist. but also i do want something that's not really hand-wavy and will give me good intuition
There is an interesting story about Dirac having the idea about the analogy between the Poisson bracket and the commutator but he wasn't quite sure about the form of the Poisson bracket. He knew it was in that book but it was Sunday and the library was closed so he anxiously waited the whole night
@Allie Leonard Susskind has a video lecture series on Classical Mechanics that makes everything extremely clear
