The mission has been making some steady progress recently. But now it's time to start setting the sails to pick up some speed, but to do so, there needs to be a bit of house-keeping. The main place that needs an update is the lists. Now is the time for that academy-keeping.
Setting the sails of the muon Academy.
List-en Update!
The lists have rightfully been renamed to: List 1, 2 and 3, where 1 is the new starting level. These have been added to the header bar for quick access. List 1 was blogged here almost a year ago, but it's gotten a little bit hidden now. Even further back, I blogged about a page that Gerard t'Hooft constructed called "how to become a good theoretical physicist". The Gerard t'Hooft Theoretical Physicist Guide is essentially List 2. List 3, well that's the really tricky one. If you need a List 3 now, the Perimeter Institute advertise their syllabus online, this was blogged about in the Perimeter Institute Video Inclusion post. With great lists comes great new links and as the lists catch the wind, links to the relevant blog posts will be added to the lists.
Back to the Booty
Next time, in spirit of the second sentence of this post, it'll be fluid dynamics time!
About a month ago, some typical rainy weather joined me as I set forth on the first day of my physics PhD. It started with the regulars: finding places, meeting people, making passwords, learning how to lift a box... then it really started. Like the blood on the bleeding walls of The Amityville Horror movie, the physics started oozing out. It oozes out thick and fast. The duty of the PhD student is to soak up as much physics as they can, construct it into some sort of original research and still be moderately sane as they tuck themselves into bed at night. It's a hard task. The PhD is three years long and, so far, it seems as though I need to be constantly running to finish in time.
Bleeding walls and physics in the Amityville Horror.
Madness
My weekly timetable has developed itself into a medley of madness. I have meetings, seminars and lectures to attend. Then I teach undergraduates, mark their assignments, then do my own assignments. This is followed by the all important reading, researching and running simulations. That's why I'm still doing it at nine o'clock at night, flicking through articles or logged into the computer cluster. Speaking of which, if you're a Chromebook user, this SSH client extension will wake you from your nightmare and let you SSH. I was given a lot of advice on how to manage my time. Unfortunately all the advice was the same monotonous drone "read a book called 'How to Get a PhD', by Phillips and Pugh".
SSH on a Chromebook.
How to Get a PhD
Despite the name, which feels a little patronising, the book can be really helpful. It has some various tips and instructions on how to manage your research, what to expect of others, getting offered places and so on. Although you can figure out a lot of it yourself, it's much easier to just read it and save your valuable time and brain power. BRAAAAINS! Of course there's a reason I'm writing this, a Google search revealed that you can download the entire book for free from here!
The End, or is it?
It's that time of year when some of us start to think long and hard about what we're going to carve into a pumpkin. This year, if I don't carve something epic, I want to see something epic. Something physics-epic. Although this one was interesting, I'm not sure why the Einstein vacuum field equations were carved into a it...
The moderately hungover first years were blissfully unaware of what I was about to tell them. For the past month I have been teaching undergraduate classical mechanics and this week I made an announcement. An announcement of the 2013 physics Nobel Prize winners. In an attempt of dramatics, I also told the tale of the Brout-Englert-Higgs boson, for it was Peter Higgs and FrançoisEnglert who won the 2013 Nobel prize. Both for their work on the theory of the elusive boson that usually goes by the name of the Higgs boson.
A Belgian Boson
I was first told about the Belgian physicists Robert Brout and FrançoisEnglert, by another Belgian physicist. In a flag waving moment, it was explained to me that Belgians exclusively call the Higgs boson the Brout-Englert-Higgs boson. The reason for this is that the mentioned Belgian duo invented and published the theory, independent of Higgs, only a few months before Higgs himself had. The duos' article can be found here, have a browse, it's in English. Unfortunately, Robert Brout died in 2011. He never got to witness the Brout-Englert-Higgs boson discovery at ATLAS last year, and as for the Nobel prize, well, you kind-of sort-of have to be alive for that...
The Standard Model
The discovery of the Brout-Englert-Higgs boson has been said to be one of the final pieces for the Standard Model of physics. This Standard Model is an attempt of a theory of everything - one theory that can explain every bit of physics. The Standard Model has proven to be highly successful, but it still doesn't play well with gravity. But, that doesn't hinder CERN's love of the standard model. They have it's main equation carved into stone:
The SM set in stone at CERN.
In honour of Brout, Englert, Higg and the Standard Model, here are some resources to check out the (Brout-Englert)-Higgs boson and the Standard Model.
Some Video Tape
To start light and short and at the Cranium level, MinutePhysics has a video about the (Brout-Englert)-Higgs boson (below), and about a theory of every thing (here).
Now to jump up in level to a Tibia / Mandible level for my favourite resource: PIRSA. Here's the link to the 2011 Standard Model course by Philip Schuster and Natalia Toro. I chose this year because I've watched every video from it, and they were rather epic.
The Standard Model as the Perimeter Institute sees it.
Some Notes
Staying at the Tibia / Mandible level, these notes are from a series of postgraduate lecture courses, by Professor Wing of UCL.
Alternatively, these ones from the University of Virginia, by Ivo van Vulpen, are more related to the Higgs boson: The Standard Model Higgs Boson.
The above two notes are the forte of this post. You don't need to use both, however, just the one that works best for you.
Previous Particle Post
A while ago I wrote an intro to particle physics post - The Particle Have Landed. The videos at the end are where I'm particularly wanting to point you, right now.
There are occasions when you can get hopped up on physics. You'll be taking it easy exploring a bit of physics when BAM! You find out about something revolutionary. Something like quantum tunnelling. It leaves you shocked and excited. Perhaps even sit-down excited. It's the physics feel good moment. A phys-elation. It's not the same as a eureka moment, but it is a good thing that happens more than once. Sometimes you'll know it's coming, sometimes you won't. But, they're pretty hard to forget.
Physics not drugs!
A Phys-elation Memory
Despite being hard to forget, I've never really reminisced about a phys-elation. Nonetheless, whilst writing The Seaside Physics Juxtaposition, a particular phys-elation memory crawled back to the surface of my mind. It was at A level, learning about circular motion. If you swing around a bucket of water fast enough, the constant change in velocity will forcethe water to stay in the bucket. However, if the bucket has a hole in bottom, water will squirt out of the hole... most of the time. If the holey bucket is being swung vertically, there is a point at the top of the swing where the force of gravity can equal the centrifugal force that makes the water squirt out.
If you want to know the equation, the velocity for a squirt free climax has to be:
in which g is the acceleration due to gravity and r is the distance to the bucket from the pivot - your shoulder.
When the velocity is this value at the climax of the swing, water will stop squirting out. All standard stuff, no phys-elation at this point.
After learning this, we (the class) wanted proof, so we spent the rest of the lesson getting it. And we got it. This is our recording taken by a phone taped to a holey bucket of water being swung around.
It wasn't a eureka moment... but it was a phys-elation! You know what they say, small things please small minds, but not all minds pleased by small things are small minds... savvy?
The Circular Motion
If you want to look up any of the physics mentioned here, The Fitzpatrick Physics Files will direct you to a perfect resource for it. Specifically the Classical Mechanics notes.
That bit at the end...
The video above is courtesy of Skipper - it was his phone that recorded it. Skipper blogs over at Confessions of a Wildlife Biologist. You should check it out! Thanks to Skipper for risking his phone all those years ago!
In the last blog post, I was in the scenically crowded seaside town of Whitby. Since that time I have packed my bindle and journeyed on southward. When it came to unpacking, I had to pause for awe. There was so much packed, it was ridiculous! But it reminded me of something. It reminded me of the bin packing algorithm. This bit of maths comes under the umbrella known as "Decision Mathematics". Of course, it's basically about making decisions using mathematical reasoning, such as with algorithms.
The Vagabond Decision Algorithm.
Decision Maths on the Cranium
Decision maths (DM) is something for the physicist, and something for the Cranium List. The reason for it making the list is that it's interesting, doesn't take long to pick up, and has links with quantum computing like with Shor's algorithm for quantum factorisation.
There are various resources that you could use to learn DM. However, I don't think that you need to spend 5 minutes watching a YouTube video about one algorithm when you could learn it in a single minute. Similarly, I don't think that you need to spend 5 minutes reading about an algorithm. So, here's the 3 resources:
The Student Room
Uncovered at Student Room D1 Revision Notes. It's well laid out, simply worded, has examples and has some video links. Unfortunately the algorithms are on different pages so you need to click through them.
The Student Room.
WikiBooks
Buried at WikiBooks OCR D1. This is a vague summary of the OCR course book for A level DM. (It's actually the book that I used.) The bonus of this resource is that the relevant notes are all one page.
WikiBooks
@ilovemathsgames
Also worth a mention is Decision 1 for Numpties. These are hand-written notes by a maths teacher (@ilovemathsgames). Although they have a good content, they remind me of when I would borrow girls notes at college!
Decision 1 for Numpties.
Final Words
Depending upon which part of physics interests you, you may never use anything from DM. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't know it, especially when it has quick rewards. Decision 1 is the first out of 2 modules in decision maths at A level. So you can dig a bit deeper if you like. As a final word, a good vagabond should know packing and route inspection algorithms, but unlike a regular vagabond, my bindle is actually a Peugeot 206...
That bit at the end...
It was very alarming when, 10 days after publishing this post, my blogger app decided to betray me. It completely removed the Vagabond Decision Algorithms post. As in, the entire post was lost. My day spiralled out of control. I was a lost cause. Hours later, submerged in empty bourbon cream packets and a tangled cardigan, I found some reluctant energy. Determined, I managed to discover a chrome extension that allowed me to load a cached webpage... The Vagabond Decision Algorithms was back in the room!
