The first week of regular classes ended today. Thats not to say that the two weeks preceding that were not worth writing about ! The week we spent with Dr. Nima Arkani-Hamed was overwhelming for me. He came and started deriving things like the velocity of sound in a neutron star and the height of a giraffe in terms of fundamental constants like the planck length and mass of an electron, charge of an electron etc with hand waving arguments and a few squiggles:-) He then took us on a whirlwind tour of the frontiers of quantum gravity, particle physics and quantum field theory. There were (very) few people among the psi group who actually understood what was going on, but Neil Turok (who sat through many of Nima's lectures) said they were brilliant. Nima would speak for 4 hours straight in the morning and then turn up randomly in the afternoon for another couple of hours of impromptu lecturing. It was interesting to watch such an obviously gifted man expounding upon what he loved. His energy was boundless !
That was followed by one week of miscellaneous stuff, computing, latex, unix, a 6 hour Quantum Mechanics test which I used as a pretext for going over Irina's notes again and completing (finally) studying most of the quantum optics I was supposed to know one year ago ! Then we started with Relativity a couple of days before the regular classes commenced.
The first 3 weeks of core course classes are devoted to General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. The way the course is organized is that there are 2 courses running in parallel at any given time and these run for 3 weeks. Then the next two courses start. There are 3 hours of class before lunch followed by 3-4 hours of tutorial and twice a week we have to hand in homework assignments. Since each morning a large amount of unfamiliar (for me) territory is covered, the weekdays are very hectic. Its exciting to be learning so much in such a short period of time !
General Relativity is absolutely the coolest thing I have ever studied. Its absolutely brilliant, and I have not even gotten to the really genius parts yet. We are using Hartle's book called 'Gravity' as our textbook, and its quite nice, but Id suggest Schutz's book for anyone wishing to study the subject fairly rigorously from scratch. Im making a feeble attempt to read it in parallel myself. There is so much math I do not know - differential geometry, group theory, topology, catagory theory, gauge theory, lie groups and the list is endless - that seems to be common knowledge in my class and vital to do anything in theoretical physics that Im beginning to feel I need to make a non-feeble attempt to teach myself some serious math too.
Its a difficult balancing act in a course like this - between depth and breadth. I could solve all the problems given to us, and then not learn anything else at all. Or I could spend time absorbing as many related concepts as possible - apart from keeping up with class work of course - and be practical about how many problems I can solve in each topic. Hardly any at all, is the answer actually. I think Im going to try and solve enough problems related to class to keep myself happy-ish about the concepts and my confidence about knowing them, and also make a serious attempt at breadth.
Ive come all the way here, I might as well do it like it ought to be done !
That was followed by one week of miscellaneous stuff, computing, latex, unix, a 6 hour Quantum Mechanics test which I used as a pretext for going over Irina's notes again and completing (finally) studying most of the quantum optics I was supposed to know one year ago ! Then we started with Relativity a couple of days before the regular classes commenced.
The first 3 weeks of core course classes are devoted to General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. The way the course is organized is that there are 2 courses running in parallel at any given time and these run for 3 weeks. Then the next two courses start. There are 3 hours of class before lunch followed by 3-4 hours of tutorial and twice a week we have to hand in homework assignments. Since each morning a large amount of unfamiliar (for me) territory is covered, the weekdays are very hectic. Its exciting to be learning so much in such a short period of time !
General Relativity is absolutely the coolest thing I have ever studied. Its absolutely brilliant, and I have not even gotten to the really genius parts yet. We are using Hartle's book called 'Gravity' as our textbook, and its quite nice, but Id suggest Schutz's book for anyone wishing to study the subject fairly rigorously from scratch. Im making a feeble attempt to read it in parallel myself. There is so much math I do not know - differential geometry, group theory, topology, catagory theory, gauge theory, lie groups and the list is endless - that seems to be common knowledge in my class and vital to do anything in theoretical physics that Im beginning to feel I need to make a non-feeble attempt to teach myself some serious math too.
Its a difficult balancing act in a course like this - between depth and breadth. I could solve all the problems given to us, and then not learn anything else at all. Or I could spend time absorbing as many related concepts as possible - apart from keeping up with class work of course - and be practical about how many problems I can solve in each topic. Hardly any at all, is the answer actually. I think Im going to try and solve enough problems related to class to keep myself happy-ish about the concepts and my confidence about knowing them, and also make a serious attempt at breadth.
Ive come all the way here, I might as well do it like it ought to be done !
