posted
On a more serious note I would say that I have faith (ooops there I go again) in your cognitive skills. I don't believe you need luck. I'm betting you are competent to the task and well prepared.
Posts: 2022 | Registered: Mar 2004
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Well, I'm reasonably well prepared, but I do hope scattering is not given. Simple harmonic oscillator, that's what we want. Perturbations on it would be ok too. And two-level systems, separation of variables, and Lagrange-Hamilton on the inclined plane. If I get those four I'll be happy.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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You've got my total luck (and i have a lot of luck) I lend it you for tomorow.
And don't forget : sleep well and be cool. Stop to learn now. You must firstly to keep your strenght and your mind ok.
In addition to that, Remember, that a success or a failure is the beginning of another point of your life, and, sometimes, a failure can give you more benefits than a success. A little example : I heard about a french Engineer, a very high potential man. This guy finish first at Polytechniques (the most famous Engineer school in France), then he manage succesfully two beautifull projects. This guy is the best. And an enrollor convoke him for a job. He explains what he success. No Darkness zone. The Enrollor, looking is CV, said "Well, Well. Your CV and your experiences are impressives... You are not recruit." The guy ask why, surprise. And the Enrollor : "You have a great default : you never knew the failure. And if it hapened, i don't know how you react. I suppose bad..."
I hope this little story can help you to relativise your exam and his importance. But you have my luck Posts: 1189 | Registered: Dec 2004
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Knock’em dead KoM! You’ll be in my thoughts as your rack your brain for answers. I’m sure you’ll Ace it and make everyone proud!
Posts: 2845 | Registered: Oct 2003
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I think, I think, I think I passed. I shot the electrodynamics dead. I utterly killed the thermodynamics. I believe I did the right thing for classical mechanics; if I'm totally missing something, no-one else saw it either, but I did have to wave my hands a bit on the choice of gauge. And for quantum - well, I certainly got the derivation of first-order corrections right. Unhappily, I used z^2 instead of z for the perturbing potential. Now this led to me doing some integrals that were more difficult than they should have been, so if anything they should give extra points, but... Surely they can't subtract more than 10% or so for a silly error like that when I did everything else right.
Anyway, giving myself 80% each for thermo and electro, I only need 40% each for classical and quantum. And that's a lot of margin for error. So I think I passed. Probably. If there's any justice. Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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Not sure, Farmgirl - sometime next week, I think. Or it may be faster since there were only five of us.
I'm not quite sure what you mean, Jay - I'm in the PhD program of the Department of Physics at the University of Cincinnati, and my supervisor is a particle physicist working at BaBar. I also did my Master's thesis on BaBar data. Does that answer your question?
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Glad to hear that you feel confident in your efforts KoM. On a related note, how long till you complete your study? And, once completed, do you have any idea where you will end up?
Posts: 2022 | Registered: Mar 2004
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Congratulations on probably passing. It feels good when you get done with a test and it went all right. When do you find out your results?
Posts: 3546 | Registered: Jul 2002
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Yeah, so you’ll have a doctrine in physics (right?) is really what I was asking. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BaBar_Experiment Is this the right stuff? Is this a kind of quantum physics? What’s your big goal? Teach? Do experiments? Get a job with the military developing the next generation BaBar Ray gun? Sounds neat.
Posts: 2845 | Registered: Oct 2003
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Doctorate, Jay, doctorate. I leave doctrines for the religious types.
But yes, you've got the right experiment, and it involves a fair amount of quantum physics on the theoretical side, though I'm an experimentalist. I just measure things; explanations I leave for the egghead types. And I do intend to become a research scientist, though ray guns, alas, are probably not in the cards.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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Oops, sorry punwit, I forgot about you. Anyway, about two or three years, and I'll probably work with the Babar experiment until it closes down. After that I'm not sure, maybe a postdoc position in Norway.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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Dang Microsoft word and doctorate doctrine….. Can’t they program in what I mean for the spell checker……
Cool. Sounds like neat research. But I’m still trying to figure it out a little bit. I know, I know you can’t put quantum physics in a nutshell….. But then again, if you tied one half of the nutshell to the other half so that their quantum signature was the same, it might be a nifty phone. But I seriously digress. What are these BaBar things in a nutshell? I’m confused on the goal and what might be done with this research? Is this ageing theories or would it be involved in communications?
Posts: 2845 | Registered: Oct 2003
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Not sure what you mean by ageing theories, but there are certainly no applications of this work directly - some spinoffs in magnets and radiation-resistant electronics, but the actual physics is all theory.
The BaBar experiment was designed to measure CP violation, though as it turns out there are a lot of interesting things you can do with it that it wasn't originally meant for. CP violation is needed to explain why the Universe consists of matter, instead of matter and antimatter in equal amounts. (Which would instantly annihilate to photons, so we wouldn't be around to observe it.) Basically, if you have an antimatter particle of a certain kind, it can turn into its matter counterpart by a process known as oscillation. Also vice-versa. However, the antimatter-to-matter oscillation is just a tiny bit faster than the reverse process, so even though you create equal amounts of matter and antimatter you end up with slightly more matter.
At the moment, our theories don't quite account for all the CP violation we see around us; the Big Bang creates equal amounts of matter and antimatter, and we haven't measured a large enough amount of CP violation to get the amount of matter we observe. So we're looking for extra sources of it, or new ways for it to occur.
Also, some kinds of CP violation occur though an intermediate virtual particle. Since it is virtual, you don't have to supply all the energy that would be required to create a real particle of that type - Heisenberg, basically. So if there are any interesting particles that we can't yet make directly in particle accelerators, they can still show up in CP violation experiments at quite low energies. Hence, as we say, 'Penguin diagrams are sensitive to New Physics in the flavour-changing loop.' Don't you love jargon?
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