Matt Springer is a graduate student of physics at Texas A&M university. He is also an occasional writer and tinkerer, and he is probably too curious for his own good.
when you order from Amazon, and a fraction of the purchase price will be sent to me at zero cost to you. Much obliged, and thanks for your patronage.Today is Judgment Day number 1 of 3. "Why today, and why are there three of them?" you ask.
Well ok, I exaggerated. It's just the first of three exams in my electromagnetic theory class. Let's see what's on the test... "special relativity, Lorentz covariance of Maxwell's equations, scalar and vector potentials, gauge invariance, relativistic motion of charged particles, action principle for electromagnetism, energy momentum tensor"
It's not as bad as it sounds. The test does have to be doable in two hours, despite containing eight or so problems. I'm not super-comfortable with all this stuff yet, but I'm feeling mostly prepared. But because of the test one thing I don't have is time to write up a super-snazzy post, so I'll leave you with a cool picture from physics history. Actually it's a painting because the event was not photographed as far as I know for secrecy reasons:
It's Enrico Fermi conducting the first test of Chicago Pile-1, the first man-made self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. Built on a converted squash court on the campus of the University of Chicago, it heralded both promise and danger and led directly to both nuclear weapons and peaceful nuclear energy. visited the site a few years ago; it's now a small and modest memorial plaza with a slightly ominous sculpture.
You can't see the location where man first harnessed fire, but in the grand scheme of things this is at least along the same lines.
Physical Science
Comments
Out of curiosity, what text are you using? G'luck!
Posted by: Douglas | October 6, 2008 1:56 PM
We're not actually using an "official" textbook, as our professor has written up a pretty extensive and high-quality set of notes.
He does, however, recommend Landau and Lifshitz despite some notation differences. I agree, I think it's a good text.
Posted by: Matt Springer | October 6, 2008 10:50 PM
I get the feeling that you will pretty much ace this thing.
I am curious, though...if you could remove one thing from the test, what would it be?
Posted by: BobbyEarle | October 7, 2008 7:50 AM
Slightly ominous? Wonderful understatement. The Moore sculpture is of the fireball from a nuclear explosion, just a few shakes after it is initiated. (Both of the wiki guesses from the literature must be from artists rather than physicists.) See, for example,
http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/Tsspike2.jpg
which is explained a bit at the bottom of the page about the Tumbler-Snapper test series.
http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/Tumblers.html
Posted by: CCPhysicist | October 7, 2008 8:44 AM