Now on ScienceBlogs: The Australian's War on Science 41
An exploration of physics and the quest to understand our world.
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.
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May 31, 2009
Category: Sunday Function
Nobody ever asks the interesting questions at presidential press conferences. But if somehow I could choose a question, it would be this: "Mr. President, has the NSA solved the integer factorization problem?" Of course it's unlikely he'd know off the...
Posted by Matt Springer at 2:52 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 30, 2009
There's a lot of important things going on in the world. Kim Jong Il is exploding nukes and launching missiles over Japan. A Supreme Court justice has been nominated. The treasury bond market experienced its steepest yield curve ever. Whatever....
Posted by Matt Springer at 10:00 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 29, 2009
A few days ago we had an interesting discussion about the actual nature of light waves with respect to the informal qualitative presentation of light waves found in intro textbooks. Because I have the best set of physics blog readers...
Posted by Matt Springer at 10:00 AM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 28, 2009
Continuing from yesterday's post on approximation methods in quantum mechanics, here's another common method worth a close look. It's one of my favorites, because it's a rare technique in which you can just make something completely up from thin air...
Posted by Matt Springer at 11:46 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 27, 2009
Category: Worked Problems
We haven't done an actual straight-up physics problem in a while, much less one above the level of undergraduate freshman physics. There's a reason: it's roughly as niche as it's possible for an internet post to be. But on the...
Posted by Matt Springer at 12:29 PM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 26, 2009
It's 10pm on a Sunday night, and I'm driving west on Interstate 10 right through the middle of downtown Houston. Focused on getting to my destination safely, I obey the traffic laws and proceed through the comparatively deserted interstate at...
Posted by Matt Springer at 10:00 AM • 15 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 25, 2009
It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.
Posted by Matt Springer at 10:00 AM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 24, 2009
Category: Sunday Function
Numbers and magic tricks!
Posted by Matt Springer at 10:00 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 23, 2009
Yesterday we talked about how fermions and bosons had different values of spin and thus their wavefunctions had different symmetry properties. In particular, fermions are antisymmetric under exchange of particles. We'd like to write the overall two-particle wavefunction in terms...
Posted by Matt Springer at 10:00 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 22, 2009
Symmetry!
Posted by Matt Springer at 10:00 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Highly Allochthonous 11.05.2009
Eruptions 11.05.2009
Not Exactly Rocket Science 11.05.2009
Corpus Callosum 11.05.2009
Starts With a Bang 11.04.2009
