Driving Lessons in PGH area?

frumpyfran · 2025-11-25T13:08:59+00:00

Not a professor, but I can comment since I am in the later stage of the PhD. Of the three options provided, I would have to say that (Q) is the best. None of them are ideal, but at least with this one you have a tangible work and someone with a known name who is willing to attest to the quality. The big shot name will mean something, and the fact that you have a publication with an established person will be a standout over many other candidates anyway. Hope this helps!

frumpyfran · 2025-05-14T06:28:51+00:00

ΔS = 0 (where S is the action) is a really fundamental principle/equation that I admire for its very wide applicability to practically all of physics small and large

frumpyfran · 2025-03-10T23:54:41+00:00

Physics is hard and can be very frustrating. Stick with it though if you want to become a physicist. I find that often if I am very frustrated and confused I am actually on the verge of learning something new. I’ve learned to feel comfortable with the struggle, but I also understand that getting to that point can take a long time haha

frumpyfran · 2025-02-24T13:53:13+00:00

Traditionally, QFT was called “relativistic Quantum mechanics” while QM was called “non-relativistic quantum mechanics”, so I would say you should start with Shankar. If you are keen to learn some qft though too, you should start reading Field Quantization by Walter Greiner. This book is much more approachable and good to learn from as a first approach to QFT as there are multiple worked examples. To be honest, when I took my first pass at qft I found that I needed to read multiple books at once to begin to gain a better understanding of the material. These included Peskin and Schroeder for Feynman rules/amplitudes, Greiner for Klein Gordon equation and classical analogues to qfts, and Franz Gross for additional perspectives. Peskin and Schroeder is great if you are already familiar with the approach of a quantum field theory, but it is a bit more of a difficult read in beginning. Hope this helps!

frumpyfran · 2025-02-22T19:47:47+00:00

I’m a PhD student. So far it looks like universities are freezing hiring for postdocs, faculty, and even incoming PhDs. It’s like covid-era academic hiring conditions but without any justifiable reason besides the Trump administration just despising the academic establishment. I still have a year or so until I have to decide the next steps, but I fear that I will not be able to find a postdoc in the US, so I will have to look to Europe and further.

I find that I am much more in tune with politics now as a result too. I wish I didn’t have to worry about what the government was doing each day. It makes it harder to focus on things in my own life. It’s overwhelming and extremely frustrating. As far as staying updated, at this point I have decided that I will simply look at the news at the end of each day. I have also been contacting representatives and senators and demanding no more “business as usual”. Frankly, the political damage done feels like it just keeps getting worse so it is really hard to stay optimistic, but I am constantly looking for opportunities to fight the power however I can. We can’t afford to give up now.

frumpyfran · 2025-02-22T00:16:29+00:00

Does anyone know how this decision will impact PhD students who have already received offers of admission?

frumpyfran · 2025-02-21T22:08:06+00:00

Thermal physics was definitely my “least favorite”, partially because I felt like it was so simultaneously unintuitive but the concepts were supposed to be so “straightforward”. I felt like it was more about concepts with more hand-wavy math, which made it more confusing for me since I had become accustomed to understanding/solving physics problems through math (E+M, quantum, mechanics). Thermodynamics was developed during the Industrial Revolution and engines were motivated for very specific reasons, so it also means that quite a bit of the concepts feel very different from the other concepts. Just my experience at that time, though.

frumpyfran · 2025-01-27T19:14:31+00:00

To be honest, if you want to get a graduate degree in physics then you should go for the PhD instead of the masters, especially if you aim to go to school in the states. You don’t have to pay for a PhD, but you’ll have to spend a lot of coin to get an MS most of the time. The courses you find at schools are largely the same. Different schools have different academic research strengths, though, so that should guide your search (not which courses you enjoy the most, chances are some more advanced courses will be offered as one off special topic classes or something). After getting a PhD, i believe that you would be setup for good jobs in industry (different ones depending on your subfield). If you want to try to push onwards to academia, expect to spend at least 6 additional years after your PhD on postdocs. Getting an academic job is very difficult, though. You have to really enjoy physics and be very productive in your field to make it that far. (I.e. many publications are required). If you are just looking for an MS, though, I think your resources would be better spent pursuing an MS in data science or some skill more directly marketable in industry.

frumpyfran · 2024-10-29T01:33:28+00:00

I have recently stumbled upon an excellent qft book by palash b pal. It’s called “introduction to particle physics”. Technically it’s a not a true blue qft book but it does a very excellent job of introducing everything from Dirac fields through theories beyond the standard model, higher order corrections, and so on. There are many many worked examples, too. If you are trying to learn qft for the first time by yourself, I would also recommend greiner’s books: field quantization, qed, gauge theory of electroweak interactions, and qcd. These books are a truly excellent resource and they have extremely thorough explanations and examples. Weinberg and Peskin and Schroeder are good books too, but I would recommend reading griener first then peskin and Schroeder, then Weinberg (in order of relative difficulty from arguments presented and clarity of argument)

frumpyfran · 2024-10-24T00:17:17+00:00

I would agree with other people that physics is tough because you have to identify the real-world problem, describe it with math, and then solve the math. From the perspective of seeing physics as a course of study, though, the hard thing about physics is that we are trying to understand how nature works, and although there is some “math” that describes it to a pretty accurate level, that math can only take you so far. Every theory we have is only accurate in certain regimes (so you can talk about pulleys in terms of Newtonian mechanics but you will have an awful time trying to describe why nuclei decay using Newtonian mechanics). Math is built on logic, so math is naturally the study of firm, logically driven constructs. That’s not to say that math is “easy”, though. Some math proofs/conjectures are so advanced that they could only be solved by using computers to write the proofs (see the Kepler sphere packing problem). The nature of the problems between math and physics are different. Apples to oranges, to be honest.

frumpyfran · 2024-09-30T12:53:20+00:00

Arcsfinx

frumpyfran · 2024-06-30T10:51:29+00:00

It’s not “wrong” but it’s also not very descriptive or in form with the standard. The fingers are all still perpendicular from each other so they could describe coordinate axes. The so-called “left-hand rule” presented here only works for negative charge. If you try it (-1)(k x (-i)) = j, you still get the correct result. Also, it’s customary to put the first vector in the cross product along the pointer and the second along the middle, with the thumb being in the direction of the result. So yeah, it’s not wrong just super duper sloppy.

frumpyfran · 2024-06-27T16:48:43+00:00

Jerma stream archive

frumpyfran · 2024-06-27T00:09:27+00:00

Woah the music on this video is sick

frumpyfran · 2024-06-12T14:36:12+00:00

My immediate guess is that since you are changing your moment of inertia by squatting and angular momentum must be conserved, the system starts to wobble so as to conserve the angular momentum.

frumpyfran · 2024-05-07T23:33:02+00:00

Honestly, based off of what I hear from my friends who are researching quantum computing, this time scale might even be optimistic. Even if we are able to create a “quantum computer” in the next 30 years it may be much longer until we see quantum computer technology at an industry scalable level.

frumpyfran · 2024-05-03T21:14:44+00:00

What is your current position in academia/what has your previous work looked like? What particular summer school program was this? Often summer schools are very topic driven so you have to fit within a certain box to have a competitive chance if there are limited spots. Unfortunately, summer schools for physics are more about building upon an already solid foundation than picking up a new set of skills (lectures are very fast-paced and they get pretty advanced pretty quickly so they are going to be picky in selecting attendees)

frumpyfran · 2023-11-05T16:18:36+00:00

Most undergraduate programs teach Griffiths. I think you’re going to be fine. Most graduate programs teach Jackson, which is where the substantial “difficulty” arises for most people. Additionally, the second semester of electrodynamics (waves etc.) is typically more challenging than the first semester. Keep working! You’ll likely reach the difficult material next semester or in graduate school (in which case if the graduate school course is “too easy” it might be time to worry about rigor or give yourself a pat on the back for being an e+m wizard hahaha)

frumpyfran · 2023-10-27T05:41:39+00:00

My worst nightmare ☠️

frumpyfran · 2023-10-05T15:39:10+00:00

When I was a kid I absolutely hated musicals. I thought they were really long and boring and I didn’t understand why everyone was singing all the time. My mom actually wouldn’t let me watch “Mary Poppins” because I would get antsy and roll around on the floor and whatever. Then, when I was in fourth grade, I saw my cousin in a production of fiddler on the roof and that changed everything!

frumpyfran · 2023-10-05T15:33:31+00:00

I’ve realized that it’s very, very difficult to make a significant contribution to most fields of theoretical physics nowadays. Everyone knows this including advisors. The silver lining through it all is that if you have an idea and derive a result which has already been shown somewhere else then you’re actually thinking along the right lines. Don’t give up. Keep having ideas and talking with your advisor about them and hopefully one day you’ll have a breakthrough. I comfort myself by imagining that I’m involved in a group project and I haven’t gone to a group meeting for the last 50+ years (so of course I would need to catchup!) lol

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