In an effort to get a better understanding of classical electrodynamics, I’ve begun writing up some notes on the subject from a rather “backwards” point of view. You’ll see what I mean when you start reading them. You can download the notes as a .pdf here. Read more »
Posted: February 24th, 2007 under Uncategorized.
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In an effort to add content to this site, beyond my rants about education, I am going to start doing biographies of various interesting fellows in the history of physics. Today I begin with an interesting fellow who contributed to the early theory of solids, Arnold Sommerfeld. Read more »
Posted: February 20th, 2007 under Uncategorized.
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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about teaching a class, what would go into it, how I would grade it, and all that jazz. This, of course, leads me to think about how grades should be assigned, and what’s important. Obviously every aspect should have a purpose — handing out midterms without a unified idea behind what you want to do with the midterm is rather fruitless. Read more »
Posted: February 18th, 2007 under Uncategorized.
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Due to the fact that I’m wildly dissatisfied with the list I created, and that it’s a rather silly task to try and compare the work of Lars Onsager to the Principia, I’m going to kill my ranking list. Instead, every week, I plan to write a review of some important article or discovery, discuss it, reference it, and perhaps expand my own horizons a bit. I think this is a much better idea than applying some artificial hierarchy to discoveries separated by two hundred years.
Posted: February 17th, 2007 under Uncategorized.
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Our ninth most important physics publication comes from 1926, when the basic formulation of quantum mechanics was laid down by Erwin Schrodinger in the paper An Undulatory Theory of the Mechanics of Atoms and Molecules[1]. Read more »
Posted: February 16th, 2007 under Uncategorized.
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As a general administrative note, I’ve now enabled people to comment on my posts. Took a bit of searching with WordPress before I could make that work, but I’ll be posting periodic updates as I find new features and such. As it is, feel free to comment on what I’m posting.
Posted: February 11th, 2007 under Uncategorized.
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We begin our countdown of important physics papers with the 1944 article by Lars Onsager, in which he provided the partition function for the two-dimensional Ising model. Read more »
Posted: February 9th, 2007 under Uncategorized.
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I spent about four hours today grading lab reports, and I noticed a rather alarming trend amongst the reports: many of them, though typed, were full of misspelled words (in my book, if you typed it in a word processor with spell checker, a single misspelled word is too much) and grammatical errors. I’m not talking about the grammatical errors mentioned in passing in Strunk and White; I mean run-on sentences five lines long that cannot even be bothered with a comma splice. Sentences without any really definite subject. Nouns and verbs slapped together with no regard for their meaning. Read more »
Posted: February 6th, 2007 under Uncategorized.
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In a shameless effort to bring attention to my site, and do something physics-related with it, I’ve decided that, over the next ten weeks, I will be writing a quick overview of what I view to be the ten most important publications in the history of physics. There’s obviously going to be a lot of controversy, and even I don’t necessarily agree with the exact ordering. Let’s face it, judging around 150 years of publications for the ten most important in a field as broad as physics is rather difficult.
That said, I will be trying to do it. The first update will come next Friday, so stick around and we’ll see if anything grand comes out of it all.
Posted: February 3rd, 2007 under Uncategorized.
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