Here’s a high quality musing by James Bell the First:

If an intelligent outside observer is required for a waveform to collapse (and thus for anything to exist), how is the entire universe here? Who is the extra-dimensional intelligent outside observer who makes the waveform of the universe collapse into the form that we experience it in? Is there a God?

Quotes from PHYS 381 Electrodynamics Winter Semester 2007

• If there is a bomb here, I am going to run there, along a radius.
• Engineers are working very hard to make our lives easier, they are not always successful but what can we do.
• There are 24 letters in the alphabet! maybe we should use the Chinese alphabet then we’d have 6000 letters to choose from? No? well then let’s learn it, use it, and be happy
• You need to tell the solvee how things behave on the boundary.
• You need to know something if the “wild guess” method is going to work.
• The “wild guess” or “lucky guess” better sometimes work, this isn’t lotto 649
• Remember the laws! you’re not allowed to visualize incorrectly.
• I lied! I just made two functions look different, it was like writing sin² + cos² and pretending that it didn’t equal 1.
• The Laplace equation gives nice and cozy solutions.

I’ve been sitting in an ETLC computer lab for quite a few hours here trying to write a computer simulation of the phys 397 lab that Rob Joseph and I have been working on for the last month. What should have ended up being a “straight line” passing through a nice series of 60 data points is actually a straight line passing through a jungle of randonimity. What I believe turned out to be our problem was that when we approximated our “filter function” (the transmission spectrum of the IR filters being used) we just used e as the base of the exponent. Assuming that a bell curve is accurately described by a gaussian distribution is something that loads of people probably do every day. I mean we did it every day for a month in Statistical Mechanics when we use the Stirlings approximation of large factorials. There are situations, and unfortunately our lab turns out to be one of them where a Gaussian just doesn’t describe a bell curve very well at all.

Indeed it’s the difference between something being gaussian and something being a bit wider up top or more triangular that throws our data for a loop. When performing the numerical integration right near the peak of the blackbody curve the filter is much narrower than the peak of the spectrum. This means that the variation from one filter to another across this regions is not
extremly pronounced. When the filter funtion is poorly approximated it makes a big difference!

What really needs to be done is to replicate the bell curve of the filter using a numerically exact model. Since I don’t have any means to do this I’m going to have to switch my beautiful 60 data point set into 10 data sets (ten filters) with only 6 data points each.

I was also going to pursue a reverse derivation of the plank curve using a 3D curve fit of my data array, that would have made my lab something close to a manifestation of sheer beauty on paper. But with these results I think it’s not going to be
worth the effort, I know that the answer will be poor.

I’m not all that worried about poor data, If I can write a blog at 12:50 am on a Friday night about the intricacies of a Gaussian Distribution, I’m not going to have any trouble filling 5 pages in Latex on the topic.

Quantum Mechanics is honestly the sweetest course I have ever taken in the history of my life. I’m now checking it off on my list of life goals as complete

Now, anybody else in the course right now might be thinking otherwise as we are all finishing up the largest “weekly” assignment of our lives. Mine totals 16 pages. But by struggling through some ridiculous matheMagic to do those complex integrals and expectation values etc. I’ve developed not only a greater interest in the stuff, I’ve really got a much larger respect for the whole deal.

When you start an integral on one page, and hack your way through it on 2 pages, making reference to another 4 pages of previous results for simplification along the way, and arrive at the finish line with an answer of h|bar*(l^2 + a). You really get a grip on how intricately everything fits together. Having started with an expression that was so long I couldn’t even write it on one line (and couldn’t be reduced from there either!) and can develop such an elegant result I’m beginning to get a bit better grip on how perfectly God has this world balanced out. Whether or not the quantum mechanics aspect of the problem characterizes the real world very accurately, the math itself is something that elicits a bit of awe in me. I can’t help but sit here at my desk and be in a good mood even though the clock now shows “12:50″ because I’ve just seen a few of God’s fingerprints.

Quotes from PHYS 372 Quantum Mechanics Winter Semester 2007

• Scientists are always trying to use bigger and bigger particles, eventually someone is going to try and shoot a baby
• I’m what you guys would call “Old School”
• …so we’ve become accustomed to using h-bar. I’m not sure if this is partly because we would all rather be drinking
• You just gave two solutions which are not mutually orthogonal so I can’t say yes or no
• ^A+ shouldn’t be anything mysterious
• It’s not a little pain, it’s a big pain.
• When I was in school I didn’t like it when people called the sines and cosines and logs and polynomials the “elementary functions” because I thought they were pretty tough. Now that I have studied Hermite Polynomials and Legendre polynomials I can certainly understand why they are called elementary
• Sorry, I will try to write louder
• How can something possibly be bound by something that it cannot even feel?
• You’re going to get some baby Gaussians Trailing after the big momma Gaussian
• This quantum mechanics stuff is really smart, it’s going to sit and wait to see if I’m going to flick the switch.
• Quantum mechanics is great, I hope you’re going to teach your children about it
• The beauty of Linear algebra is that you can do an example and still keep it completely abstract.
• I don’t know how to explain it you just need to treat bras differently than kets.

I’ll let your read the email correspondence between my prof and myself and let you judge the results for yourself…

FROM: Josh TO: Z.W. GortelI’m interested to come and have a look at my Physics 311 final exam. Is this possible?, I mean do you have it on file or is it locked up somewhere and unaccesible. I didn’t feel particularily confident with regards to my final exam performance and was a bit dissapointed although not entirely suprised with my grade (B+). After talking with a number of peers following the break they also thought they didn’t do very well on the final but still recieved excellent marks.

FROM: Z.W. Gortel TO: Josh Thank you for getting to me. It looks like we have a once in a lifetime bad luck with reporting. In fact, your grade is A+ (you had a second best final exam). I have, mistakenly transcribed this as B+ in my final report. Well, you can treat this as a New Year’s gift or come and kill me for causing you such an anxiety. I will correct the record (and check if I did not do a similar error with someone else). And, of course, you can come and see your final exam.

My Phys 397 lab course requires that my lab reports be submitted according to a specific style. LaTeX is strongly recommended as this allows us to use a template provided to develop our lab reports and equations etc. in an efficient, neat and standard manor.

I therefore downloaded the freeware MikTeX distribution of the LaTeX language for windows operating systems. I got a bit of practice thus far, but I certainly have a lot yet to learn. For the most part all I have figured out is that TeX is an extremely powerful tool. The more I read (which is not much yet) the more I realize that I haven’t really made much progress yet. It’s one of those things that once I know it I doubt I’ll be using much else to create documents. The thing I’m interested in is how other people are going to respond to my communication via .pdf for all purposes rather than .doc? If you’re wondering how this is going to work out you’ve got about 1 month to find a solution because I know that once I learn I won’t turn back.

Here’s an Example of what I’ve figured out how to do so far. Focussed mostly on the math aspects of the markup, I’ll learn the other stuff as I go along.

Tuesday and Thursday this semester are certainly days that will teach me that even great things like physics need to be managed in moderation.

Hopefully this semester won’t turn me against it (I have little doubt that this is impossible) but I’ll certainly get my fill. Starting with Electrodynamics and then Quantum for 3 hours straight each morning I then roll right into 3 hours of labs in the afternoon. It’s a bit overboard but that’s just how the cookie crumbles.

I’m a little worried that I’ll get buried within a few weeks and won’t emerge until May.

27 outs in a baseball game, 27 days to mark a test…

So the waiting has finally come to an end, a mere 1 day short of the four week mark I was beginning to expect. Some people pointed out that our Statics mark in first year didn’t come until the Thursday of the first week of school, that may be the case but it was the last exam written on the last day of exams, they also had full lecture halls of students. And 27 days (Hiebert’s record) still has a significant margin over the 22 days record set by Hrudey and company.

Discussions amongst the other guys seems to suggest that things must have been tied up in the physics office

I figured it wouldn’t hurt to fill in the details regarding semester 6/8. my courses this semester consist of…

• EE 350 – Electronic devices, Instructor Jeremy Sit
• ENGG 405 – Engingeering Management Instructor Peter Flynn
• EE 323 – Partial Differential Equations Instructor Vien Van
• PHYS 381 – Electrodynamics Instructor Zbigniew Gortel
• PHYS 371 – Quantum Mechanics A Instructor Frank Marsiglio
• PHYS 397 – Projects in Experimental Physics Instructor Kim Chow

Things are looking busy but thus far not impossible. Engineering Management is something I know I will find harder than the average person, we’ll see how it goes. If I keep on top of things I should be in good shape. I guess that’s the situation for all of my classes, but staying on top of things gets tough when I have to write those big lab reports (one of which I picked up today – 89% woo hoo)