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.

If you’ve visited my kitchen in the last month you’ve probably read the poem. We ran out of space last night and it was declared officially complete. For the sake of posterity I figured a copy should be kept before it was erased. Here goes…

Yesterday, Tomorrow’s sunrise came late. Thunderstorms loomed tenaciously over dreary words! Walter vivaciously scripted another dubious disaster. Following an appendectomy; agony continued mercilessly. Needlessly twenty-seven-thousand philanthropists aggravated fifty-four-thousand Shakespearian flautists. Temperatures skirted cautiously around tepid tea soaked tributaries? Monolithic watertowers raged unmercilessly. Quantum ineffectually peace Canada. ~Cheetoes~

So it’s nearing three full days of being stuck in my head… here goes

Multiply Your Love Andy Park

Multiply Your love through us
To the lost and the least
Let us be Your healing hands
Your instruments of peace

May our single purpose be
To imitate Your life
Through our simple words and deeds
Let love be multiplied

Multiply Your love through me
To someone in need
Help me Lord to freely give
This grace that I’ve received

Let my single purpose be
To imitate Your life
Through my simple words and deeds
Let love be multiplied

Let us see Your kingdom come
To the poor and broken ones
Let us see a mighty flood
Of justice and mercy, O Jesus
Let love be multiplied
Let love be multiplied

Multiply Your church through us
To the ends of the Earth
Where there’s only barrenness
Let us see new birth

Use us as Your laborers
Working side by side
Let us see your harvest come
Let love be multiplied

Martin Strel is planning on swimming the entire length of the amazon river over the course of the next 722 days. If you thought that I had some crazy ideas up my sleeves you’d better take a look at This Website and see what this guy is planning on doing… Swimming the entire length of the Amazon River!

It amounts to around 90 km of swimming each day. The funny things is that this isn’t a joke he’s serious. He’s swum the entire Danube River (Europe), the entire Mississippi River (USA) and the entire Yangtze River (China) and the entire Parana River (Argentina). He’s also swum 504 kilometers in 84 hours, continuously!

I guess his speed has got to be on pace for ~4 km/hour in standing water if he plans to get those big distances on moving water.

After spending Engineering week doing a grand total of zero hours of homework it was only natural to up the ante and take another entire weekend away from Physics and Math to spend time with great people out in God’s creation.

Intervarsity Christian Fellowship held its annual winter camp this year at Pioneer Lodge just 15 km from Sundre. Some highligh photos of the weekend made it into this gallery. We were treated to amazing weather and blue skies and starry nights, perfect for having ridiculously large bonfires and sleeping under the stars.

The topic of discussion for the weekend revolved around love. Now if you were to pick a topic for discussion to be as cliche as possible, you might choose to talk about love. If you were going to pick a topic to be as powerful as possible you might also choose to talk about love, it’s not a completely hokey idea. Jesus sums up “The Law” (Torah) and the Prophets (The rest of the old testament) in two sentences. It’s no coincidence that both of those sentences have the instruction to love.

So the teaching was sweet but just being together in a super low stress atmosphere was way better. I’ll go for a 4 km run for 40 minutes anytime, I can’t get enough of being with these people.

On the 16th of November 2006 I had a letter to the editor published in “The Gateway”. The Gateway is the student newspaper at the University of Alberta. While this can easily be found by Googleing my name like this I’ve decided to post the “Paper Version” here on my website. You’re going to have to find a printer if you want the paper version but here it is: (click to enlarge)

Feel free to read the online version at: gateway.ualberta.ca

As quoted in a news release by the VP external of the University of Alberta Students’ Union.

• (Edmonton, AB) – Totals from the University of Alberta Students’ Union Wall of Debt campaign suggests that many students are being excessively overburdened with loans. Approximately 800 students wrote their anticipated student debt load upon graduation on paper bricks. The total amount of debt on the Wall was $20,293,100. That is an average of $37,000 per student.

Now I can understand that it’s possible to run into trouble coughing up $6000 per year on tuition on top of raising funds to pay for rent, utilities and food throughout the year. I have a hard time believing that the average person signing a brick for the “Wall of Debt” needs to take out a loan big enough to pay 6 years tuition. Come on people, have you no idea how much money you are spending that doesn’t need to be spent?

If you drive a $25 000 car to school, pay $400 per month to park it on campus. Wear $200 pairs of jeans and carry around a $2500 laptop with you while you spend $800 per month on rent. Eat most of your meals at a restaurant and spend $80/night to go clubbing/drinking 3 times per week. Spending $2500 each reading week to take a trip to Mexico or Vegas. Those are the big expenses, just think about one of the small ones, if you stop at Starbucks for a $5 cup of coffee every morning you’re investing enough money to buy a new bike every year.

Our society has things worked out so that people who want to spend way more than they should are just allowed to do so. If you want to take society up on that offer you by all means have the right to do so. I don’t think you have to right to do so and then attribute your financial situation to being a student.

Andrew and I spent a bonus 3.5 hours sitting in the 350 lab today working on our audio amplifier and it seems that we did nail it in the end. Our power amplification is well above the 1 million times specified in the manual. In fact, we pretty much maxed it out. Instead of doing like EE 340 where I figured out everything before I did it we decided to go for it and start building amplifier stages with the hopes that we could just tweak them into working correctly rather than actually calculating everything properly.

We started out by asking for maximum amplification from out MOSFET and found that we could get a voltage amplification of about 30 from it. Because it was impossible to drive our 8 Ohm speaker directly from the output of the amp we needed to put it through a BJT amplifier with a bit more reasonable of an output impedance. Anyhow, maximum power called for approximately 860 Ohms resistance on the drain of the FET, and this drove the BJT into clipping rather severly. Our simple solution to the problem was to decrease the amount of signal being coupled into the BJT by decreasing the efficiency of the FET, what started at 860 quickly became 560, then 480, 360, 240 and finally 150 Ohms. This amounted to a signal just clear of the level of clipping onset. And left us with well more than power amplification of 60dB.

Another curious note which we didn’t understand immediately, but soon got a handle on as everyone else in the lab was running into the same problem was a massive drift in power gain. It turns out to be no surprise at all that when a 100uF cap is in series with approximately 500K your time constant is a whopping 50 seconds! So evenif you let the circuit “warm up” for a minute you’ve still got a fractional drift of ~1/e to deal with after 2 minutes (1/e)^2 etc… Based on PSpice simulation I can drop that capacitance by a factor of 10 (or even 100) and not lose any bandwidth so it shouldn’t be a problem in the future (Time constant is 5 seconds (or 0.5)), just a funny story.

The Engineering physics club placed 4th in Geer Week 2007! We also managed to clean up in 3 events and the club room will be adorned with 3 pretty sweet-action plaques until January 2008! to check out some of the pictures from the week visit the Eng Phys Photo Gallery (click the thumbnail).

• 1^st Place – Scavenger Hunt
• 1^st Place – Godiva (Eng Week Newspaper)
• 1^st Place – Blood Drive

We scored Second in the Tech Display and placed far lower in the Design competition (5th) and the Movie (6th) than I think we deserved. Placement in other events can be found on the Engingeering Student’s Society Webpage.

Engineering week ends tomorrow with the 68th annual Engineers Ball. I would consider this one the most fun yet and would attribute that entirely to the fact that I went to essentially everything! I missed out on the Keg Races Obstacle course because I had a mandatory lab and I skipped out on the Wrap-Up party because I wasn’t interested in any of the bands playing there. What I did attend is nothing to be laughed at…

• Tug of War EP placed top 4
• Scavenger Hunt EP beat mecE, civE and EE.. all the big guns
• civE party
• Toboggan Races Had to borrow a female participant who incurred penalties for us =(
• Battle of the Bands
• chemE party
• Shangria First near-beer down and first to the bat… …last one back
• Design Competition Highest towerby far
• mecE party
• Movie Night Got to judge on behalf of our club, we certainly did good
• EE party
• Career Fair
• Beer Brewing / Boat RacesAnchored the team on one of the heats (5th place)
• Engineers Ball

I’ll find out tomorrow how we did in all these events and list our sweet achievements then. For now feel free to check out the EnPhys Gallery to see some pictures of the weeks events. Of special note are the ones involving shredded paper and club offices.