Recent content by AstroK

TL;DR: Not yet feel ready to graduate so decided to take a one-year internship in the middle of final undergrad year to get things straight. Adviser think it's stupid to come back for one semester after the internship and think I should just get graduate requirement ready before I go. I don't...

I am almost done with my BS in physics now, but I am seriously concerning and even panicking about my future career. Before I entered college, I thought I will be able to pick up everything I needed career-wise and is confident in my decision-making ability, so I haven’t worried too much about...

Thanks everyone. I had checked all the resource being suggested so far, and it seems only Sakurai cover everything that Shankar got. I will definitely try out Sakurai (we use it for graduate QM, so our library has several copies of it), and meanwhile any other suggestions are also welcomed.

I am currently taking a second course on QM (at undergraduate level). The official texts of my course are Griffiths (we are covering the second half of it) and Shankar (for everything that is not in Griffiths). But after reading Shankar for a while, I found myself not really liking the book too...

Thanks everyone. These are exactly the kinds of things I am looking for. I definitely agree that I should give more details about the whole story / background behind all these. I was just trying to start off my question without giving too much at once, to avoid a "unreadably long post" and to...

Thanks for the reply. My professor is actually the one who teaches this graduate stat mech course. He knows me personally but not sure if he had overestimated my capability. For the graduate credit, I am not sure how it will work out if I go to another school for my graduate study, but if I...

Thanks for the reply. I understand. I did have a look at all the books I mentioned, but still I found it hard to judge whether I can handle them all in one semester. I of course enjoy reading all these subject while I am free from academic pressure, but from my own experience, things often just...

Recently I have had a conversation with one of my professors, and he suggested me to take a graduate statistical mechanics course in the coming Spring semester. Although the various reasons my professor gave for his suggestion sound really appealing to me, I am a little bit worried about whether...

Never mind, I just have a talk with my professor about this, and it turned out that I had overlooked some obvious yet important details...

I am working on problems similar to this one too. Please allow me to borrow your thread for a quick question -- for this particular problem, I have tried to use conservation of angular momentum then energy to solve, and I got everything right in my final expression except I don't get the 1/3...

Thanks again for the replies. I have heard quite a few comments about the math (I have asked about this in several places) which is good because that bring up another aspect that I should think about. But I want to make sure that the "tedious math" I hate is the same "tedious math" that people...

Thanks for the reply. Actually, I don't necessarily want to get very deep into theoretical physics or astronomy. And I guess relativity would be my last stop in theoretical things and it is barely just a goal I wish to achieve as a student. And beyond that, I think I really would not care too...

For online courses, I have three more to add: PHYS102x Electricity & Magnetism and PHYS201x Wave & Optics, both offered by Rice on edX. And UPenn's Single Variable Calculus on Coursera. I took 102x in Spring this year when self-studying the AP Physics C exam; It helped me got my 5. But I...

As the deadlines of college admission approach, I really start to think about what I should study in college. I love physics. And by that I mean I really love physics, not just those popular science about time traveling and all those junk, but also the more "real" physics like how the Maxwell's...