Recent content by caleb5040

I'm in the same boat. My decision to graduate this year came after the deadline for the physics GRE. I'm still applying to 7 grad schools, though: University of Minnesota, Brown University, UW-Milwaukee, CUNY, Stony Brook, Brandeis, and University of Pittsburgh. None of them require the physics...

Yeah, I haven't anything at all myself, excepting two rejections. I'm starting to think it'd be a good idea to make back-up plans for the summer just in case.

Yeah, I just got rejected from Notre Dame. 300 applicants for 12 spots. Hahaha...

Hi, I've been working on an experiment where I dip LEDs into liquid nitrogen and note the color change. All online sources I've seen predict that the wavelength of the light emitted by the LED will decrease upon immersion. What I've been observing, however, is a sudden decrease in...

I see now that I didn't formulate the thread title very well. I don't at all feel that it's all been "done." I'm aware of plenty of open questions out there, and I'm sure they will keep coming. My feeling is mainly that I have nothing to contribute to the open questions, which is probably just...

You make a good point! The likely discovery of the Higgs Boson is very exciting. You're also right that I just don't know enough to be getting into the real deep questions. I would be more excited if I was able to understand the actual theory behind the Higgs Boson, which I probably won't be...

Thanks everyone for the advice. This is very helpful (and encouraging). I guess I just needed to hear from some people who have actual experience with research. It sounds like I definitely shouldn't expect so much from myself ;D Don't want to neglect this either haha

Hello all, I'm currently an undergrad student studying math and physics. It's my hope one day to go to grad school and pursue some sort of research within physics. Recently, though, I've been having a sort of crisis (haha): Evidently I'm completely void of novel research ideas. Every...

Interesting! I think I see how to prove the generalization.

Awesome! Thank you both. Those were just the thoughts I needed to do it myself. Sorry for not posting my initial attempts...they both involved rewriting the integral as an iterated integral and switching the order (I figured out two ways of doing this). The trouble was that each time the...

So recently I've been working through some challenge problems from my old calculus textbook for fun. I'm stuck on one of the integrals, though, and can't find any solutions online. This isn't for homework...it's for my interest and hopefully the interest of others. Here it is (sorry about the...

That's a really thought-provoking question. Different people have different answers, and there seems to be no general consensus. A partial explanation is that we actually develop mathematics ourselves in order to describe the natural world. In other words, it works because we make it work. But...

The equation becomes exact if you multiply both sides by the integrating factor μ = y2. You can then find the solution using regular methods for solving exact equations. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exact_differential_equation. Not sure if Wikipedia explains the method very well, but...

I think that makes sense. Thanks!

Given a function z(x,y), is the following expression valid: ∫(1)∂z = z Does this even make sense? I came up with this in my differential equations class, but I'm not sure if it actually means anything.