Recent content by Crass_Oscillator

You're probably talking about shoe lace tying. Again, take a random top 10 undergrad and random 100-11 undergrad and put them in front of a PGRE and the latter might not even recall what the field between a parallel plate capacitor is. But I can think of dozens of papers written by grads of...

There is, in my experience, zero correlation between name of school attended, and capacity for thought. Academia follows the Pareto principle pretty closely. Probably fewer than 20% of faculty are actually creative, productive, and useful to society. These faculty, sprinkled throughout the...

My impression of the MIT grads I've worked with or under over the years is that 99% of them can tie their shoe laces, but can't think. My impression of the grads from lousy state schools such as the one I'm at is that 99% of them can't tie their shoe laces, and also can't think. Is having a...

Complete your PhD at ASU; they rarely get good physics grad students and having years of experience will make you highly desirable. They also have arguably the strongest structural biophysics department in the world right now (Graves, Spence, Kirian etc are there, along with BioXFEL). Just talk...

As an addendum to my previous post, there are many who have switched fields via a post-doc or industrial post. The demand for, say, computational statisticians working on biology is enormous, and they seem to like theoreticians trained in physics (a biophysics/computational biology group at my...

I think getting a few bad grades is normal for most people, but physics careers are so difficult to obtain that you need every advantage you can acquire. You will be competing with a lot of 4.0 Stanford Honors students when you try out for graduate school. Also, physics is incredibly broad; you...

I think you're wasting your time for the wrong reasons. The truth is you'd probably be just as happy doing experimental quantum optics, computational materials science, machine learning, or some other more practical and well funded discipline. Likely you don't view those subjects as being as...

A PhD is essential for a technical career path in certain cases in semiconductors. It's the difference between being a user of the TCAD programs to design a device and being the scientist who wrote the TCAD program and designed the algorithms/models. Some precocious masters degree holders may...

Isn't the degree far too broad for blanket opinions to apply? I've been in a graduate computer science department and graduate engineering department for my PhD and students often started doing internships during the degree where they applied their research to an industrial problem before...

Obviously if you begin with the same values, you will converge to an "objective" notion of beauty. For instance, I highly value parsimony, and, therefore, find GR to be aesthetically pleasing, even though in practice it is mathematically turgid. Some of you probably do too. The problem is that...

The Berkeley degree is very strong for grad school in engineering/applied physics programs. It is not as good I guess for fancy theoretical physics (not enough fancy math), but that's about it for physics programs, many of whom have experimentalists who work in very applied fields anyways. I...

I am getting a PhD in solid state device physics in an engineering program. I do physics simulations of semi-classical and quantum transport in devices and materials. I was also recently put on a quantum photonics project. Some of the work I do is the fast track to industry; other work that I...

I find it baffling that anybody would suggest that beauty is anything but subjective. In quantum transport for instance, one can go the route of second quantization along with all of the associated dazzling Feynman diagrams and abstract representations, followed by conventional Green function...

Thanks, these both seem useful

I just got put on a project involving quantum optics, but have a background in semiconductor transport physics/electronic structure of materials. Does anybody know of a good textbook in this area, covering topics such as, say, the Jaynes-Cummings model?