I'm not sure if this is the correct forum but i figured I would post here. So I've been working on a problem set for my first quantum field theory class consisting of 3 problems since 10am this morning with nothing but a few 20 minute breaks to eat, i just finished the second problem after 17...
I'm finishing up my undergrad days at cornell right now. The physics program here is amazingly good but there is only one class offered on optics and I've never really heard anyone talking about optics research here. If you are fairly sure you want to do optics i would probably recommend...
if you want to solve problems identical to ones you've seen before but with the numbers changed or other useless changes like that, you don't need the feynman lectures.
If on the other hand, you want to truly understand physics and have intuition that let's you tackle problems you have not...
you could try to study some simple circuits and EE type stuff if you really are clueless, but my advice is just to go in and do what you do. If they want you to know something specific, they can tell you that and you can learn it. At the interview, they just want to be floored by shear brilliance.
Well I've managed to answer the question, and i get an estimate of 5990 degrees kelvin which doesn't seem far off at all. I'm pleased. If anyone is interested in what I did, post here and i'll post my solution.
:-) somehow I don't think a simple no I can't will suffice, haha. Wikipedia has a nifty way of estimating the temperature of the sun just using the distance between the sun and earth, and the radius of the sun, however I'm not sure how I can get both of these values simply from know this 2.1...
So I've been given a problem in my thermodynamics class and it is completely confusing me. Here is the problem:
"Measured from the time when the first rays of sunshine appear above the horizon until the moment when the sun is fully visible, sunrise lasts 2.1 minutes. Based on this...
yes there is a difference, theoretical physics still tries to make predictions of physical things with their work. Mathematical physics has no such restriction, you can write papers on things such as axiomizing quantum field theory, clever math tricks to do physics problems, or just interesting...
sure, you can say that the zero matrix is nilpotent, but that would be considered the trivial case. i.e., if you are asked to find a nilpotent matrix satisfying some properties, using the zero matrix will probably not get you credit for solving the question.
with a table of data, the best you are going to do without using regression is to approximate linearly between any two points and use that as an approximation to the rate of change in that two year period. Doing that, you can answer the two questions given to you.
if you want people to help, you are going to have to show what you have tried so far... have you tried graphing the data and using linear approximations?
I'm sorry, but that is just plain wrong, If you use that logic it is possible to go an arbitrarily long distance in an arbitrarily short amount of time by just going closer to the speed of light. What i said was correct.