You can make a contribution, but it will be very long and very hard.
To give you some perspective after 4 years of full-time university undergraduate training in physics I'm not yet in a position to make a contribution to the (theoretical) physics community. This is because all the ideas I've...
I'm with cristo in that I think given you would've put in a couple years of hard work to get to the writing up stage of your thesis it's probably worth putting in the last few months to finish it - it will look a lot better on your resume (you can always sell a PhD as "I spent 3 years working...
Well, it sounds to me like you don't have a firm idea of what you want to be doing (in terms of what department, where,...) so I will give you a general overview of what I would do in your situation. I'll be specific, but take my advice with a grain of salt and apply it as appropriate.
A...
The path students take going from undergrad to PhD seems to vary greatly between countries, and I was wondering if some natives could illuminate me on how it works in their country.
In Australia the process is (typically) as follows:
3 year undergraduate
1 extra year of undergraduate...
Well to start with what is the wavefunction (as a function of space and time) of a Gaussian representing a free particle.
What could we mean by the 'size' of the wavepacket?
(I think the question is asking you to calculate the fractional change in size of the wavepacket over a time period...
Think carefully about what you're doing here.
Here's how I have read the question: You have a charged insulating spherical shell and no other sources of charge. You know the potential on the shell; deduce the potential at all other points.
Now the equation E=-grad(V) tells you how to get the...
Firstly the limits: you're not being careful, you're just guessing. Sketch u as a function of x. (Use a graphing program if you must.)
Your inverse looks good: which sign should you take and why (hint: think about the limits).
Your expression looks pretty good; but as you say it's pretty...
That all sounds perfectly reasonable.
In order for a map to be defined as conformal both the range and domain must be Riemannian manifolds; so they certainly have geodesics, but they do not in general have a unique notion of distance, and hence arc-length or area. (You can always have a...
It's hard to follow what you're trying to do without some background.
Firstly if you are taking a non-compact one dimensional submanifold of the Euclidean plane and then compactifying it, you may as well be taking one dimensional submanifolds of the sphere.
There are a whole lot of different...
A good place to start is to sketch the function you are trying to substitute and work out whether it makes for a reasonable substitution (that way you should be able to see the limits and all that straight off your sketch). Also find the inverse function, u as a function of x.
What is dx in...
Homework Statement
I recently came across this integral while doing a problem in electromagnetism (I'm not sure if there exists a nice analytic answer):
\int_{0}^{\pi}P_m(\cos(t))P_n(\cos(t)) \sin^2(t) = \int_{-1}^{1}P_m(x) P_n(x) \sqrt{1-x^2},
Homework Equations
P_m(x) is the m^th...
With these sorts of problems we've always got to keep an eye on the expression we are trying to get to; in particular we want dT in terms of dV.
Consequently it makes sense to consider temperature T as a function of volume V and another independent variable; here the only sensible choices...
Does anyone know of any books on the history of quantum mechanics? I'd ideally like an in depth coverage of the experimental results and theoretical developments, with references to original papers. A complete treatment of non-relativistic quantum mechanics (from pre-Planck to Dirac) would be...
Ok, I think I get what you're saying now. It doesn't matter what's holding the dipole together; whether its electric forces, gluons or Achillies. If we're thinking of a dipole as a spinning spherical shell, the important thing to notice is that if it is conducting when we put it in a magnetic...