Recent content by Lelephant

Do you have any comment as to why Honors UCSB < Berkeley regular?

I'm visiting Berkeley the weekend of April 11th, and have visited UCSB and attended a CCS breakout session. I know David Gross at KITP completed the standard model so he's really important in quantum physics, but I'm not sure how much exposure I would have to great scientists like that, being a...

I had simply assumed, but your comment made me google it and I found that UCSB actually has one more current physics Nobel Laureate than Berkeley does. That said, I'm not sure how accessible the Nobel Laureates are at either university and I have no idea how the faculty at UCSB is regarded in...

I'm going to enter college this fall, and I will have a choice between UCSB CCS Physics and Berkeley Physics. The way I see it: CCS offers me more research opportunities, smaller classes, more happy and social student body, probably a higher class rank (Cal is supposed to be more competitive...

By "Princeton and MIT" I mean to say, large, big name, very prestigious schools where a faculty member could find lots of funding for research. I'm aware that it isn't typical to go straight from PhD to faculty, I'm asking how this small percentage of physicists prove themselves in order to...

Whenever I look at the careers of famous physicists, current and past, they seem to only attend prestigious universities. They graduate with a PhD from some great physics school and immediately start teaching somewhere very well regarded, whether it's Princeton or MIT. I've also read "So You...

Thank you for the thorough reply. I have just two more follow-up questions: 1. Is admission to a highly selective grad school (e.g. Princeton, Stanford, Berkeley) much more difficult if you don't happen to land a coauthorship or super valuable internship, but still do a fair number of URE's and...

I'm facing the possibility of going to UC Berkeley for undergraduate. I will be majoring in physics and possibly double majoring in math. I have a few questions: 1. How can I stand out in a class of 100 students and find an opportunity to coauthor a research paper or two before I graduate...

I've read that the reason why the academic job market is so swamped for Physics is because of the massive spending around Sputnik's launch which resulted in the hiring of tons of physics faculty, followed by anti-age discrimination legislation which allowed those Sputnik-era professors to stay...

And it's 2pi because it's in terms of radians. Alright, I think I understand. Thanks!

Why isn't the angular velocity 2*pi*r/T? It seems like the speed at which you travel around the perimeter of the Earth ought to be the circumference (distance traveled in one Earth rotation) divided by 24 hours (the period of one of Earth's rotations) given that velocity = distance/time. So...

Because if it did, it seems as though the spacecraft would be following the rotation of the Earth. As in, as the spacecraft got further from the Earth, it would be rotating around the Earth at the same velocity as the Earth was rotating along its axis previously.

There is something I don't fully comprehend. When I throw a ball into the air while I'm sitting in a train, I won't accelerate past the ball because the ball carries the momentum of the train just as well as I do. Furthermore, the ball, the train and I carry the momentum of the Earth, which is...

Hahaha rubbing it on cats. Fair enough, thanks all for your help, if I need more help I'll start a new thread.

Ah, I was thinking of moving the magnet because of the Faraday videos (bar magnet into coil of copper) and an explanatory video which included a shakeable flashlight (magnet passes in and out of a coil when you shake). When I say "cutting corners," I don't mean I'm going to leave anything out...