Recent content by nickbob00

Why do you want to spend a whole extra year in undergrad? Get your Physics Major and get out into a PhD programme. IMO having spent so long to get your undergrad will more than cancel out any benefits you will get from having a more well rounded approach. By all means, take as much math and cs...

It is usual in the UK to have a masters course (MSc, MSci or MPhys) before starting a PhD, though it it certainly not unheard of for a BSc student to get on a good PhD programme. Your best bet in that respect is to get in touch with an individual lecturer somewhere doing something you want to do...

If you want to do experimental physics, statistics are absolutely essential. However, the mathematical approach to statistics might not help so much if you cover the things you need to know for experimental data analysis in lab courses and any data analysis based courses.

Since you won't have to take pen and paper exams, assuming you understand how you could solve the problem by hand, there is no reason to do by hand what computers can do better. Many working theoretical physicists do complicated calculations by computer.

As an incoming UK PhD, I understand that the situation usually is that research councils will only award maintenance payments (i.e. your salary) to students who have been in the UK for 3 years (excluding time spent in education). Some universities have a scheme that will award funding to some...

Definitely start with special relativity. General Relativity is hard, and very mathematical. It's usually taught at masters level. If you want to do anything interesting with it you need to know a lot of very difficult mathematics. If you're not familiar with tensors and that sort of thing...

That sounds completely outrageous, my university has a policy explicitly permitting use of computer facilities for personal things. If you were using the resources "inappropriately" they should have told you at the time and given warning.

Theoretical physics Quantum mechanics Thermal and statistical physics Skills in physics (problem solving and applications)

Excellent point, rolling completely slipped my mind.

The "actual" value is the speed you measured in the experiment (maybe you did distance over time to find it indirectly), while the predicted speed is one you find by doing mgh= 1/2 mv^2. The idea is that you can then compare the two numbers and see how well the theoretical calculation (ignoring...

You need to consider the conservation of energy. The ball starts with a certain amount of potential energy, which is converted to kinetic energy as the ball rolls down the hill, then back to PE as it goes around the loop.

Fortunately for mathematicians, they work in a dream world where space is perfectly euclidian, no funny quantisation business going on!

Depending on where your physics is at, you may know that voltage is really potential difference. There is an electric potential field with a scalar value defined for all space (including within your circuit wires) related to the work done to push a unit charge to that point from a pre-agreed...

Density is inversely proportional to volume, given constant mass.

^ What HallsOfIvy said If you're looking for an easy way to find derivatives and do other mathsy things, look up wolfram alpha. It's a website that is quite excellent.