Recent content by radium

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I think it is quite important to have two semesters of QM as an undergrad if you are planning to do a PhD in physics. Many students entering PhD programs at top departments have already completed some graduate coursework during undergrad, so that may give you an idea of the high level of...

Elements of information theory by Cover and Thomas is one of the best general texts. Information, physics, and computation by Mezard and Montanari applies ideas from information theory and the physics of disordered systems to computation. I also second David MacKay’s book.

The second law arises from the statistics of large numbers. While it may be possible to observe configurations of molecules that appear to violate the second law, those configurations are so rare that you will practically never see them in a large system with many particles. You can quantify...

Several people at Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Canada work in quantum foundations. The faculty usually take graduate students through the University of Waterloo, and they also have a one year masters program in theoretical physics. It’s quite an interesting place.

My advice to anyone considering a PhD is that you should do it only if you believe that you will truly enjoy the day to day life of doing research and want to devote a significant portion of your life/make a career doing research (in academia or in industry). Of course there will be days when...

Try not to be too hard on yourself and just do the best that you can. Usually spending time with your cohort doing homework etc. helps you adjust and feel connected to the community when you begin graduate school, but it is much harder to do this with the current restrictions. I think this year...

Another good text to learn from is Quantum Field Theory and the Standard Model, although it’s a bit biased toward particle phenomenology. The exercises are very helpful for learning to calculate scattering amplitudes/cross sections

Many programs have made all GRE scores optional or are not accepting scores at all this year due to the pandemic.

The starting salary for a quant at a hedge fund can be in the $300,000-$400,000 range not including the bonus. With bonus, you can often make over one million a year within a few years. Many of these hedge funds (DE Shaw for example) have summer internship programs that you can do during the end...

Since you like the physics style more, I think the best option may be to major in physics and take whatever chemistry courses interest you or that you feel will be useful.

This is usually called the overdamped limit. In this case γ is large enough so that the velocity equilibrates very rapidly so you can set dv/dt=0 to find the behavior at long times. The joint pdf p(x,v) then factorizes into a stationary Maxwellian distribution for p(v) times a time dependent...

I think it’s definitely possible that there will be STEM graduate programs that choose not to admit any students at all next year, especially smaller programs. I have heard of at least one humanities program that has suspended graduate admissions this year. However, the physics programs I am...

The situation is still rapidly evolving, but I suspect that many universities may want to admit a smaller class size this year due to uncertainty in funding and also because a significant fraction of the current students may likely take longer to graduate because of the shutdowns. Many people...

Many faculty working in theoretical biophysics/soft matter are located in applied math departments. A sizable number of them (especially among more senior faculty) switched fields during their career, usually from more well developed areas of physics such as high energy or quantum condensed...