Recent content by sizzleiah

The major comment I'll make is that 16 hours/week will not be nearly enough time for a four year physics degree. When I was in undergrad (I'm currently a Ph.D. student), my weekly workload was at least three times that. As far as I'm concerned, it is not feasible to work a full-time job while...

I first learned what a tensor really was (i.e. beyond the usual heuristic discussions given in many undergrad physics books) in a grad GR course. Almost all of the standard texts for such courses cover tensors in some degree of detail. If you want to learn about them right now, I second the...

I took the grad school path (going into 2nd year), so I can't really comment from personal experience on other routes. However, I think you will find that grad school is very different from undergrad. For one thing, I found my grad classes much more interesting and satisfying than undergrad...

It was in Canada. Let's leave it at that...

I'm a grad student at UBC. I just transferred to the Ph.D. program after one year in the master's program. It's a fairly common thing here; the only requirement is that you get a decent average in four of your first year classes. Since my first year consisted entirely of classes (i.e. no...

I did 9 courses in my last year of undergrad (in Canada), and got accepted to several physics master's programs (also in Canada). You should check with the schools you'll be applying to.

Ok, I get it. Thanks a lot for the help.

Hey, thanks a lot for responding. It looks like my complex analysis is more rusty than I thought. Why are the limits of integration on the 2nd integral not -\pi to 0? Naively, I would think that we'd just integrate from the left part of the contour over to the right part along a semicircle...

Hi there. I've just finished reading chapter 2 of Peskin and Schroeder, and I managed to follow all of their calculations - with one exception: Homework Statement I'm not sure how P&S arrive at the integral in equation (2.52) (page 27) from the previous step in the calculation of D(x-y)...

What you've listed is quite a standard sequence of basic university-level mathematics courses; there's nothing for you to be afraid of. I would recommend that you tackle this course load in exactly the same way that thousands of math and physics students have in the years before you: take it...

Working with electronics is a fairly broad desire. There're some very different occupations that might fall into that category. For instance, an electrician works with electronics, and needs no math worth mentioning in his daily life. An electrical engineer, however, will certainly need to know...

Well, it seems fairly clear that you're going to have to somehow deal with this source of depression before you can really concentrate on mathematics again. I should mention that on applications for scholarships and whatnot, there is usually a spot wherein you can explain why you may've had a...

I've come up with a somewhat facetious aphorism that I find is all too often applicable in undergraduate physics and math courses (of which I've taken a few - I'm just starting grad school in physics): "School takes the fun out of learning." The point is that it can be rather easy to get caught...

Thanks very much for your response/welcome, humanino. Ok, so it comes, theoretically, from the fact that the photon is diagonal in the flavor basis; this makes sense!

Hi Friends, I am an undergrad currently taking my first course in particle physics. In thinking about various possible reactions, I have run across what appears to be a rather basic question: Why are reactions of the form e^- + e^+ \rightarrow \gamma \rightarrow q + q^' where q and q' are...