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Random thoughts
May. 7th, 2004 12:39 amAnother night in Cornell, working on my Beaumarchais paper. At least I've now got an outline, and I think I'll be able to put together a pretty good paper. I'm going to look at the last scene and vaudeville at the end of the play and use that as an interpretive lens to look at some other parts of the play and its revolutionary qualities.
I'm becoming more and more like![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rose_garden. First I got a lj account to begin with. Now I'm starting to leave my books on the student belongings shelves in Cornell as lugging Shankar and all my French books back and forth is just silly and back-breaking.
I still don't understand quantum. Paul Bloom,rose_garden, and sildra all seem to be saying that learning quantum takes time and that it's a continuous process. I think that's true. It's weird though; even though I know that I still don't completely grasp electromagnetic theory and that there's a ton of stuff (ie Griffiths and Jackson) that I haven't even seen, I felt at the end of Physics 8 that I at least had a good basic grasp of e/m. I don't know; I think I understand the 1-d problems in Griffiths pretty well (must go over scattering tomorrow) and I think I've got a handle on the basics of Dirac language. But there are still many lines in Shankar that have me befuddled, and I am rather overwhelmed in parts of Chapter 5 when he treats the same 1-d problems that are done in Griffiths. Perhaps someday I'll understand this... At any rate I did go back and look at the Physics 6H quantum exam, and the problems sure make a lot more sense now. So I guess I have made progress. It was cool to see that what in 6H we called the "time evolution operator" is just the propagator, and now I can see how that's derived in Shankar from the Schrodinger equation rather than it being something Peter just pulled out of thin air.
So, I'll probably finish studying for quantum tomorrow and then take the exam. Then Saturday I'll write my French paper. Perhaps I should take a day next week and just spend the day away from Swat, perhaps studying at Bryn Mawr. I don't think I need to be around here to study for P50; most of the material is straightforward enough and I don't think I have a slew of questions for Doc. We'll see...
I'm becoming more and more like
rose_garden. First I got a lj account to begin with. Now I'm starting to leave my books on the student belongings shelves in Cornell as lugging Shankar and all my French books back and forth is just silly and back-breaking.I still don't understand quantum. Paul Bloom,
rose_garden, and sildra all seem to be saying that learning quantum takes time and that it's a continuous process. I think that's true. It's weird though; even though I know that I still don't completely grasp electromagnetic theory and that there's a ton of stuff (ie Griffiths and Jackson) that I haven't even seen, I felt at the end of Physics 8 that I at least had a good basic grasp of e/m. I don't know; I think I understand the 1-d problems in Griffiths pretty well (must go over scattering tomorrow) and I think I've got a handle on the basics of Dirac language. But there are still many lines in Shankar that have me befuddled, and I am rather overwhelmed in parts of Chapter 5 when he treats the same 1-d problems that are done in Griffiths. Perhaps someday I'll understand this... At any rate I did go back and look at the Physics 6H quantum exam, and the problems sure make a lot more sense now. So I guess I have made progress. It was cool to see that what in 6H we called the "time evolution operator" is just the propagator, and now I can see how that's derived in Shankar from the Schrodinger equation rather than it being something Peter just pulled out of thin air.So, I'll probably finish studying for quantum tomorrow and then take the exam. Then Saturday I'll write my French paper. Perhaps I should take a day next week and just spend the day away from Swat, perhaps studying at Bryn Mawr. I don't think I need to be around here to study for P50; most of the material is straightforward enough and I don't think I have a slew of questions for Doc. We'll see...
