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Oct. 7th, 2005 01:51 pmThe physics GRE is going to kick my rear extremely hard.
Somehow I appear to have lost the ability to do rapid, back-of-the-envelope type arithmetic. Similarly, I need to be able to solve problems quickly, say in about a minute or 90 seconds. And the stupid, almost comical mistakes. Arithmetic, factors of ten, and even dumber things. In solving an electrostatics problem that was a trivial applicaton of Gauss's law, I managed to forget that the volume element in spherical coordinates includes a factor of r^2 sin theta. Forgetting something so elementary and geometrically apparent from multivariable calc, is so profoundly stupid that I'd be tempted to laugh if it wasn't myself. It's like a English major forgetting that Milton wrote Paradise Lost or a French major forgetting how to conjugate aller in the present indicative.
Somehow I appear to have lost the ability to do rapid, back-of-the-envelope type arithmetic. Similarly, I need to be able to solve problems quickly, say in about a minute or 90 seconds. And the stupid, almost comical mistakes. Arithmetic, factors of ten, and even dumber things. In solving an electrostatics problem that was a trivial applicaton of Gauss's law, I managed to forget that the volume element in spherical coordinates includes a factor of r^2 sin theta. Forgetting something so elementary and geometrically apparent from multivariable calc, is so profoundly stupid that I'd be tempted to laugh if it wasn't myself. It's like a English major forgetting that Milton wrote Paradise Lost or a French major forgetting how to conjugate aller in the present indicative.
