(no subject)

Totally, totally swamped with work I didn't do from last week. I probably should stay up some more to continue grinding away on the E/M Honors review problems; I've only solved two of the 12 so far, and they were among the more straightforward ones on electrostatics: a trivial Gauss's law problem, and a method of images problem that was a variation on one from Griffiths we had done in 112. The latter problem was interesting; it came from "Problems and Solutions on Electromagnetism", one of a series of books published by the Chinese government containing a compilation of physics PhD qualifier problems from major American universities. Specifically, this problem, concerning a charge outside an electrically isolated, neutral, conducting sphere, was from MIT. I do not honestly think I could have derived the basic image charge configuration for this system in a reasonable amount of time. Then again, there are only a handful of electrostatics problems solvable by the method of images, so perhaps they just expected you to have memorized this geometry, or at least to have remembered it well enough to be able to quickly re-derive it. I also wonder whether this problem would have been on Generals I or Generals II. If I went to MIT, I'd have to take the first round of qualifiers upon arrival, on MIT undergraduate physics. A year later, I'd have to take Generals II, on intro grad physics.

I need a couple of hours of sleep... I'll be up all night for sure tomorrow night working on Solid State after we get out of Honors review with Carl at midnight, and then going to Cornell on Thursday. As of right now, silly me is stumped on boundary conditions on what should not be a difficult problem involving the solution of Laplace's equation. It's been a while since I've had to grok with PDE's and it's showing... Must also review retarded potentials and radiation, badly.