Buckingham Pi

My university career, it seems, has come like the tail-biting snake to finish exactly on the topic it began.

It began with Physics Foundations, and an overview of dimensional analysis, and the Buckingham Pi theorem. The first lecture I ever went to. I could say I've learned a lot since then, and I have in some ways, although not as academically based as the idealist might think. I could also jest that I've learned nothing except loathing for my subject, but that would also not be entirely true.

The close of the course on Chaos and Complexity, on my last day of lectures, was on dimensional analysis and the Buckingham Pi theorem. Perhaps this provides a unique poetic closure. Perhaps this means it is time to go. Goodbye university.

Scylla and Charybdis

I'm busy writing up the report on that final project of mine.

On reading the introduction to "Specific Heats at Low Temperatures" by E.S. Raja Gopal, I discovered the following claim:

"It has been a difficult task to steer between the Scylla of encyclopedic completeness and the Charybdis of shallow banality."

This is a fancy way of saying "I recognise that this book is not at all interesting. I'm trying to squeeze blood from a stone by injecting grandiloquent references to Greek mythology."

God. Even the professional physicists know their subject is boring.

Bad Graph Day

I believe I just had what is quite possibly the worst day for graphs I have ever had (or will ever have) in my whole scientific life. Check these beauties out.





Super-bonus points to anyone who can identify my area of research.

As it happens, while I was a-projecting today, creating the monstrosities before you, I was quite taken with the iPod Touch of a fellow research student. I spent an age fiddling with a particular game on it called Evolution RGB.

Now, it would almost be worth describing this game except that it is nothing more than the poor cousin of another game that predates it, which I came across one day on the Big Bad Internet.

The Falling Sand Game is really a series of Java applets, each containing a different set of tools and materials, such as (but definitely not limited to) sand, water, fire, plant, oil, wax, napalm and the enigmatic but annoying "???". There is no objective other than to create marvellous interactive sculptures - it is really just an advanced virtual sandbox. My favourite version even features little zombies, which you can bury in the ground and watch as they attempt to dig their way out.

Come to think of it, my graphs do kinda resemble zombie-battered shelves of wax.

The Falling Sand Game

Danger Danger, High Voltage

"Are you busy?" calls Tim. He comes to me. "Because if you are, feel free to tell me to bugger off. I just need your help for a minute, if you could." Indeed, I have just finished what I was working on, so I go to help him out.

Tim is a lab technician. I see him every Monday and Thursday as I work in the labs on my final year project. He cusses and talks to himself. He grins at you madly when he catches your eye. He watches BBC news on the web at lunchtime, as he munches his way through an entire shopping bag of lunchtime goodies. He is enjoyable company.

I am not sure why Tim is where he is, exactly. He left school to work as a technician for the university. Work, that is, not study, but he soon decided he did want a degree after all, and is somehow now simultaneously a technician and a student of electrical engineering who doesn't really spend time around other students. It is his job to fix the magnetism department's machines and to build random electrical toys. Toys - I don't undertand either - like a ball bearing rail gun.

Or today's aluminium-disc-jumps-skyward-for-no-readily-discernable-
reason-or-purpose thing. He is adding more capactiors to it so that the disc can jump higher.

"Right," says Tim, handing me a stick of wood. "I just need you to be here in case anything goes wrong. It's highly unlikely, but it might, so I need you to be ready with that stick." I should point out that the stick is about 1 m long, 5 cm in diameter and completely solid. "Stand back in case anything blows up. If I electrocute myself you need to beat me with this stick until I let go of the electrics."

Sometimes I really love the occupational hazards of my subject.

The Summer Holiday is a Fruit Tree

In the spirit of anticipation of the end of term I have been trying to use up the food that has been lying around in my cupboard. This consists mainly of two-year-old cans of beans. I was most pleased with myself today when I was able to liberate no fewer than two cans and four bottles of spice. As the food depletes and the kitchen counters get reclaimed by the Crumbmaker and her entourage of mess, and as the sun shines and the calendar ticks down to Q-day*, I feel my involvement in this spit-encrusted hovel begin to lessen. I phoned the water company today to cancel the account.

I might even miss the Crumbmaker a bit. I'd miss her more, but I already started missing her when we moved in together - when she who was once one of my favourite people in the world began, inexplicably, withdrawing from me. Plus, she makes so much bloody mess! Perhaps the least considerant person in the kitchen I have ever met. Severus I am going to enjoy leaving behind. I have had to put up with a year of listening to him finishing everyone else's sentences and belittling everyone (including the Crumbmaker, when they are supposed to be the best of friends), shouting (as a standard vocal volume) and snorting back phlegm on the landing.

And another gorgeous holiday is approaching. A holiday that has not yet started is one of the best things about life. It is far better than a great holiday finished or a holiday in progress. It exists at the edge of time, waiting, calling with boundless promise. A holiday that has not yet started is an opportunity to do anything and everything, all at once. There can be no plan or there can be a thousand, and because it has not yet started, all plans are still valid. You are still at the trunk of a magnificently beautiful tree with fractally branching possibilities. You have not yet crawled along a single branch to the very end of a twig only to realise that you cannot reach for the piece of fruit on the other side. At the trunk you can eat every single piece in with your eyes and imagine savouring the taste of each one. I have so many plans for when the holiday arrives, and as much as I will delight in executing them, I delight most now as I shape and reshape them effortlessly in my head. Right now is when I enjoy the summer the most.

It's just as well, because in the mean time I have to contend with stoopid revision and exams. I feel like I will never fit it all in my head in time, and I'm in the air watching the rocks as they come rushing towards me. Right now I am treating science with the greatest amount of grace-saving contempt I can summon. Let's see:

Quantum mechanics - A theory of not knowing stuff, and pretending not to mind. Responsible for some of the worst in-jokes known to man.

Statistical mechanics - Science is a science, they tell us. It is based on careful observation and formulation of rules derived from hard fact. Why then is statistical mechanics' most crucial tenet, S=klnW, based on a guess? And then there's Gibbs' Paradox. After being guaranteed this was a genuine paradox and being lectured through the maths, we are told it is not a paradox.

Electromagnetic theory - Maxwell decides to fudge, adding a term called "displacement current" to Ampere's Law in order to force an incorrect theory into validity. He fails, but inadvertantly fixes a different problem he wasn't even aware of. Oh, and the displacement current is not a current.



* - The day of my demise, the quantum mechanics exam.

Welcome Back, Imagination

Holiday time is upon all the physicists, and you can really tell. Scan down my list of physics contacts and you would find that each name sports a tag line:

Only Two Left!! Fighting!!
2 down 1 to go
C will die
Finished my formal report!

And then, there are those tag lines that come after the last of the deadlines are met. We are like wild animals captured and then set loose, blinking at the sunshine as we hesitate on the thresholds of our cages:

wow, what to do now, we have free time for the first time in ages
Look at the sky!

We have all been so brutally overworked that now that we have even a few minutes of free time we have no idea what to do with ourselves. I have been working pretty much solidly for the last week to meet all requirements to such an intensity that I do not eat and I do not sleep. This is the case for me, and I do not doubt for a second that I form a completely representative indication of the rest on my course. Of course, there are some people who do not take stress too well.

"Oh my goodness!" I manage, coming down the stairs, simultaneously wilting and chuckling, "worst day of my life ever!"

"Why?" demands Steve sharply.

"Only just finished my final C project. It was crazy!"

"Well, I've been working two days solid on my essay," he retorts.

I give up. It is not worth pointing out to him I've been working at least three times as long, even missing meals, while he says this to me having just finished dinner tucked away watching South Park. Some people, eh? Never mind him though, I am now on holiday. To misquote my mother's recent misquotation, the only people who truly appreciate laziness are the hardest workers. And I can say this to you with the fullest understanding: maaaaaan, it is good to be lazy!

My time will once again be devoted to the things I love. I will juggle, I will dance, I will laugh and write and play my piano. I will start to notice the small things in life again, like the way being clean after getting out of the shower feels so good, or the shape of the clouds, or the way the last sip of a hot cup of tea made from a limescaly kettle is decidedly crunchy.

My Fantasy

I had a fantasy a minute or so ago:

I'm walking up to where my physics classes are held, and suddenly the guy I've decided I like runs up to me and kisses me. "Oh," I say, "you shouldn't have done that, because I just ate a tuna and onion panini" (which was true, I had just finished having a brunch at the Arts Centre). "Oh," he says. He can taste it. And he walks off with the air of one who has just made an embarrassing error.

How very half-arsed. I continue to believe that my imagination is currently suffering due to the stress of overworking in the scientific mindset.

Error Analysis Saves Lives

So, here it is. Another night-before-lab-book-gets-handed-in, and I am scrawling away, overlooking the criminal nature of my layout, accuracy, maths, logical flaws and so forth (but never my English), in a half-hearted attempt not to fail as badly as last time. It's a small mercy that this particular experiment hasn't had too much in the way of errors, however what it has had has been as excruciatingly painful as usual.

When I run into a tight corner with my write-up, as I nearly always do, I plead to my University Godparents for guidance - Wikipedia and Google. They have been of little help to me tonight, however through them I have apparently learned the importance of error analysis. Columbia University, New York assures me that "bad things can happen if error analysis is ignored". To back up their claim, which in this context is shamefully less than scientific, they have provided the following picture of the derailment at Gare Montparnasse, Paris, 1895:



There you have it. I must press on to avoid causing any such disasters. I'm a little disappointed I was not warned about this in my lab script.

Links of the day: Columbia University's Error Analysis Tutorial