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comment by am_Unition
am_Unition  ·  3083 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Man Ejected from Flight for Solving Differential Equation

My spooky living room:

Edit: bonus points if anyone can tell me what branch of physics this is!





ButterflyEffect  ·  3083 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Looks like you're trying for some sort of positional calculation? Dunno, I see lots of vectors and all that.

Jesus, I haven't touched much math since graduating. Engineering is such a ham. I miss stuff like this.

am_Unition  ·  3083 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Close enough. I barely remember this, it's from last fall. I was working with the plasma pressure tensor (in spherical coordinates), which has a divergence of 0, that's what the triangle thing with a dot and a T with two lines under it set = 0 signifies. In a nutshell; terrorism.

Lol, and this is just setting up the problem, the solution took another 2 dry erase boards to arrive at. SO FUCKING GLAD THE SEMESTER IS DONE, THE WORST YEAR OF MY LIFE IS OVER

Devac  ·  3082 days ago  ·  link  ·  
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am_Unition  ·  3081 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Maybe, but I doubt it. The professor was having us prove that the "non-conservative" form of the magnetohydrodynamic momentum equation can be derived from the "conservative" form:

Oh, and you see that Pathria & Beale Statistical Mechanics book? Fuck that thing. LeBellac's Stat Mech text is superior, in my opinion, but still has too many mistranslations and other errors.

I take it you are Russian? Just curious :).

Devac  ·  3081 days ago  ·  link  ·  
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am_Unition  ·  3081 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Cool. Glad to have another physicist-in-training on hubski!

Yeah, I used Landau & Lifshitz (Vol. II) for Electrodynamics this spring semester. So dense! But generally good. I'm more of an experimentalist (read: stupider than theorists), so maybe Jackson would have been better for me, but whatever. Most of my problem sets are custom designed by the professors, eliminating any possibility of finding solutions online, which is probably for the best.

I'm a magnetospheric guy. Worked for NASA for a few years building plasma spectrometers after I got my bachelor's, mostly engineering type stuff. I do NOT recommend taking time off between undergrad and grad school, it's been very difficult to get back up to speed on the curriculum. I'm barely scraping by, in terms of GPA.

Anyway, cheers dude!

Edit: I see you have updated your profile with quite a bit more info. We'd definitely get along, but I can guarantee you'd make me feel pretty dumb, hahahah

Devac  ·  3080 days ago  ·  link  ·  
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am_Unition  ·  3077 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I know you mentioned adjusting to the pace of Hubski vs. Reddit in your "meet Hubski" recording, and I apologize for how long it often takes me to respond to things. Life seems to be moving at a breakneck pace all of the time, it's difficult to find enough time in the days. Also, I partied so hard last night. Like... woke-up-and-sleepwalked-out-of-my-friends-apartment-hard. It's OK though, they went after me before I could do anything bad. Turns out I was just lookin' for the bathroom.

    Mind if I will badger you with questions after my internship will end?

Absolutely not. I need the practice of explaining my trade to folks of all different scientific levels.

    Mind sharing some starting tips for a theorist in the making who likes to get his hands dirty?

Start programming. Learn Fortran and Python, and start checking out numerical methods. A good text for that is Numerical Methods For Physics by Alejandro L. Garcia, which is on Amazon for cheap. For familiarizing yourself with space science (a bit broader, but includes geophysics), a good text is Introduction to Space Science (lol) by Kivelson & Russel.

Also, learn how to work a screwdriver so the experimentalists don't laugh at you. The university systems will have you so specialized and math-centric that it's not going to be easy, but try to develop a skill set as broad as possible. And don't forget to have fun, dude. If your idea of fun is Fourier transforming a six-dimensional phase space, I'm jealous.

Devac  ·  3077 days ago  ·  link  ·  
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user-inactivated  ·  3083 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Found the terrorist!

am_Unition  ·  3083 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I did code up a primitive model of nuclear meltdown sometime back in March...