• Physics Discussion
    973 replies, posted
[QUOTE=Goodthief;39548071]damn if only computer scientists were valued this much[/QUOTE] I may be biased, but I'd say CS are just as valuable. Can you name any large industries or companies that doesn't require computer scientists or engineers? In Sweden, the best paid entry salary in 2011 (or was it 2012?) went to students with a degree from the CS program at Uppsala University. Roughly $5460 a month which is quite neat. You may also want to read, to get an insight of a group of computer engineers and scientists working on a large project. [url]http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1853ap/we_are_spacex_software_engineers_we_launch/[/url]
CS is highly valued in Germany I can tell you, if companies complained any more they'd have to start producing tears, same with UK and Canada welcomes CS with open, maple syrup-sticky arms.
[QUOTE=Swebonny;39549360]I may be biased, but I'd say CS are just as valuable. Can you name any large industries or companies that doesn't require computer scientists or engineers? In Sweden, the best paid entry salary in 2011 (or was it 2012?) went to students with a degree from the CS program at Uppsala University. Roughly $5460 a month which is quite neat. You may also want to read, to get an insight of a group of computer engineers and scientists working on a large project. [url]http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1853ap/we_are_spacex_software_engineers_we_launch/[/url][/QUOTE] wow that's a pretty cool job to have, I'm probably underestimating the value of computer scientists since I don't really know the scope of the jobs available, I just like the subject. At least this reassures me that there is a future ahead for me. Funny you should mention job availability in Sweden since it's probably the country that I want to live in the most.
[QUOTE=Killuah;39549394]CS is highly valued in Germany I can tell you, if companies complained any more they'd have to start producing tears, same with UK and Canada welcomes CS with open, maple syrup-sticky arms.[/QUOTE] CS seems incredibly boring though, sitting in a cubicle for hours every day just coding right? Yeah if I studied Computer programming in post secondary and was stuck with that career for 20 years I would probably kill myself.
Saying that programmers are "just coding" is like saying physicists are "just calculating stuff" all day. Guess what, most physicists sit on their ass all day, too. Unless you're a dean or a head of a department of a fancy university, your office will probably [U]not[/U] be nice and you'll have to learn to appreciate that flickering fluorescent lamp on your ceiling. Both of my bachelor's thesis's involve heavy C++ & Matlab coding and I fucking love it. Having said that, I don't know if I'm going into research in my university, I hate my campus.
[QUOTE=aridpheonix;39481781]If escape velocity within the event horizon of a black hole is greater than the speed of light? How is hawking radiation plausible? Is it the conclusion that quantum mechanics are allowed to 'break physical laws'?[/QUOTE] the information which falls into a black hole is """""stored*""""" on a """""horizon*""""" from which it is given off as hawking radiation (otherwise black holes would be destroying information which is not allowed) [SUB][SUB][SUB][SUB][SUB][SUB]*not really[/SUB][/SUB][/SUB][/SUB][/SUB][/SUB]
Goddamnit I thought that tiny text was a crack/dirty spot on my screen.
Can someone who is in advanced enough physics class explain the fault, simplistically, in newton's law of universal gravitation which was mended with the addition of einsteins general theory of relativity?
[QUOTE=zzzz;39557926]Can someone who is in advanced enough physics class explain the fault, simplistically, in newton's law of universal gravitation which was mended with the addition of einsteins general theory of relativity?[/QUOTE] Yes: it's not correct. [editline]12th February 2013[/editline] Seriously though. It's a decent approximation, but there are a bunch of small things that we can observe that it can't explain. A bit one is the perihelion precession of mercury. GR can be used to derive the equations describing orbit, along with an extra term which explains Mercury's precession. [editline]12th February 2013[/editline] Another is the warping of a photon's path by a massive body. Under Newtonian gravity, there is no attraction between a massive body and a photon since a photon is massless, but this is not what we observe. (Although technically speaking, this wasn't observed until after it was predicted by GR)
Why is it wrong? How did general relativity fix those problems? [editline]12th February 2013[/editline] Wait why is a photon influenced by gravity then if it has no mass [editline]12th February 2013[/editline] Evidently I've never taken a high level physics class before. Obviously, therefore, I never covered such complex topics. No, the extent of my education in physics pertaining to gravity is mg = (G(m1)(m2))/(r^2) , yippee, I can solve basic algebra problems.
[QUOTE=zzzz;39557989]Wait why is a photon influenced by gravity then if it has no mass[/QUOTE] Because gravitational attraction in GR is caused purely by the geometry of spacetime. It doesn't matter how massive an object is, its path will be bent because the spacetime it travels through is warped. Technically speaking, I lied. Henry Cavendish predicted the deflection of light from a Newtonian standpoint. (Since the rate at which an object fall toward another object is not dependent on mass, e.g. Galileo's experiment) However, the value predicted didn't agree with observation. GR agreed much better with observation.
I wish I understood topics like this, they're what truly interest me in physics. Interesting phenomena such as gravitational lensing and time dialation and quantum entanglement, weird shit like that. [editline]12th February 2013[/editline] I mean, I feel like I understand them obviously on the most basic of levels, as it is not difficult to. But to actually be able to understand the proofs of groundbreaking equations and theories of well known physicists would be neat.
Read up on them. There's plenty of books on topics like that written for the layperson.
[QUOTE=Yahnich;39558096]i hope you like math[/QUOTE] Or, if you really want to understand them, Yahnich is right: learn the math necessary to understand the physics, and study the physics.
[QUOTE=JohnnyMo1;39558106]Or, if you really want to understand them, Yahnich is right: learn the math necessary to understand the physics, and study the physics.[/QUOTE] Hey, easier said than done, but I'm taking both a calculus class and another physics class next year. We'll see how that turns out, and how much I really understand toward the end. I still feel as though it will be very oversimplified for the beginner in calculus.
If you really want to understand GR, you're going to need a few semesters of basic calculus, plus vector calculus, plus linear algebra, plus differential equations, plus some intermediate level mechanics to understand the Lagrangian formulation. And then the GR class/textbook you learn from will build up the machinery of tensor calculus and differential geometry from there.
I can see why einstein was such a goddamn genius
And then you might need more depending on if you'd like to learn certain specific higher level parts of GR. Like if you want to study the singularity theorems you'd need a background in topology (or something else proofs-y, at the very least), or some quantum mechanics if you want to study black hole thermodynamics
The fact that I plan to major in neither physics nor mathematics seems to make the prospect of eventually doing all of this pretty improbable.
You could do it yourself out of textbooks. The majority of the foundation could be done via khan academy. I think probably you'd only need to go out and get textbooks for mechanics and when you actually want to study GR.
I was thinking about teaching myself a bit of calculus and physics over the summer when I have some free time at any rate in order to prepare myself for next year well enough to get As in all of my classes again and maintain my GPA, so I may very well do that. [editline]12th February 2013[/editline] While I'm at it, that is.
I love studying stuff on my own over the summer. (it's even easier when you have access to a university library) Earlier today I decided I'm gonna start trying to learn category theory over the summer.
tbh I tried to start learning GR from tensor analysis and it sucked so I just learned the tensor calculus the GR textbook taught and it was much better [editline]12th February 2013[/editline] I went through a whole GR course and I still couldn't tell you what a tensor is (apart from "a thing that transforms a certain way under coordinate transformations")
I thought dot products and cross products, à la some of the most basic physics equations, were examples of tensors. That being said, I obviously have no idea what a tensor is, but whatever :v:
[QUOTE=Yahnich;39558395]well tensors are p much everything which is kinda cool[/QUOTE] wut
That doesn't stop topics like this from befuddling me, especially when I read their respective wikipedia pages, ugh. Like honestly, I probably appear to be a massive idiot in even pointing things like this out, but what the hell does this even mean? (Rhetorically of course) [img]https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1439792/picture.png[/img] [editline]12th February 2013[/editline] It's just a jumble of symbols, lines, and numbers. Math hurts. [editline]12th February 2013[/editline] You probably have the same feeling talking to me about physics as I would talking to a first grader about algebra. It's kind of humbling.
calling them objects with properties is pretty much the best way to explain them [editline]12th February 2013[/editline] because even things we'd naively expect to be tensors (partial derivative of a tensor, christoffel symbols etc) turn out not to transform right a lot of the time [editline]12th February 2013[/editline] [QUOTE=zzzz;39558418]That doesn't stop topics like this from befuddling me, especially when I read their respective wikipedia pages, ugh. Like honestly, I probably appear to be a massive idiot in even pointing things like this out, but what the hell does this even mean? (Rhetorically of course) [img]https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1439792/picture.png[/img] [editline]12th February 2013[/editline] It's just a jumble of symbols, lines, and numbers. Math hurts. [editline]12th February 2013[/editline] You probably have the same feeling talking to me about physics as I would talking to a first grader about algebra. It's kind of humbling.[/QUOTE] tbh wikipedia's explanation of tensors is atrociously bad
Scientific wikipedia articles certainly aren't written for the layman, that's for damn sure.
I think I'd better quit while I'm ahead :v: This conversation, that is. Obviously not study of physics; it's fascinating. Thanks, at least, for the food for thought.
[QUOTE=zzzz;39558457]Scientific wikipedia articles certainly aren't written for the layman, that's for damn sure.[/QUOTE] The math laws are explained pretty well, talking about the German Wiki though.
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