No more alarms

Constant shortage of sleep keeps making itself more and more noticeable: what’s the optimum amount of sleep anyway? If I sleep 10 hours, this becomes largely over the limit, for I feel that the day is running sooo slooooowww, whereas in reality it actually runs faster than the clock thinks it does. On the other hand, if I sleep 5 hours, I feel completely lost, because I immediately feel that there’s no point in doing any of this; at the same time, each time I fail to answer my own question of “Why? Why is there no point?”. Now, as a proper physicist, I need to realise that if 5 is too small and 10 is too large, I should perhaps take a simple average and try it out (the famous “trial-and-error theorem” — works exceptionally well!). And what do you say? It doesn’t work! At times I feel very well, but at times I feel as if I slept 10 hours or 5 hours.

This puzzling behaviour of my mind simple is a real bugger! I guess the answer is that it all needs to be consistent (another famous physics theorem that “everything needs to be consistent”). Consistency will require setting myself in a horizontal position, centered at fluffy pillow, each day for some 7.5 hours within an error of half hour.

Alright. No problem.

But (and it is a large butt), how can I get consistency? Especially now that I’m still (still!) and an undergraduate?

And so the answer remains sought for. I hope I will find it afore retirement, if that’ll ever happen :)

Add and expand…

This has been a very busy month. And, sadly, it continues to be. This is the reason I have halted the blog entries, which I do feel ashamed for.

I have written a review article on Mather and Smoot’s 2006 Nobel Prize in physics experiment. I will find a way to publish the article in the upcoming month or so.

To tell the truth, it was a project in one of my courses. The sad thing about it, though, is this. I decided to take an early start and take it rather slow (that is, with no rush), so as to be able to make a substantial amount of research and prepare my work very carefully. Well, I did make a fair amount of research, but the due date had approached far too quickly, so I wasn’t able to organise and write my paper quite as neatly and quite as nicely as I wanted to.

Nevertheless, I think I’ve done by far more than what the project was supposed to cover, so there’s not too many concerns about it. I do, however, want to take the time after the semester’s end to improve, add, slightly reorganise and hopefully perfect the paper. Hence the delay in having it out for easy access.

The name to the paper is “Black Body Form and Anisotropy of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation”, which is not too remotely distanced from the Nobel Prize statement. I also will take the time this summer to correct my older papers on string theory and TOKAMAK. Add and expand, add and expand…

Ignorance towards physics?

A couple of days ago I visited my high school that I used to go to before I became a university student. I talked to my physics and chemistry teachers; I also wanted to talk to my analysis teacher, but could not find him, unfortunately.

My physics teacher brought me the terrible news, which I was completely shocked by. The school is semestered (that is, courses are divided up into semesters) and — due to small size of the school and the low interest in physics — there is only one grade 12 (final year) physics course. And truly that is not the most disappointing thing, for there was only one grade 12 physics course when I attended the school, and so is in many other small schools. The sad fact is that the class was scheduled exactly in the same time as grade 12 calculus was scheduled. Of course, all people took calculus and were forced to take physics in night school, let alone those who traded it for summer school. There are 2 (!) people in the class!

This is disastrous! The physics education in Canada is very weak by itself; when school administration does such sort of violence, they are making closer the day, when Canada will not produce home physics students at all!