life as a physicist...
i thought i would waffle on about something that i think is interesting.... life as a physicist... well, im still a student.... for now.
so, heres what drives me, and one or two things im learning about at the moment:
as you know, i study theoretical physics. that means physics with a maths slant. what this actually means is:
the words you read in a pop-science book, or the articles you read in the new scientist (shudder), are based upon models. a model is a representation of reality. as it is a representation, rather than reality itself, it is fundamentally flawed, or at least limited in its usefulness.
for example:
if you look at a field of grass, moving in the wind, its pretty trivial to say that the blades of grass are going to move in the same direction, with the wind.
what it is not trivial to do, is to predict what each blade of grass will do, individually. and, even if you could, that prediction will be way too complicated to use to predict the motion of the entire field, on a blade-by-blade basis.
the model that you use (i.e. collective, or individual) depends on what information you want out.
i, personally, enjoy the study of cosmology. cosmology is the study of the universe as a whole, as opposed to looking at it individual components, and adding it all together.
as with the field example; by looking at the field, one looses the ability to predict the motion of each blade, or each individual "bit" of the system. one does so because one wants to know the behaviour of the whole system.
why would i want to know the motion of each molecule of water, when i could just look at the wave coming towards me? its the same type of thing.
anyway, something i said: a "bit" of the system.
we must divide the system (the thing of interest) into pieces, and decide how big we want the pieces.
if i want to look at the field, i may want to consider what each square metre of grass will do. or with water waves, maybe i look at the wave over a centimetre.
with the universe, we divide it up in a way which may seem ridiculous. ill build it up, through the scales.
we have a country. continent. planet. solar system. galaxy. 1000galaxies.
there we shall stop. in cosmology, we ignore anything of lesser size than a few thousand galaxies: individually, they dont affect anything enough to warrant thinking about them.
in the grand scheme of things (and this really does mean GRAND), galaxies are too small. i mean, a galaxy which takes about 30,000 years for a beam of light to cross, is too small. infact, a collection of galaxies, each separated by about a million light years, is too small. we need things on a scale of hundreds of galaxies. that is truly HUGE!!!
ok, so, my point is... lost.
no, im working, this summer (before camp) as a theoretical cosmologist.
i get paid £2 an hour to dislocate my mind & brain, and think about things on a horrendous scale! so so much fun!!!!!
as an aside (!!!) anyone with a particular mathematical bent on physics... or wants to just read some cool stuff, i have a website, with all my lecture notes on; typed out in LaTeX (for those who know what that is)... so they look all fancy!
JonathanP
have a gander! you never know: something may grab you, and you'll want to be a physicist! let me know if you do!