Black holes, neutrinos and why Cambridge is overrated...

It’s about time I wrote another post here. There’s been no real reason of the hiatus, I’ve just been forgetting.

Today I had the last of the first round of midterms for this semester (that does make sense, honest), so it’s a good day to talk about what I’ve been studying this term. Other stuff may be saved for another post or I might carry on writing this. I don’t exactly plan these things.

I’m taking four lecture-type courses this semester, all of which I’m enjoying. They are all interesting, or at least I find them interesting, so I’ll say something about them.

First off the bad news: I’m not doing very well in Thermal and Statistical physics, but the good news is nobody is. I’m improving though and my marks are fine for a course I’m not very good at (that also makes sense).  It’s interesting though and I’m glad I’m doing it. I did wonder at the start how useful I would find this going into astrophysics, but then a grad student told me he didn’t do it and was now regretting it.  

Talking of graduates I’m also, perhaps foolishly, taking a graduate level course, Gravitational Astrophysics. This is looking at Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, otherwise known as the way the universe really works.  There are plenty of undergraduates in the class so it’s not just me, and it’s fairly straightforward so far. It’s also taught really well, with the most interaction I’ve had in a course so far. Every so often there will be a question that the class will debate, with someone responsible for writing down the answer and send it to everyone else. Which reminds me that I haven’t sent mine yet…oops.  

 It also results in some great questions, the best of which has to be “So you know in Star Trek…?” (It turns out that the scene at the end of Star Trek, where they create a massive explosion behind them to escape a black hole, is a perfectly legitimate tactic for getting out of a black hole. It’s just a shame that film got pretty much everything else about a black hole wrong. They should have used a gamma ray burst that created a wormhole. Would have been a much better special effect as well.)

A good thing this semester is that only those two courses have final exams. For the next two I have to write papers, which is going to be much more fun than exams.  The first of these is Nuclear and Particle Physics, which is my second favourite area of physics and is a really interesting course. A great result of having a world class nuclear physics lab on campus is that everything we do can be directly related to what the lecturer goes and does right after the lecture across the road.

For this we have to write a paper on a subject of our choice, for which I’ve chosen to look at the discovery of neutrinos from the 1987 supernova, the only recent nearby supernova. When a star explodes it emits billions of neutrino in every direction, which can, with a lot of luck, be detected. It was the first successful instance of neutrino astronomy and also has consequences for the apparent detection of faster than light neutrinos last year. If neutrinos travel faster than light they should have arrived here before the light from the supernova, instead of slightly after.   

The last subject is probably my favourite and the one I had to negotiate to get on to: Planetary Geology. This is really the first course I’ve done that’s studied the planets in any real detail and is the area I’d most like to get into for my own research. I’m also writing a term paper  for this about Titan, the largest moon of Saturn and maybe my favourite place not on Earth. It’s possibly the most similar object to Earth we’ve found in terms of its complexity, with a thick atmosphere and a methane cycle analogous to our water cycle. My paper will be exploring just this aspect of it, looking at the similarities and difference to Earth.    

  

As well as these I’m carrying on with my senior thesis studying variable stars. Well I say that, but it’s hit a few problems after the last couple of weeks, as the detector my data is from appears to have been designed by throwing a pile of components into a box, pouring superglue over them and shaking the box around. The people responsible for it? Cambridge University.

This means that I have three papers to write, one on neutrinos, one on a moon and one on RR Lyrae stars. None of which have anything to do with each other. Should have planned that better…

So that’s pretty much what I’m doing academically. I’ve done plenty of other stuff, but that will be for another post in a bit. A short bit not the long bit that this ends (that, like the rest of this post, makes sense. At least to me.)