school

The first day of school is always exciting. Even in "18th grade."

Oddly enough the class I'm most excited about is Solid State Physics, 08:00 TuTh. Our homework for the first class is to "look at wavefunctions." (Do it here.) However, I've [successfully] resorted to Usenet to get my phonon questions answered. Searching usenet also reveals some hilarious (oh-so-nerdy) phonon jokes. I think you should all be tickled to discover the websites bosons.com and fermions.com, as well as the 'official string theory web site'.

In Galois Theory with Ken Ribet (tm) we derived the equations for solutions to quadratic and cubic polynomials. The pace of the lecture is a bit quick, but I've heard so much about what a great professor Ribet is, and Galois Theory sounds like requisite knowledge, so I'm eager to stick with it.

Metric Differential Geometry (math 140, MWF 08:10-09:00) seems to have a good professor and looks like it will be a managable course despite my general loathing of calculus, especially the multi-variable breed. (-: One question I had (but suppressed) was whether geodesics (shortest paths on a smooth surface) are always unique — he had defined a 'triangle' as three points connected by geodesics. Points on opposite sides of a sphere have an infinite number of geodesics, so obviously they aren't unique.. but maybe it doesn't matter.

C-star-algebras (math 208) wasn't nearly as unintelligible as expected, but only because the first lecture was all history. Even then, all the results after von Neumann were foreign to me. Someone raised his hand and said, "There are a few of us physicists here... our math background is a little bit shakey. Should we leave?" (answer: absolutely not!) The prof is very cool but I don't think I can learn enough about hilbert spaces and banach algebras (the prerequisites) for it to make much sense to me. Instead I think I will attend the Wednesday 09:00-10:00 course on crystallography and microscopy offered by one of the professors (Bob Glaeser) I indirectly work for. (Yes, very cool, just found out about it, MCB 218P 'Physical Optics and Crystallography')

Spanish 1A from Vista is not nearly as much work as it would be through Berkeley, because the class is huge and not very interactive. But I think that suits my level of commitment.

Still trying to figure out whether I can make it through this semester with non-negative cash flow. I don't think I'll be able to register for (get credit for) any of my courses, but I guess that doesn't really matter too much (to me).