I'm currently in the PhD part of the process, and I agree with the books on your list, for the most part.
However, I would add Griffiths Introduction to Electrodynamics before Jackson as a much more approachable and physical textbook. Jackson is kind almost more of a course in solving PDEs under insane boundary conditions.
And, for physical insight, I would add the Feynman Lectures. The examples are well thought out, and they're kind of fun to read in their own right. But, these are for reading after you understand the math; before hand, they're practically useless.
I would also tend to add a few books in the Landau and Lifshitz series, most noteably their Mechanics and their Quantum Mechanics books.
And I agree, that a realistic foray into physics is not to be undertaken lightly. It takes years to get to the point where you can even begin to read journal articles and begin to understand them.
That depends on what you want to call a good understanding of quantum mechanics. I agree, that most of quantum is accessible through PDEs, but to really understand where a lot of it came from, you also need linear algebra, group theory, and a really good grasp of hamiltonian mechanics and field theory.
... these people are going to be complaining about how the sun is throwing off an excessive ammount of electromagnetic radiation, and how we should blow it up to protect ourselves.
Never mind that the rest of us like the sunlight....
The silicon that they're talking about here is porous silicon, which has properties that are massively different than the bulk crystal. Current study on the material has found that it is an excellent emitter of both light and electrons.
The primary problem with this material is nobody understands it either chemically or physically. We have a list of stuff you can do with it, but no model to predict other effects.
The main problem here is that nobody has shown that any of the quantum computer algorithms solves an NP-Complete problem. True, we have NP problems, but we still don't know if NP-Complete is the same as NP.
NMR Quantum Computers have even more problems than the Ion Trap models -- including scalability to large numbers of qubits and (if my memory serves), a very short decoherence time.
The person giving the seminar (her name escapes me right now) pointed out that right now, the electron mobilities in these materials prevents you from making fast devices. She envisioned eventually getting them up to monitor frequencies (a few kHz).
Her joke on the matter was that right now, they might be able to print out a 60 Hz Pentium. Don't expect high speed electronic systems from this stuff in the near future.
Besides, a better use for these materials might be in photovoltaics, if they can make junctions that undergo photoelectric effect in the infrared.
Why does everybody assume that the purpose of a Computer Science degree program is to teach you how to program? The real purpose is to teach you something about how a computer works -- from both a formal math point of view and a practical point of view. Hence, the reason that most people have to take a courses on computation theory, language theory, compilers, operating systems, etc.
Anybody else remember paying $8.00 to see the Star Wars Episode I trailer and then sticking around for a 2 hour movie that should have been more appropriately titled "The Search for the Medic?"
Seriously, The movie had everything! Bad acting! Bad plot! Bad 3D graphics! Come on --you can see the seams in the texture maps if you look carefully.
A micron usually refers to a micrometer, although many other people use it for a different measurement. An angstrom is (in your notation)E -10 m. So, 10 angstroms is one nanometer. If you really want to talk small, I suppose you could try picometers, femtometers, or apatometers.
To give you an idea of scales, Bhor's radius is about.5 Angstroms, and the wavelength of visible light is usually measured in 100s of nanometers.
The truth -- at least commonly in the sciences -- is that it often takes years of work after the initial discovery of an idea to put it to practical use. Just because we can do something once in a controlled environment doesn't always mean that it can scale to a mass production industry.
> On that note, where's the ability to read email?
Probably had to go the way of the dodo when they decided not to put any hard drive into it. Programs like Netscape Communicator have to put the e-mail *somewhere* local while you're reading it. I think IMAP might get around this, but anything based on POP can't work without a HD.
Refering to physical constants as meaningless disturbs me greatly. I mean, physics is an attempt to model the universe in a mathematical way. In the end, the things that we're interested in *are* the numbers; be they things like the speed of light, Newton's gravitational constant, Plank's constant, etc. Many of these numbers only exist because physicists go to great pains to make the theory match up with the experiment; i.e., because they try to make a model that works
Sorry. Conservation of angular momentum tells you that the object will keep on spinning in the same fashion unless it is stoped by some kind of outside torque. What you state is true for a particle in free space, but we're talking about rigid body motion here.
Normally I wouldn't wade into this debate, but I'd just like to point out that science never denies the existance of a God. As a matter of fact, if you talk to many physicists, you will find that many of them actually believe in some kind of higher being/abstraction. This just usually can't be made into a concept as small as the Christian God, though.
still don't like the idea that they're keeping the instruction sets closed. It would seem like if someone out there wanted to port GCC to Crusoes native instructions, that would be good... But they just don't want to be percieved as being at all incompatible with Intel, i guees
Not quite right. The way that Crusoe got the massive reduction in transistors on the die is by moving lots of processor functions off of the processor and into software. Things like branch selection and out of order execution aren't done in the processor anymore. All of that is done in the software now.
Actually, this is the exact reason that we can't really use Tesla's power distribution method. Modern electronics work mostly via a condensed matter system called a p-n junction. Under extremely high frequency fields with large amplitudes, the things break irreperably.
Actually, science journals are already "moderated" in a way. When you submit a paper for publication in something like PRL (Physics Review Letters), your paper is given to a couple of experts in the field and they decide if the paper is worthy of publication, or if some kind of modification is necessary. This "Referee" process is really nothing more than the moderation at/., except that it is only done by field experts.
"The common human problem, the big question, always is 'Should I do this?' It is a question of action. 'What should I do? Should I do this?' We can divide this into two parts. We can say, 'If I do this what will happen?' This doesn't tell me whether I should do this. We still have another part, which is 'Well, do I want that to happen?' In other words, the first question is at least susceptible to scientific investigation; it is, in fact, a typical scientific question."
Feynman argues basically that the realm of science is seeing what is possible; it is up to society to decide what it wants to do with the discovery after the fact. (BTW -- this quote is from The Meaning of it All.)
Slashdot Mirror
However, I would add Griffiths Introduction to Electrodynamics before Jackson as a much more approachable and physical textbook. Jackson is kind almost more of a course in solving PDEs under insane boundary conditions.
And, for physical insight, I would add the Feynman Lectures. The examples are well thought out, and they're kind of fun to read in their own right. But, these are for reading after you understand the math; before hand, they're practically useless.
I would also tend to add a few books in the Landau and Lifshitz series, most noteably their Mechanics and their Quantum Mechanics books.
And I agree, that a realistic foray into physics is not to be undertaken lightly. It takes years to get to the point where you can even begin to read journal articles and begin to understand them.
That depends on what you want to call a good understanding of quantum mechanics. I agree, that most of quantum is accessible through PDEs, but to really understand where a lot of it came from, you also need linear algebra, group theory, and a really good grasp of hamiltonian mechanics and field theory.
... these people are going to be complaining about how the sun is throwing off an excessive ammount of electromagnetic radiation, and how we should blow it up to protect ourselves.
Never mind that the rest of us like the sunlight....
The silicon that they're talking about here is porous silicon, which has properties that are massively different than the bulk crystal. Current study on the material has found that it is an excellent emitter of both light and electrons.
The primary problem with this material is nobody understands it either chemically or physically. We have a list of stuff you can do with it, but no model to predict other effects.
This is pretty cool, though....
Or gas from a shitload....
Sounds kinda like the old pi menus to me.
The main problem here is that nobody has shown that any of the quantum computer algorithms solves an NP-Complete problem. True, we have NP problems, but we still don't know if NP-Complete is the same as NP.
NMR Quantum Computers have even more problems than the Ion Trap models -- including scalability to large numbers of qubits and (if my memory serves), a very short decoherence time.
...It will accept all cookies, but when you exit it tosses them.
Gives a whole new meaning to "tossing your cookies", doesn't it?
The person giving the seminar (her name escapes me right now) pointed out that right now, the electron mobilities in these materials prevents you from making fast devices. She envisioned eventually getting them up to monitor frequencies (a few kHz).
Her joke on the matter was that right now, they might be able to print out a 60 Hz Pentium. Don't expect high speed electronic systems from this stuff in the near future.
Besides, a better use for these materials might be in photovoltaics, if they can make junctions that undergo photoelectric effect in the infrared.
I can just see a new 3-d version of nibbles and gorilla! (Anybody else remember the terrible qbasic games that shipped with DOS?)
Why does everybody assume that the purpose of a Computer Science degree program is to teach you how to program? The real purpose is to teach you something about how a computer works -- from both a formal math point of view and a practical point of view. Hence, the reason that most people have to take a courses on computation theory, language theory, compilers, operating systems, etc.
Anybody else remember paying $8.00 to see the Star Wars Episode I trailer and then sticking around for a 2 hour movie that should have been more appropriately titled "The Search for the Medic?"
Seriously, The movie had everything! Bad acting! Bad plot! Bad 3D graphics! Come on --you can see the seams in the texture maps if you look carefully.
But don't you see? That's what vigor was all about. We already have Clippy.
Out of sheer curiousity, has anybody even found a photoresist that works with x-rays yet?
Or -- an equally difficult problem -- do we even have a good hard x-ray source?
Let me correct your measurements a little --
.5 Angstroms, and the wavelength of visible light is usually measured in 100s of nanometers.
A micron usually refers to a micrometer, although many other people use it for a different measurement. An angstrom is (in your notation)E -10 m. So, 10 angstroms is one nanometer. If you really want to talk small, I suppose you could try picometers, femtometers, or apatometers.
To give you an idea of scales, Bhor's radius is about
The truth -- at least commonly in the sciences -- is that it often takes years of work after the initial discovery of an idea to put it to practical use. Just because we can do something once in a controlled environment doesn't always mean that it can scale to a mass production industry.
> On that note, where's the ability to read email?
Probably had to go the way of the dodo when they decided not to put any hard drive into it. Programs like Netscape Communicator have to put the e-mail *somewhere* local while you're reading it. I think IMAP might get around this, but anything based on POP can't work without a HD.
Refering to physical constants as meaningless disturbs me greatly. I mean, physics is an attempt to model the universe in a mathematical way. In the end, the things that we're interested in *are* the numbers; be they things like the speed of light, Newton's gravitational constant, Plank's constant, etc. Many of these numbers only exist because physicists go to great pains to make the theory match up with the experiment; i.e., because they try to make a model that works
Sorry. Conservation of angular momentum tells you that the object will keep on spinning in the same fashion unless it is stoped by some kind of outside torque. What you state is true for a particle in free space, but we're talking about rigid body motion here.
Normally I wouldn't wade into this debate, but I'd just like to point out that science never denies the existance of a God. As a matter of fact, if you talk to many physicists, you will find that many of them actually believe in some kind of higher being/abstraction. This just usually can't be made into a concept as small as the Christian God, though.
still don't like the idea that they're keeping the instruction sets closed. It would seem like if someone out there wanted to port GCC to
Crusoes native instructions, that would be good... But they just don't want to be percieved as being at all incompatible with Intel, i guees
Not quite right. The way that Crusoe got the massive reduction in transistors on the die is by moving lots of processor functions off of the processor and into software. Things like branch selection and out of order execution aren't done in the processor anymore. All of that is done in the software now.
Actually, this is the exact reason that we can't really use Tesla's power distribution method. Modern electronics work mostly via a condensed matter system called a p-n junction. Under extremely high frequency fields with large amplitudes, the things break irreperably.
Vacuum tubes work, though....
Actually, science journals are already "moderated" in a way. When you submit a paper for publication in something like PRL (Physics Review Letters), your paper is given to a couple of experts in the field and they decide if the paper is worthy of publication, or if some kind of modification is necessary. This "Referee" process is really nothing more than the moderation at /., except that it is only done by field experts.
Quoting Richard Feynman:
"The common human problem, the big question, always is 'Should I do this?' It is a question of action. 'What should I do? Should I do this?' We can divide this into two parts. We can say, 'If I do this what will happen?' This doesn't tell me whether I should do this. We still have another part, which is 'Well, do I want that to happen?' In other words, the first question is at least susceptible to scientific investigation; it is, in fact, a typical scientific question."
Feynman argues basically that the realm of science is seeing what is possible; it is up to society to decide what it wants to do with the discovery after the fact. (BTW -- this quote is from The Meaning of it All.)