Ion clocks are also based on optical transitions.
So your new summary is incorrect.
Also, it's not really "statistics" that win out, its the ability to probe your ensemble (either 1 ion or many atoms) with lower Quantum Projection Noise. For example, everytime your laser has excited your ion to a quantum superposition of ground and excited state all you get back is one bit of information: 1 - excited state, 0 - ground state. So to discover where your laser (aka clock oscillator) is detuned with respect to your atomic reference or in another words what quantum superposition you created requires you to run the experiment many times. With an optical lattice clock, you gain the ability to measure more than just a 1 or a 0, you measure as an example 2035 atoms in the excited state and 812 atoms in the ground state or an excitation fraction of 0.714. It is statistics, but it's quantum in nature.
I mean, I get what you are saying...but they had to choose some platform. So they chose microsoft *shrug* if they had chosen adobe would we still be having this conversation?
All I'm trying to say is that I really think the article blurb is incredibly misleading and this really isn't a "slap in the face" or anything that people should really feel wronged about.
Choose your fights I guess is the moral. I remember being pretty pissed when Deval Patrick axed Massachusetts plans to get away from Microsoft for state documents...and in the end an issue like that is really where the open source community should be focusing its efforts on.
I think the moderators really dropped the ball on posting this story. There are lots of other sites you can watch the inauguration on without having to install silverlight. This is just shoddy moderation, and lends credence to people's complaints about/. being horribly biased.
I think the important thing to realize in your situation is that whatever you _need_ to know to do your masters your classes and your professor will point you to the right books. As such, what you really need to do is go back and fill all the wholes that were left from a non-physics undergraduate degree. Most of these textbooks that I will list are the standard for MIT, and Harvard and the like. So let's begin.
Classical Mechanics: Kleppner and Kolenkow
If you have time: Goldstein
Electricity and Magnetism:
This one is a little tricky, I'll give you the 1st undergrad, the Junior level undergrad and then the two Grad texts. You can probably just read the Junior level text. Purcell Griffiths Jackson and Schwinger
Statistical Mechanics and Thermodynamics:
There are really no agreed upon texts here (sorry), I used Baierlein at MIT but that seems to switch every year.
Same goes for graduate texts, BUT the MIT profesor who has been teaching grad stat mech just put out his own books which I hear are quite good. We'll call them Kardar 1 and Karadar 2
Quantum Physics:
What you really need is an introduction to two fundamental ideas, the wave-function formalism and the linear-algebra formalism.
Wave-function: French and Taylor
Linear Algebra: Griffiths - Best Book in this list in my opinion.
Special Relativity and General Relativity:
Special: French
General: Carroll
That should fill in everything that you missed. What we are skipping is every other specialty in physics, but, it seems like you've already chosen one, so no big loss.
Slashdot Mirror
Ion clocks are also based on optical transitions. So your new summary is incorrect. Also, it's not really "statistics" that win out, its the ability to probe your ensemble (either 1 ion or many atoms) with lower Quantum Projection Noise. For example, everytime your laser has excited your ion to a quantum superposition of ground and excited state all you get back is one bit of information: 1 - excited state, 0 - ground state. So to discover where your laser (aka clock oscillator) is detuned with respect to your atomic reference or in another words what quantum superposition you created requires you to run the experiment many times. With an optical lattice clock, you gain the ability to measure more than just a 1 or a 0, you measure as an example 2035 atoms in the excited state and 812 atoms in the ground state or an excitation fraction of 0.714. It is statistics, but it's quantum in nature.
BU offers a High school research internship
http://www.bu.edu/summer/high-school-programs/research-internship/how-to-apply.shtml
You might be able to swing something in the CS department there.
The Problem is you really have to start a month or two applying to programs like these...Check out PROMYS, and there is a Stanford one as well.
The "best" is supposed to be RSI...but again they have stopped taking apps.
http://www.cee.org/rsi/
All I'm trying to say is that I really think the article blurb is incredibly misleading and this really isn't a "slap in the face" or anything that people should really feel wronged about.
Choose your fights I guess is the moral. I remember being pretty pissed when Deval Patrick axed Massachusetts plans to get away from Microsoft for state documents...and in the end an issue like that is really where the open source community should be focusing its efforts on.
I think the moderators really dropped the ball on posting this story. There are lots of other sites you can watch the inauguration on without having to install silverlight. This is just shoddy moderation, and lends credence to people's complaints about /. being horribly biased.
I think the important thing to realize in your situation is that whatever you _need_ to know to do your masters your classes and your professor will point you to the right books. As such, what you really need to do is go back and fill all the wholes that were left from a non-physics undergraduate degree. Most of these textbooks that I will list are the standard for MIT, and Harvard and the like. So let's begin.
Classical Mechanics:
Kleppner and Kolenkow
If you have time: Goldstein
Electricity and Magnetism:
This one is a little tricky, I'll give you the 1st undergrad, the Junior level undergrad and then the two Grad texts. You can probably just read the Junior level text.
Purcell
Griffiths
Jackson and Schwinger
Statistical Mechanics and Thermodynamics:
There are really no agreed upon texts here (sorry), I used Baierlein at MIT but that seems to switch every year.
Same goes for graduate texts, BUT the MIT profesor who has been teaching grad stat mech just put out his own books which I hear are quite good. We'll call them Kardar 1 and Karadar 2
Quantum Physics:
What you really need is an introduction to two fundamental ideas, the wave-function formalism and the linear-algebra formalism.
Wave-function: French and Taylor
Linear Algebra: Griffiths - Best Book in this list in my opinion.
Special Relativity and General Relativity:
Special: French
General: Carroll
That should fill in everything that you missed. What we are skipping is every other specialty in physics, but, it seems like you've already chosen one, so no big loss.
Actually, I believe that under some circumstances the second law of thermodynamics "breaksdown". http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn2572