Saturnian language

All lectures and tutorials will be done in a month as this year’s exam period looms overhead. This year was somehow significant to me. I finally feel at home in Edinburgh and, perhaps even more importantly, I think the way I approach my study of Physics is changing.

My subject is often portrayed in the media as a philosophical quest to discover natures’ hidden laws. The study of it feels much more linear, where every new piece of information transitions from the previous one. Continuity is key. When looking ahead through lecture notes, it feels like I am reading a language that is alien to me. But as it comes to looking at it with all the prerequisite knowledge, it suddenly makes sense. Great! But the week after it’s back to learning that “Saturnian” language again.

The advantage of not having essays where one may get lost in the sea of historical sources is that our direction is set. We’re being handheld through the tasks given to us. Problem solving and lectures, dictate the way we shape our self-study.

When we came to the university, we were like mere children to our teachers. That is the main drawback of always being told what to do. As toddlers, we couldn’t walk let alone count, but next year, the last of out BSc, we’ll have to stand up on our feet. It is now in the penultimate exam time I see we need to learn how to walk properly before skipping the rope.

I’ve applied for an internship at the university doing computational modelling of hydrogen at extreme conditions. It’s when hydrogen at very high pressures transitions from being a liquid to a metal. During the interview, we talked about the main principles used in the simulations. Density Functional Theory (or DFT) looks at atoms as quantum mechanical functions rather than small and rigid like in other models. It was only a few days earlier that we modelled a single, hydrogen atom “as a wave”. And that was it, I saw the horizon behind that long “linear” hill. It finally looked like there was even a point in having a factual discussion with someone who does real research.  It finally looked like we’ve learned enough to try to properly understand a scientific paper. Maybe we’ve learned the “Martian” language and it is now time to tackle “Saturnian”. Maybe we’re no longer toddlers and it’s time to get walking…


 

 

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