photondracula

[photondracula]

this is perpetually on loop in my head and i love it

[photondracula]

early evening study session ✨ ✏️

[photondracula]

long time no see study tumblr. i have a test tmrw and am losing my mind!!!!

[photondracula]

i want to feel good about my achievements so i will list all my test scores so far this year

maths:

baseline test - 98%

part 1 test - 85%

further maths:

pure test - 100%

algorithms test - 85%

english:

essay 1 - 90%

essay 2 - 84%

essay 3 - 96%

essay 4 - 76%

essay 5 - 92%

physics -

waves multiple choice - 93%

mechanics - 97.5%

waves - 85%

[photondracula]

just watched this and it’s so interesting!!!

[photondracula]

The Wizard Nebula, NGC 7380 // Brian Boerma

[photondracula]

25/09/2023

the school burnout has already hit. it’s been two weeks. slay!

i had english lit and maths today, both were fine. the two people i sit next to in english always seem to exclude me from conversation and idk why, they just turn their backs to me :-( but the group i’m doing the satire presentation with is chill.

at home i did homework ( 😔) and read ahead for physics tomorrow because i’m a model student. i don’t know where to find good a level physics exam questions, if anyone reading this has suggestions please share!!!

i also continued reading taming of the shrew. some dodgy stuff in that play- katherina literally having to marry a guy she doesn’t want to and being physically restrained so she’ll talk to him is a bit toxic shakespeare!

anyway ciao.

[photondracula]

the fact that i will be doing 4 a-levels, an EPQ, doing a 6 month stem competition with my friends, and (hopefully!!!) working on the school magazine, all while continuing to learn french and german, is terrifying.

[photondracula]

21/09/2023

yesterday was good, though i didn’t have time to study much! but in my double free yesterday i did so much further maths practice AND continued my school magazine application.

physics was fun though i completely flopped a (not recquired) practical. further maths was also really fun the roots of polynomial stuff is so satisfying despite being tedious i love the little cubic and quartic stuff.

i also made a study biweekly plan so that i stay on top of the revision stuff.

excited for today because i’m having chips for dinner!

[photondracula]

free period vibes ✨

[photondracula]

20/09/2023

today was shaky. lessons were fine, i had maths and english, both were enjoyable, but most of everything else was stressful-ish.

i don’t feel up to doing much studying today, i did my english homework and am trying to get myself to start my further maths work but feel no effort to. but i’m worried that if i don’t do extra revision now i’ll fall behind, because i won’t have time tomorrow or on saturday. my whole back and neck really hurts because of uncomfortable chairs at school and heavy bag. the bus home was also unpleasant because the man sat next to me kept shuffling closer to me on the seat until i was basically squished by the window. which i really did not like.

hopefully i get the motivation to start my further maths work :/

[photondracula]

19/09/2023

today was nice :-)

i enjoyed school, it’s still so nice only doing subjects i enjoy, and i’ve done a bit more of my maths essay. had further maths, physics, and english. all slayed!

meanwhile at home i did my physics homework which actually wasn’t too hard and started learning aspects of comedy vocab for my english comedy test. i made a rap of it!

not much studying other than that, i just had a chill evening <3

[photondracula]

18/09/2023

traumatic day. left the house at 7am didn’t get home until 8:45pm. although the school day was fun, and getting to town was fun, my german lesson and onwards were awful.

i thought the german was for 16-18 year olds but it turns out it was general adult education. and obviously there’s nothing wrong with that but i just am really uncomfortable around adults. also it’s exhausting doing no stop work that late.

so in the car back i asked my mum to cancel the lessons and apologised for wasting money (i have to pay half back for the term price so i’ve learned my lesson-) but she was very upset and a bit mean about it so i cried because i am very emotionally insecure! but then after two hours of desperately trying to rationalise myself away from mental breakdowning too far everything was (sort of) resolved.

the highlight of my day was starting my maths essay. that was tranquil.

[photondracula]

Oxford Open Day 2023

[photondracula]

17/09/2023

ahhhh after two days of open days i had to catch up on so much work.

luckily i slept ten hours and stayed in bed for even longer so my energy was rejuvenated but that just meant i spent like all afternoon working.

i did english, which was chill, just analysing a poem and stuff.

but then further maths took 2 HOURS to catch up on because the one day i’m not in my teacher decided to teach like 5 algorithms. and maths also took ages because my teacher set so many practice questions, luckily the content itself was pretty easy though.

my first german lesson (not alevel, it’s outside of school) starts tomorrow, which means i’ll be out from 7am until 9pm. send help.

[photondracula]

“It has been said since ancient times that the nature of reality is much closer to music than to a machine, and this is confirmed by many discoveries in modern science. The essence of a melody does not lie in its notes; it lies in the relationships between the notes, in the intervals, frequencies, and rhythms. When a string is set vibrating we hear not only a single tone but also its overtones—an entire scale is sounded. Thus each note involves all the others, just as each subatomic particle involves all the others, according to current ideas in particle physics.”

— Fritjof Capra, foreword to The World Is Sound: Nada Brahma: Music and the Landscape of Consciousness by Joachim-Ernst Berendt

[photondracula]

The Universe Is Not Locally Real, and the Physics Nobel Prize Winners Proved It

Elegant experiments with entangled light have laid bare a profound mystery at the heart of reality

One of the more unsettling discoveries in the past half century is that the universe is not locally real.

“Real,” meaning that objects have definite properties independent of observation—an apple can be red even when no one is looking; 

“Local” means objects can only be influenced by their surroundings, and that any influence cannot travel faster than light. 

Investigations at the frontiers of quantum physics have found that these things cannot both be true. Instead, the evidence shows objects are not influenced solely by their surroundings and they may also lack definite properties prior to measurement. As Albert Einstein famously bemoaned to a friend, “Do you really believe the moon is not there when you are not looking at it?”

This is, of course, deeply contrary to our everyday experiences. To paraphrase Douglas Adams, the demise of local realism has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

Blame for this achievement has now been laid squarely on the shoulders of three physicists: John Clauser, Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger. They equally split the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics “for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science.” (“Bell inequalities” refers to the pioneering work of the Northern Irish physicist John Stewart Bell, who laid the foundations for this year’s Physics Nobel in the early 1960s.) 

Colleagues agreed that the trio had it coming, deserving this reckoning for overthrowing reality as we know it. “It is fantastic news. It was long overdue,” says Sandu Popescu, a quantum physicist at the University of Bristol. “Without any doubt, the prize is well-deserved…”

Read more:  https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-universe-is-not-locally-real-and-the-physics-nobel-prize-winners-proved-it