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save me gamefee. gamefee save me

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Particles* I work with as a theoretical chemist, from most typical to wildest:

Proton - Positive vibes, pretty quarky. A classic.

Neutron - Like the proton, but neutral. Sometimes simplicity is best.

Electron - Less than 1/1000th the mass of our first 2 particles. Less mass means more quantum weirdness, which means more fun. At this point, wave-like behavior is becoming pretty significant.

Atom - A particle created from the combination of a nucleus of protons and neutrons and orbiting electrons, atoms are a chemist’s bread and butter. Otherwise, these are pretty straightforward. For simplicity, I’ll be excluding ions from this list, as they’re just atoms either with more or less electrons than they’re supposed to have.

Molecules - Created from several atoms bonded together by shared electrons, molecules are like atoms, but a little more complicated. They can rotate, vibrate, and much more. Molecules can have anywhere from 2 atoms to millions, and it’s molecules that describe most chemical systems.

Photon - The particle form of light. Photons are massless packets of energy that can be freely created or destroyed. This is about the point where things are really getting weird. Let’s see how.

Phonon* - The particle form of lattice vibrations. In a solid, vibrations of individual molecules are not independent of each other; however, these collective vibrations can be separated into a series of fixed patterns with their own energies. Those patterns can then be treated as particles in their own right, creating a “gas” of phonons. At this point, the particle definition is getting stretched quite a bit, but to deal with a system like this, this particle treatment works quite well to simplify the math and make it reasonable to deal with the system.

Hole* - One of the few of these that doesn’t end in “-on”, the hole represents an empty space where an electron should be on a material’s surface. The remaining particles on this list, much like the phonon, are designed to deal with solids in a convenient way. In this case, because the surface is made up of positively charged nuclei with negatively charged electrons on top, removing the electron leaves a positively charged space behind. Turns out, we can say this hole behaves like a particle itself, which moves as electrons shift across the surface. It should also be noted that electrons on a surface are treated differently than in free space, so one could argue that a surface electron is also its own kind of particle*.

Exciton* - We’ve seen that pairing a nucleus and electrons creates an atom, but what if we try to create the surface equivalent? Normally, putting an electron where a hole is would just move the hole, but what if we were to excite the electron so that it orbits around the hole? These are excitons. Excited, neutrally charged hydrogen-like particles on the surface of a solid. This is what my research focuses on.

Plasmon* - As our final particle, we’ll briefly talk about plasmons. I don’t know these particles too well, but from discussion with some colleagues who work with them, a plasmon is the particle form of oscillating electrons either on a surface or in a plasma. These are notably rather similar to phonons, in that we’re just treating the movement of many electrons by dividing them into collective states that we can treat as particles. At this point, the definition of a particle has been stretched pretty well beyond the typical limit, but for these kinds of system, mathematical convenience is beyond just desirable. It’s essential.

This list is not a list of every possible particle or quasiparticle. I’ve omitted antimatter, quarks, and many elementary particles in the standard model on one end, and on the quasiparticle end, I’ve omitted things like polarons (excitons + phonons) and polaritons (excitons/plasmons/phonons + photons). Maybe I’ll discuss these at another point, but there is still much I would like to learn about these kinds of systems. Either way, until next time, byyyyyyeeeeeee.

*Not all of these are “particles” in the traditional sense. Several are just mathematical constructs designed to turn complicated systems into easy things we know. In such cases, one could refer to these as quasiparticles, which can behave like particles well enough for us to model them as such. For clarity, I’ll try to mark all quasiparticles with an asterisk.

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Oh thank god more excuses to talk about this. Put under read more just because it's a Lot.

On top of that, because that's bad enough and there's plenty of stuff, there's some other stuff I want to talk about: I have a friend who was reading, I believe, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, and if not, one of his other pop cultury books, because she was interested in it (don't remember the exact reason), only to come across this quote (it's right under the "mathematics is looking for patterns" centered text):

I would like to report other evidence that mathematics is only patterns. When I was at Cornell, I was rather fascinated by the student body, which seems to me was a dilute mixture of some sensible people in a big mass of dumb people studying home economics, etc. including lots of girls. I used to sit in the cafeteria with the students and eat and try to overhear their conversations and see if there was one intelligent word coming out. You can imagine my surprise when I discovered a tremendous thing, it seemed to me.

I listened to a conversation between two girls, and one was explaining that if you want to make a straight line, you see, you go over a certain number to the right for each row you go up, that is, if you go over each time the same amount when you go up a row, you make a straight line. A deep principle of analytic geometry! It went on. I was rather amazed. I didn't realize the female mind was capable of understanding analytic geometry.

She went on and said, "Suppose you have another line coming in from the other side, and you want to figure out where they are going to intersect. Suppose on one line you go over two to the right for every one you go up, and the other lines go over three to the right for every one that goes up, and they start twenty steps apart," etc. I was flabbergasted. She figured out where the intersection was. It turned out that one girl was explaining to the other how to knit argyle socks.

Therefore, I did learn a lesson: the female mind is capable of understanding analytic geometry. Those people who have for years been insisting (in the face of all obvious evidence to the contrary) that the male and female are equally capable of rational thought may have something. The difficulty may just be that we have never yet discovered a way to communicate with the female mind. If it is done in the right way, you may be able to get something out of it.

I have... a lot I can say about this one quote in particular, worsened further by the fact that I found the linked post through a forum post from 2010 on ycombinator's news site, which... there's a lot to say there too.

The main issue I have with this is the ABSURD degree of disdain it holds. I've never seen a statement make me feel more wrong for being "in the right" than "Those people who have for years been insisting (in the face of all obvious evidence to the contrary) that the male and female are equally capable of rational thought may have something." I've seen people say that he is making himself the butt of the joke here, because he's "admitting to fault" here, but at least in my anecdotal experience, this just does not come off as intending to make himself the butt of the joke. It DOES come off as him intending to make a joke, but I cannot see how he is making the joke at his own expense. This isn't even in the section of Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman which is broadly critiqued for demonstrating his immense misogyny and poor treatment of students. For someone who Murray Gell-Mann described as "spending a great deal of effort generating anecdotes around himself" (I personally think that the anecdotes, regardless of the feelings between the two, is evidently true considering Feynman's generalized knowledge to the layperson in the public sphere), if he did notably change his feelings on women in general in his later years in life, he could EASILY have dedicated far more energy to clarifying that he had changed, since he clearly understands the impact that good teaching can have on someone (after all, it is essentially what he is most well-known for). I've been compared to Feynman before, and I was curious why, and I do understand it on some level, with quotes like from an interview with the woman who he wrote a letter in support of her promotion to tenure (violating his general policy of not engaging in politics? Not sure if I've phrased the policy correctly).

The act of writing the letter "surprised" a lot of his colleagues, and I see a lot of people make arguments like how some of the students he supervised for PhDs were women, and he encouraged his sister to pursue a PhD in physics.

Knowing what Messy references, and just... everything else about him, it generally feels to be the case that he did change his perspective on women over time. However, he's very well-known among physicists of the time, and again, Gell-Mann's comment wasn't made without cause. It feels like he very much believed, in one form or another, the notion of a "great man" picture of science, which is demonstrably not the case at this point in time, and even if his picture began to include women, he had the knowledge and social power to be much more forthright about changed feelings on women, and the words with which he could choose to not put people down in such a manner. Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman was published only two years before his death, and many of these events happened decades before, so there was plenty of time for it to not end up grossly misogynistic, intentional or unintentional. My feelings towards him are definitely complicated, but they are definitely not positive, because he could've done more. I still see people using him to justify that problems very actively present in science to this day aren't actually problems, because people point to Feynman as a misogynist and he supported his sister in becoming a physicist. Clearly, his views of his sister are easily generalized to all women. Also, the man is so fucking corny.

The 'Feynman sex quote' is just... utterly ridiculous, and again, I find it to paint a picture of a man with odd and concerning views on women.

feynman hate why tf

Richard Feynman bean his wife really badly. It's all documented in his FBI files and divorce proceedings. He would choke and punch her. Lots of other reasons to dislike him but that's the main one for me. I've answered this about 5 times before on this blog, you might be able to find some of them in the ask tag, but who knows because tumblr search function sucks.

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smiling at you btw. loving you btw. liking you btw. enjoying our time together btw.

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no, gmail, I do not mean anyway, I mean any way, they have two separate meanings and you should stop blue squiggling "any way" used in the correct context to mean "anyway".

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Got the perfect arrangement of my 7 blankies I’m compfy :3

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finally finished my homework, time for me to close all the tabs both from this week and last weekend's exam, this is gonna be great

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In the Psych pilot they made Shawn a "cool guy" who is good with women and drives his motorcycle, and after that they said: "what if we make him really pathetic instead?", and honestly it's the best decision they could have made.

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hello i am currently attending the "many faces of active mechanics" conference at the kavli institute for theoretical physics in santa barbara, california

and i have a new obsession: worm blobs

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they have to make mobility aids nicer looking... i would like to purchase a shower chair that doesn't look like hospital equipment

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theoretical physics is a soft science to me

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middle infinitesimals are so.... who did this

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I feel so normal doing homework and writing statements like this :)

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"What do you think a hurricane is? They're particles, accelerated?"

I- I'm on his side, he's right. CERN, please don't kill us all

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minmin you're so real for this, every professor in my (small) department congratulated me on my score on the major field test (I didn't take the physics GRE) in part because one of the big things the department was trying to improve the students' score on the beginner physics portion. Me? Literally could not tell you which section was supposed to be beginner and which was supposed to be advanced.

I also got absolutely dragged by the grad student the year ahead of me and my classmate who told me "you should take E&M 2, you'd probably love it" and when I asked more, he actually had me read exactly. All this talk about how challenging graduate E&M is just for me to get to it and in my very particular situation I feel right at home. Symmetries though.... are something else entirely Indices are great though, they indicate which components are topographic maps and which are arrows :)

[24/9/24] nothing like practicing for the pgre with league soundtrack. i switched over to my QFT and GR psets (bc life goes on and those need to be done too)

ive been pacing like an under enriched zoo animal between both of them but barely got anything done :D we are doing symmetries in both but my brain is not stretching to accommodate right now.

look as much as i think noether's theorem is cool, i cannot compute the noether current for this symmetry. don't get me started on lorentz transformations. i have seen too many indices today and i dont know what any of them mean.

we have a lovely juxtaposition here because im getting my ass kicked by both freshman mechanics and relativistic quantum field theory.