(Image: Representation of Earth's relative location at stellar, galactic, and cosmological distance scales. Credit: Andrew Z Colvin.)
Friday December 25th, 2020
Chapter 4 solutions for Zwiebach's string theory textbook are finished. Chapter 5 is also finished. Chapter 5 is focused on relativistic point particles in terms of the action (Lagrangians and Hamiltonians), as well as the case of charged particles, and the spacetime dynamics of the electromagnetic field itself. Tables of contents were added to them as well as to Chapter 3 solutions. Eventually I will include a table of contents for Chapter 2 solutions as well.
Wednesday December 16th, 2020
Additions include a newspaper guest commentary, "Election results were consistent with polls" on December 15th 2020, following a predictive letter to the editor "Take polls seriously, not literally" on October 17th 2020. There is a longer, related blog post "Why The Election Was Closer Than It Looks" on December 4th 2020. Solutions have been added for Chapter 3 of Zwiebach's string theory textbook, which is electromagnetism and gravity in other dimensions, and I am currently working on Chapter 4 which is non-relativistic strings in differential equation and variational calculus forms. I am auditing Alain Aspect's Coursera MOOC on quantum optics (i.e. photons). The canonical quantization of electromagnetism in it reinforces what I am reading in Lancaster/Blundell.
Wednesday August 5th, 2020
After a long break I am working the physics project pages again. Some solutions to Barton Zwiebach's string theory textbook have been posted using TeX. This is a very slow process, and I may use scanned images of handwritten pages to a large extent going forward. Possibly TeX for certain major points, and then images for bulk calculations. The COVID-19 situation has given me motivation to stay in and work through physics books. Likely targets are QFT books by Zee and Lancaster/Blundell, Goldstein and maybe V.I. Arnold in classical mechanics, Carroll and Hartle's general relativity books, and Sakurai's quantum mechanics textbook. I will not be attempting to solve every problem, so they will tend to be earlier problems in the chapters. I may adapt material from a few MOOCs for the quantum computers, MEMS/NEMS, and synthetic biology pages, but that is not my priority right now.
Sunday November 6th, 2016
MathJax has been implemented with Javascript, allowing equation rendering with TeX commands. The initial stages of the Quantum Field Theory project have begun. However, writing equations is extremely slow in this way, so the mathematical subjects will undoubtedly take a long time. The script is external rather than a server-side implementation. Hopefully this will not become a problem.
Friday October 28th, 2016
The site framework has been redesigned to not have a universal top-menu bar, with all subsections embedded within three left-menu bar categories. Works of satire and letters to newspapers have been included under "Works." Most of the dark humor and bathos has been cut. There is a slate of essays on radical education reform on the drawing board that will not be released piecemeal. The rest of the site will expand bit by bit. Organization will be a lagging feature because it has impeded productivity.
