And so it begins

06Feb07

First day of classes today! I am, as always, inordinately excited, but will become suitably embittered within a month. Such is life.

I am taking:

8.044 Statistical Physics I
8.06 Quantum Physics III
8.14 Junior Lab II
8.972 Astrophysics Seminar

At 48 units, counted MIT-style, it looks ike my lightest courseload yet. But HAH HAH: I’ll be lucky to survive this set.

Now hark! And I will tell you all about them. But I’ll fold the post here, because I’m a kind person.

For the uninitiated, subjects here are designated entirely by number – none of this PHY XXX business. The 8 means it’s physics. The other numbers designate the particular subject, and may or may not follow any real algorithm.

8.044 is a sophomore-level class. I took about half of it back when I was a sophomore, but dropped it halfway through term, convinced that stat mech and I were destined to be mortal enemies forevermore. But somewhere along the line I completely changed my mind about that – maybe it was the degenerate fermi gases in astrophysics, or the spectroscopy in lab – and now I’m back. BEWARE.

8.06 is the third of the three-term undergraduate quantum sequence. Now, quantum was something I’d never found terribly interesting, and I wasn’t expecting 8.04-8.05-8.06 to be much more than something to get through. I was thoroughly shocked to find I really liked 8.04. And 8.05 was better still, although HARD; it was the kind of class that beats you down and leaves you bleeding on the linoleum, but you keep hobbling back for more because it’s heady, addictive stuff. So I’m actually looking forward to 8.06. But not without some qualms, because, again, HARD.

I just had my first 8.06 lecture. We’ve lost a fair few of the students from 8.05, including my lab partner from last term and (woe!) the hot boy from last term’s lab section. But the material looks interesting: there’s more about physical applications of QM, and less about its mathematical formalism, and, in addition, we’re expected to research and write a term paper. And, to my delight, this term’s professor has kept the rigorously-structured “chapter” system of lectures. Today we started Chapter 9 of quantum mechanics: Identical Fermi Systems, and proceeded through to 9.1.3: The Ground State of N Noninteracting Fermions in a Box. I’m a sucker for a well-organized lecture. Props to Hong.

8.14 is Junior Lab. Now, students here tend to refer to courses by number, i.e. “Yo Morris, why weren’t you in 8.06?” BUT. A select handful of classes, institute-wide, are so notorious, so thorougly mind-breakingly life-suckingly hardcore, that they’re called by name. Aero-astro people have Unified; chemical engineers have Ice; physicists have Junior Lab. It counts as 18 units, which means it should occupy about 18 hours of your time each week. Realistically, it takes more like 24. Or 36. We do four experiments per term – NMR; Doppler-free spectroscopy; 21-cm astrophysics; &c. – and for each one we write a journal-style paper and give a 15-minute presentation. Jlab eats lives. It’s dreaded by sophomores and cursed by seniors and for some unfathomable reason it’s my favorite class. Who knows.

And finally, 8.972 is an astrophysics seminar. This year it’s on exoplanets and brown dwarfs, and it’s taught by Josh Winn and Adam Burgasser, who know a little something about exoplanets and brown dwarfs. First meeting tomorrow.

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