The Student Room Group

Imperial Strikes Back: 2nd Year Physics GYG

Scroll to see replies

Reply 60
Original post by Flobro
Could I get a tag please?

will do
Reply 61
I went in to campus today and got a fair amount of work done. I like just being at the campus, it reminds me of better times - there's still a few weeks to go before I actually have anything on-site. The lack of indoor seating is really annoying when I get food though, sitting outside with your curry rapidly cooling isn't fun.
Speaking of that, I tried the vegan place at the campus last time I was there and it was really nice, had a chickpea madras with some onion bhajis. I think it's the only outlet that has become cheaper - probably they realised that being among the most expensive places while not serving any meat is a bit daft.

The academic side of things:
Caught up on 3 lectures: Quantum Physics 8, Differential Equations 4 and Structure of Matter 5. Still two lectures remaining for structure of matter.

Finished the quantum physics problem sheet up to the "tutorial question" which, I assume, will be covered in the tutorial.

Did another question from the assessed differential equations problem sheet, but haven't got the right answer on the last part and I'm not sure where the mistake is.

Progress continues to be very slow on the computing project - I spend way too long working out the mechanics of the collisions, I don't get much code written down and I'm indecisive with how to structure it or how to interpret the tasks on the script. In an hour I'm really not sure what the hell I achieved, and the computing session yesterday wasn't that productive either.

Work remaining to do:

getting up to task 5 in the computing project which involves setting up the simulation and the animation (most important)

finishing the DEs problem sheets, both assessed and normal (~1 hour?)

watch the remaining two structure of matter lectures (~90 minutes)

watch the introductory video and do the reading for next week's Horizons seminar (Haitian Revolution)

(edited 3 years ago)
Reply 62
Well I think I have finished all the work I needed to do this week, I'm up to date on lectures and have uploaded my APS. Even the computing project isn't looking so bad right now, the only snag is adding in a class method for the visual animation of the ball in the container, but I've got a computing session tomorrow so hopefully that's sorted quickly enough.

Last two lectures on Structure of Matter were on probability distributions in ideal gases (incl. Maxwell-Boltzmann) and how heat capacity and energy equations are affected by the degrees of freedom in the system. It's new to me and quite interesting, although I'm not sure how this is applied in exam questions.

ngl I prefer GMT to BST.
Reply 63
Even the computing project isn't looking so bad right now, the only snag is adding in a class method for the visual animation of the ball in the container, but I've got a computing session tomorrow so hopefully that's sorted quickly enough.


Dear past self

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. You poor innocent ****.

I spent the entire three ****ing hours of the session on that one thing, was speaking with one of the demonstrators for a total of I think 45 minutes and barely anything has been achieved. So I have gone from being 1 task behind to 5 tasks behind. This session was meant to involve generalising the simulation to allow for multiple particles and do some statistical analysis on it as well. None of that has happened and nothing has worked. Right now I would rather have coded the entirety of my summer project than spend another minute on this **** of a task.

Than you for reading the Update of Many Asterisks.
Original post by Sinnoh
Dear past self

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. You poor innocent ****.

I spent the entire three ****ing hours of the session on that one thing, was speaking with one of the demonstrators for a total of I think 45 minutes and barely anything has been achieved. So I have gone from being 1 task behind to 5 tasks behind. This session was meant to involve generalising the simulation to allow for multiple particles and do some statistical analysis on it as well. None of that has happened and nothing has worked. Right now I would rather have coded the entirety of my summer project than spend another minute on this **** of a task.

Than you for reading the Update of Many Asterisks.

:console: hope you manage to sort it out!
Original post by Sinnoh

Last two lectures on Structure of Matter were on probability distributions in ideal gases (incl. Maxwell-Boltzmann) and how heat capacity and energy equations are affected by the degrees of freedom in the system. It's new to me and quite interesting, although I'm not sure how this is applied in exam questions.

As a fun little asside, you can work out the shape of a gas molecule by dropping a ball bearing down a tube of gas and watch it bounce up and down. Shape changes degrees of freedom, which changes heat capacitiy, which changes compressibility, which changes "springiness" of a gas column. Thats the sort of thing that can sneak into exam question teritory. That, or justs lots and lots of sigmas over assorted distributions and special cases like doing this all in 1D or 2D. That used to be "just for fun" but now we do indeed have 1D and 2D materials like graphene and nanotubes to worry about electrons in.
Reply 66
One good thing to happen this week, I'm through to the second round of try-outs for University Challenge [s]biggrin[/s]
Reply 67
UC tryouts went okay but not great. I didn't get any incorrect interruptions (did 2 of those last year!) but a lot of the questions just weren't good for me and I didn't get that much time to actually play. There were also a couple questions where I'd seen the information in the past and I had known it at one point but I couldn't recall it at the time. There was a question on Pokémon though which I absolutely nailed :ahee:
Right now I'm a bit more motivated to actually try and learn things for next year if I don't get in.

Have made a bit of progress on the computing project, but it just feels like swapping one frustrating task for another. I'm also a bit behind on lectures and problem sheets for this week.
(edited 3 years ago)
Reply 68
Didn't get on to the team :indiff: but based on the fact that I've gotten to the second round twice now with zero preparation I think I have it in me to qualify if I prepared. Have started by making a list of topics that I'm terrible at (like biochemistry, film, sport), good at, and okay at but could get good with more practice (e.g. classical music and geography).

...if only I was this motivated about my actual subjects!

Speaking of which, I'm caught up with lectures at least, and I've got a weekend and a bit to pull the computing project out of the fire.

Differential equations has now covered some definitely new topics like looking at solutions with power series and Legendre's equation, I'm understanding it so far but the problems take up a lot of page space and ink. And the so-called 'mini lectures' are the longest out of any module...

Thermal physics & structure of matter has now definitely moved on to the thermodynamics topics, but due to 'technical issues' only one lecture has been uploaded. But I'm looking forward to this topic more than the last few.

Quantum physics has moved on to proper quantum-sounding areas like operators and wavefunctions. It's interesting enough and not too difficult either.
Reply 69
Okay I'm a bit less screwed with the computing project than I was, thanks to tactfully skipping certain tasks that aren't necessary and using some fuzzy coding to solve certain bugs. So at the very least, I've got some plausible-looking graphs.

However at the cost of catching up (somewhat) on that I'm still behind on two thermal physics lectures and the most recent problem sheets. Terrific. But to account for the project write-up and other people's lab reports there are supposedly fewer lectures being released next week so that gives me a chance.

I also want to stay up for the US election so that might just ruin my Wednesday. Now yes this is of literally no relevance to my course whatsoever and doesn't affect me at all, but fact is I've been checking the polls and the FiveThirtyEight website so often this past month that I can't not watch it live, even if the only swing state that'll be called on the night will probably be Florida. I still remember waking up on the 9th of November 2016 and checking BBC News at 7 a.m., that was certainly a surprise...
Reply 70
Getting my code fixed to finish the project feels like trying to empty the ocean with a sieve
Original post by Sinnoh
Getting my code fixed to finish the project feels like trying to empty the ocean with a sieve


What kind, a mersenne sieve :smile:. Sorry, coding joke .....
Reply 72
Original post by Mr Wednesday
What kind, a mersenne sieve :smile:. Sorry, coding joke .....


:colonhash:

I will chuckle once the crisis is over
Reply 73
Found out at 20 to 5, thinking that I was cutting it ridiculously close to the deadline, that the report and code were actually due at 4.

whoops
Reply 74
Mid-term Blues - Update 4

Hi everyone. It's been 5 weeks of term now. A lot has changed in the 3 weeks since I last did a proper update, but not so much for me. As eagerly as I was following the US election, it did absolutely nothing for me except cost me some hours of sleep on Tuesday night. If Florida voted Democrat I could have gone to bed sooner and slept much easier :frown: Things seemed to be going quite smoothly until about the end of the 4th week, but now that the computing project is done I'm hoping this was just a temporary dip in fortunes.

The structure of the day hasn't changed much at all, for the most part it's just me getting up, milling about at home for a bit, watching a few lectures and doing a little bit of problem sheets (and occasional live events like seminars or the Horizons class). I had been going in to campus about once a week, but I didn't last week what with the imminent nationwide stay-at-home policy. This Friday though, I'll have my first lab session in... let me check... nine months. That's the only thing I have to be on campus for.

I've also been very grateful for the restructuring of the course for our year. In the old course we would have had almost-weekly assessed problem sheets, and instead of covering quantum physics and structure of matter at the start, we would have been doing Fourier and statistics. And that, combined with the computing, would've been hell.
So, on to the modules.

Advanced Practical Physics
Uuughhhh. What a ****ing that was. The main gist of the project was to create a 2D simulation of an ideal gas in a container and then see how it held up to physical laws e.g. finding coefficients for the van der Waals law, making histograms of the particle velocities, doing a graph of pressure against temperature. Having had just three sessions on object-oriented programming preceding that, it really wasn't easy for me. I spent most of the last day wondering why my histograms sometimes looked disgusting and why sometimes it recorded no values for pressure. It took an hour of just fiddling with different numbers for the simulation - changing the number of balls and changing the number of collisions to 'record' - until I got some neat and realistic-looking histograms. I have no idea why 75 and 1500 were the magic numbers, they just were. My summary report was hilariously bad. One of the quantities we had to determine turns out to be the volume occupied by a single particle. Now I'm not good at coding or chemistry, but I'm pretty sure that shouldn't be negative, let alone in the vicinity of - 300. But hey, if you can't talk about how your code works, I guess you just talk about how much it doesn't work.

As a tragic cherry on the icing of the cake of misery, I was 45 minutes late in submitting it - but it turns out that they had indeed put 5 pm as the deadline before, and only announced the evening before that it was a mistake. So they've agreed not to penalise me for that... though I'm seriously not expecting to get over 50% for that anyway so it's not much lost if they did cap my score.

On to hopefully less opaque and time-consuming things with the labs. But from what I've heard from those who did have labs this cycle, three days isn't long at all to get the lab report done.

Thermal Physics & Structure of Matter
So I'm a bit behind on this because for most of the last week I couldn't really justify doing anything other than the project. We've properly moved on into the realm of thermal physics though, the last few lectures have been about temperature and heat transfer and the most recent ones (that I need to catch up on) are on entropy and the first law of thermodynamics. There's also an assessed problem sheet; I've made good progress on it so far. If there's any consolation, all the non-practical modules have been doable and interesting. Since doing Fourier back in January and February there hasn't really been a topic that I've felt lost with.

Quantum Physics
The introductory course is like a 'greatest hits' compilation. Has included the photon model, blackbody radiation, energy levels in the Bohr atomic model, some basic atomic physics, operators for wavefunctions and the Schrödinger equation which is very satisfying to write down for the first time. Problem sheets have been doable, and I got full marks on the assessed problem sheet. I don't think I managed that in first year. This is the only module for which I'm caught up on lectures.

Differential Equations & Electromagnetism
We've had an APS on this too, as well as a seminar. Recent topics were about the Legendre equation and solutions, and just in general finding power series solutions to DEs. I uhh think I get it? Not sure if I do. I have just one lecture to catch up on, but they're always quite long. If we had to do this in the lecture theatre on campus and bound to a timetable, I'm sure these ones would have over-run. And the lecturer calls them 'mini-lectures'...

Horizons - Revolutions & The Making of the Modern World
Most recently looked at the Industrial Revolution in the UK which was a bit drier than previous topics like the Haitian revolution and the French revolution. Tomorrow the session is on the year of 1848 and the simultaneous revolutions that occurred in it. I'm starting to think a bit more about the essay, I'm still pretty sure I'll pick the topic on the Russian Revolution since I'm still most familiar with that one, but I'll have to do some more reading - I can't just use Figes' book for that. I can write essays fairly quickly so I'm not too worried about time pressure (bet I'll be eating those words in a month's time). I think I wrote most of my A-level coursework in two weeks anyway.

Afterword
I think this format I've got for the blog is working well for me. Okay I've spent enough time writing about the stuff I still need to do. Time to attempt to do it. Thanks for reading.

Tags

hope the lab session goes well!
Reply 76
Original post by absolutelysprout
hope the lab session goes well!


Cheers, I'm looking forward to having an actual reason to come to campus :biggrin:
Original post by Sinnoh
Mid-term Blues - Update 4

Now I'm not good at coding or chemistry, but I'm pretty sure that shouldn't be negative, let alone in the vicinity of - 300. But hey, if you can't talk about how your code works, I guess you just talk about how much it doesn't work.

So I am sure the guidelines say this, but a bit of semi-professional advice here. The 1st rule of coding for physicists is "don't start by coding". Draw a block diagram on a bit of paper first with arrows showing how things are supposed to flow between different bits of code. Rule two is "work out how to test the stuff in each box before you code it". Rule three is "test and comment small blocks as you go" so that once you bolt all the functional units together it has a reasonable chance of working. Rule four is a pragmatic "if you think it works .... prove it" exercise by benchmarking against something you really trust, like a book value / equation - there is probably a specific "give points for this" bit in the marker's rubric :smile:. A more subtle rule five for physicists is "do sensitivity analysis". Change "little things" and see if (when ..... its usually when) the code does something stupid. The "75 and 1500 were the magic numbers" thing is the kind of warning flag that should have you doing fun testing for 76, 77, multiples of 5, multiples of 75 etc. One for the future, Fourier transform routines (FFT) tend to like power of 2 data sizes. Best of luck with this, its a usful skill to nail and is worth the time invested.
Reply 78
Original post by Mr Wednesday
So I am sure the guidelines say this, but a bit of semi-professional advice here. The 1st rule of coding for physicists is "don't start by coding". Draw a block diagram on a bit of paper first with arrows showing how things are supposed to flow between different bits of code. Rule two is "work out how to test the stuff in each box before you code it". Rule three is "test and comment small blocks as you go" so that once you bolt all the functional units together it has a reasonable chance of working. Rule four is a pragmatic "if you think it works .... prove it" exercise by benchmarking against something you really trust, like a book value / equation - there is probably a specific "give points for this" bit in the marker's rubric :smile:. A more subtle rule five for physicists is "do sensitivity analysis". Change "little things" and see if (when ..... its usually when) the code does something stupid. The "75 and 1500 were the magic numbers" thing is the kind of warning flag that should have you doing fun testing for 76, 77, multiples of 5, multiples of 75 etc. One for the future, Fourier transform routines (FFT) tend to like power of 2 data sizes. Best of luck with this, its a usful skill to nail and is worth the time invested.


Much appreciated! I've certainly learnt some things the hard way with this project.
Reply 79
Got the differential equations APS mark back, was 9.5/10 - missed out a + c when I used the Wronskian method to find another solution to the DE. I think. I've only glanced at it.

Tuesday's seminar was a bit crap, was on quantum physics and included a nice simulation for us to mess about with but it all felt a bit pointless, didn't really learn anything from that.

Labs tomorrow, then later there's an interview with a demonstrator about my computing project which I'm really not looking forward to.

Other than that I've mostly caught up with the lectures I missed last week, all that's outstanding from before are 1 and a half thermal physics lectures which had problems with the video and anyway don't seem to have been that important.

I've watched both DEs lectures for this week and the one thermal physics lecture that was uploaded, but still haven't started on this week's quantum physics lectures or the 2nd APS for quantum. Might have a chance to start on that when I'm on campus for labs.