keine titel.

Hello people who are interested in Germany/Joey/Physics!!

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!im sorry, but my posts are always super long…

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So a bunch of exciting stuff has happened since the last post. So I will start Friday June 19th, about 2 weeks ago… I had just received my train passes from DAAD (the people who are paying me) which will allow me 5 free days of travel within Germany. I was thinking that I only had a few weekends left and thus I needed to use 2 of those passes and go somewhere awesome. Thus, around midnight Friday, I decided I wanted to go to Munich (Munchen in Germany) on Saturday. In the morning I got up, packed, booked a hostel, put on my running shoes and ran to make an 8am train. I must say, I made pretty good time from my room to the train station, and the train literally left less than 40 seconds after I got on it. My legs were still shaking when I had to change trains in Frankfurt about 40 min later!

Eventually I made it to Munich, checked into my hostel, and went about trying to find stuff I’d heard about that was cool. After a while of being lost underground (subway tunnels and such) I was able to make it to the famous Nymphenburg Palace with the help of some super-nice german people. It was beautiful and amazing and it had a garden which was over 500 acres. It was so strange to be walking down a busy street in Munich and then suddenly be in front of an astounding sight like this! I spent a little bit of time walking/being semi-lost in the garden and looked around the palace before moving on. Soon after, I was lucky enough to see a group of street performers composed of a cello, a stand up bass, a flute, and a mini-grand piano!! It was really cool!

From there I saw some statues and other landmarks, before stumbling across the Residence, which was the home of the rules of Bavaria for hundreds of years. I did not mean to find this (i was looking to find a theater and see a play) but it was amazing. I never went inside, but instead just admired the myriad statues and the great architecture outside. I walked around it for hours, passing gardens, fountains, and other incredible sights. There was a moment when I was in the middle of a garden in a small, ordinate pavilion while a street performer was playing solo violin and a man was painting a picture of him. The sun was setting behind a palace and it was all breathtaking.

Nothing else spectacular happened that day, and I again spontaneously decided to take a train in the morning. This time the train was at 7am and went to Garmisch-Partenkircken, a small town essentially in the Alps. I spent a really long time walking around the town and surrounding area. I eventually ended up at the top of the tallest mountain in Germany (with a little help from a train)!! It was almost 10,000 ft up, but I couldnt see much of the famed panoramic view of the Alps due to clouds. It was actually very disappointing… but I did walk on a glacier for a while! I finished off the weekend with a bit of shopping and I got home around 2am. Overall it was a great weekend and I really liked exploring so much stuff on my own!

Okay, so then I was back at work for a week. Early in the week I finished another program, which I talked about in my last blog post. It uses a first order partial differential equation to model neutron stars. When I was done with the program and had checked everything, it was still giving dramatically wrong results. I spent the entire remainder of the week checking units and algorithms in this program. We wrote up a mathematica script which could do some of the same things and our program agreed exactly. I checked several places within the program by computing values in multiple ways and comparing them. After a while my PhD student also started looking at it and determined that my program was probably right, but we were just missing some equation that is supposed to be “understood”! We still haven’t figured it out…

During this week the final few RISE students (RISE works for DAAD, and together they give us money) got here, so now there are 10 of us. There are 8 biology people and 2 physics. There is another physics person!! She is from England and she is hardcore experimental… so she didn’t really know anything about my project at all (because she is experimental… not because she is from England!). She mentioned that she wants to learn fortran, and I had to hold my tongue to not tell her that it is the devil, because no matter how much I dislike it, it is the standard in a lot of physics right now and if she is only going to know one language that should be it.

It was, overall, a pretty uneventful and frustrating week at work… so now I will skip forward to the weekend! I wasn’t sure what I was going to do until about 11:30 pm on Friday (I sense a pattern…) but then I decided to accompany some of the other RISE students to Hamburg. It was an 8 hour train ride, because we opted for the super cheap tickets (with a lot of train changing) and because we missed one train (which only added 1 hour). I had ordered some burger king and the lady was taking a while, I said we should abort but the other students thought we had time…

Anyway, Hamburg is a really cool city! It is a port town, and the people equally like fish and pirates. We got a hotel which I thought was really cool, because it was so small and had cool pictures everywhere, but the girls thought was a little sketchy, for the same reasons. Apparently the red light district in hamburg is some sort of historical big deal, and a thing called a “whore tour” is offered, where a woman dressed like a whore from hundreds of years ago shows you famous old brothels and tells interesting facts. I think this would have been hilarious/awesome/uncomfortable/memorable, but it was too expensive. So we toured some boats, some churches, a WWII memorial, and miniature wonderland and we also climbed a tall tower. Miniature Wonderland is like a model train set times 10^7! It was really awesome and through random confusion and awkwardness I was able to look at it for about an hour for free! Its kinda a long story…

So there is a flea market known as “the fish market” at 5am, and thus we decided to stay up until then! We went out to dinner at an awesome Italian place where I ordered coffee and everyone else ordered water, but the guy made fun of me and brought everyone beer! The two girls who went were really into going to clubs, so them and the other boy who went and myself ended up at a dance club all night. Its not really my scene, but it wasn’t Casey’s (the boy) scene either so it worked out. The name of the club was HALO, which was awesome. Oh, and we passed “the doll house”, which was the nightclub recommended to us by the ~40 year old woman at the travel information center, and it turned out to be a strip club!! From there my subpar german got us to the fish market, but everyone else was too tired and lame to stay up so we went to the hotel and slept for 3 hours.

The next day we ate free breakfast, checked out the motorcycle convention going on at the time, and went to the awesome hamburg zoo. I fed an elephant and a giraffe!! Also, in a lot of places the animals (ie the elephants, mountain goats, giant rabbit creatures, …) were not separated from the people at all! It was really unsafe/cool! It was fun and there was also a large guinea pig village with a church, windmill, barn, etc…

From there we ran to make our train. We passed a taxi that I wanted to hail, but the other students told me not to. Oh how I regret that moment… We missed the train and would have made it if I had said “screw you guys, hey taxi!” It would have been awesome… well, we just had to wait 1 hour for the next train, and then we came back home to Giessen!

Oh, and on the trip I finished the 5^th book ive read since ive been here! It is nice to have some time to read… not like at school where I have to do homework all the time! Next I’ll be reading GEB, and I’m really excited! Jeez this post is getting long…

So then this week started! We have given up on fixing the code from last week, and my PhD student said he trusts it and will figure out what we are missing sometime. So I started a new project, and he said “I know there is not much time left, so I don’t know if you will have a chance to finish it, which is fine.” To me that means “I CHALLENGE YOU TO FINISH THIS!” Thus, I am now in a race to create code that will find phase transitions in nuclear matter with 8 particles. It sure would have been cool if I had taken critical phenomena last semester… The code is going alright so far and I have worked on it a bit at home since I was challenged to complete it. I’m getting okay shapes for the curves, but the magnitude is off by a lot. It is probably a unit thing and I feel pretty confident that I will have it all worked out in a few days.

Tomorrow is the annual theoretical physics summer excursion! This year the excursion consists of riding bicycles between beer gardens! Yay! Then yesterday I learned that we are riding almost 50 miles! I haven’t ridden a bicycle more than from Tom & Ian’s to campus (not even 1/2 mile) since middle school… oh no! Eh, I’m sure I’ll be fine… but maybe all the beer gardens won’t help!

You’ve almost made it to the end of the post… just hold on a little longer!

So here is what I’ve got left ahead of me:

-bike trip tomorrow

-weekend in Berlin with my PhD student

-3 days of work

-4 day RISE conference and hanging out in Heidelberg (beautiful german city)

-1 day of work

-1 day to pack/check out of my room

-come home on Wed, July 15^th!!!

Wow I only have 4 days of work left! It’s going to be a challenge to get this program done! Anyway, you’ve made it to the end of this blog post! I’m sorry it was so long…

Have fun!

joey

deutschland ist toll… aber Kirksville ist auch gut?

Hey!  I haven’t posted in a while so get ready to read way more stuff about me than you actually care about!

First off, do you guys remember when Truman hosted that awesome party that over a thousand people came to and everyone had a really fun time for many hours?  Oh wait… that only happens in Germany!  So yeah, that happened here.  The party was in a large field and there were no less than three soccer tournaments going on.  There was volley and sac racing too, and lots of slightly overpriced (but still tasty) german beer.  There was also a beer crate stacking competition where you had to climb on top of the crates you’d already stacked to put more on top, which was super awesome!  Then there was a dancing/break dancing/other stuff show which was really cool and had really different creative stuff.  I was there from 6pm to 430am which was really fun, and there were tons of people there when i showed up and tons still there when i left.

Then, last weekend, some of the other RISE students and I went to Koln, or Cologne.  It was really fun!  On the first day we saw the dom which is a giant church.  We also saw an old nazi prison that had been converted into a really interesting museum.  My favorite part was the writing scratched on the wall of the tiny tiny cells (which held 30 people, 28 more people then i had guessed by looking at them!!).  Among the best were “Nazi Assholes”, and “Dear prisoner, you can endure through anything, and thus you can endure this.  Keep your head high!”.  The guy who wrote that last one must have been awesome.  From here we ate some food at the Rhine, and noticed the German phenominom that is the ‘beer bike’.  A bar with wheels and petals!  We walked about town, lost track of time, and had to run across the whole town (with me jumping walls because i fell behind to take a picture of a mr t poster) to catch a boat.  We took a really cool tour of the rhine, which i slept during.

This was followed by making our way back to the hotel we had booked, which was literally in the middle of a field out of the city.  We had to walk through the woods to get to it.  Then, around 11pm we made our way back into the city!  We enjoyed the German tradition of buying beers at corner stores and walking the streets drinking them while looking for bars and getting lost.  Okay, I don’t know if its a German tradition, but we did it anyway.  The next train back to our hotel was at 5am so we stayed out until then to avoid the cost of a cab, but we accidentally took a train in a circle and got confused so we just took a cab anyway.  In the course of the evening we spent a lot of time just walking around, met a homeless man with a giant joint who was frustrated because someone took his “rook-bag” and he hoped he could randomly see that person tomorrow so “I… I will push my fist so hard into his face!”, and some cool british guys, one of which said to me “you have the coolest beard and haircut that I have seen the whole past 2 months I’ve been in Germany,” so it was a pretty fun evening i guess.

The next day we got up and went back to the dom.  We looked at the underground caverns and stuff it has.  Building it began in the 1200’s and didn’t finish until sometime in the 1800’s!  We also saw a fancy box that is said to have the remains of the 3 wise men in it, which was cool.  Then we proceeded to climb over 500 stairs in a tiny spiral staircase (it took a LONG time) to see the worlds largest free hanging bell.  The bell was closed so we didn’t get to see it… but it was still a super cool view of the city!

We then finished off the trip by visiting the chocolate museum!  It was actually really interesting but we didn’t get as much free chocolate as I would have liked… Then we traveled back to Giessen and went to sleep!

Well, during this time I’ve also been going to work.  As always I’ve just been programming away, which is a lot of fun!  While I really don’t like FORTRAN very much, I do like programming a lot!  I’ve pretty much finished the program that I had been working on.  We have a file with the parameters for different nuclear models, and I have the program set up to take whichever models the user specifies and create data tables for density, effective mass, effective chemical potential, energy density, free energy, entropy, chemical potential etc for each particle (there are 8 particles, include particles with strangeness /neq 0) for given ranges of total density and temp.  It works really well and it is fun to look at the 3D graphs in gnuplot.  Using this program we found a few behaviors that were not expected including an area which had a continuum of solutions.  Andreas was able to theoretically explain this, and it was really cool!

Since then I’ve been working on a new program concerning neutron stars.  Neutron stars can be described by the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff equation, which is a first order pde expressing d(pressure)/d(radius) in terms of enclosed mass, pressure, and radius.  I am using the 4th order Runge-Kutta method to numerically evaluate the equation.  It is kind of a pain because M is expressed as an integral in terms of radius and energy density which we also needed to solve numerically.  This is even more of a pain because we don’t have an analytical way to obtain energy density from p so we have to use newton’s method to find rho (total density) for the given p and then use that rho to find energy density.  Well, i actually finished this program today, but it basically took me all week and a lot longer than I had hoped.  The program uses a given pressure for r = 0 and evaluates pressure at different r, until reaching p = 0 (the surface of the star) and then returns the total radius of the star and its total mass.  I just finished it before leaving work today, so I haven’t had a chance to check the results at all.

Oh!  There was another program I wrote sometime that I totally forgot about.  In between writing these two I spent a few days  writing a program which takes certain facts about neutron stars to act like my first program but not require rho as an input.  It was really cool and uses Newton’s method in 24 dimensions, which was kind of a pain, but not too bad.  It works well and turned out good I think.

The PhD student which is my mentor said that he wanted to give me my own side project, and I’m glad that he did.  It has been cool acting mostly on my own doing research which is important to his, but somewhat distinct.  That being said, once I finish this neutron star program I will be done with everything which he had set aside for me, so we don’t know what I’ll be doing…

Now lets stop talking about physics again.  I think that I will be going to the Alps tomorrow, but maybe not, I haven’t decided.  I really want to go somewhere but I don’t know where… I suppose you, dear reader, will hear about it in my next post!  I really should post more often, because this one seems very long…

UNRELATED SUBJECT:——————————————————————–

So I have been thinking about my schedule next semester a lot lately, and I think this might be a good place to get some opinions.  I’m afraid I might be doing too much and I’d like to especially hear from anyone who has taken these classes.  My classes, in order of probable difficulty, are:

MATH 465 — differential geometry with Easley

PHYS 580 — quantum mech with Edis

CS 460 — computer graphics with Neitzke

MATH 564 — adv linear algebra with garth

PHYS 490 — senior research with goggin

PHRE 186 — intro to phil with chad mohler

Let me know what you guys think!  Any input would be greatly appreciated!

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Well, I think I did a good job conveying all of the interesting stuff I’ve been through without being too long-winded… Anyway, everybody keep up the good physics and good luck with everything!

have fun!

-joey

if only the strong force wasn’t so strong…

Hello phyisics fans!

So I have been doing a bunch of cool stuff lately!  First off, last weekend I did my first ‘touristy’ thing and went to visit the nearby town of Marburg.  It was really awesome!  The brothers Grimm lived there for a while and there is a cool castle and stuff like that.

Here’s how it went:  Around 3:30 (I almost wrote 15:30!!) I decided I was bored and it was lame for me to just sit around.  Thus, via train, I was in Marburg at 4:30.  The train system here is amazing!  Then I wandered around for a while, eventually seeing a giant church tower.  I knew Marburg was really famous for the old section of the city, so I walked towards the tower.  It was Elizabethkirke and it was awesome.  I then, following anything old I saw, found the old city.  It was really neat.  The streets were very narrow and it was built on a hill, so the town literally had more steps in its alleys and roads then in its houses!  From here, more exploring yielded several awesome churches, a ton of cool houses, a gigantic castle, a scary dark underground tunnel that I think was left unlocked on accident, and other cool stuff.  It was a fun day, and I got home that night around 11 just in time to go out to a pub with Andreas and one of his friends.  We had some good beer and played some bad pool, so overall it was a pretty good night!

From there I had a very productive week of work.  I have continued working on the FORTRAN program and now it works!!  It is almost done, I have a few little tweeks and things, but overall I got it all working and Andreas said he was surprised at how much I had already accomplished!!  That put me in a pretty good mood…

Also, on thursday we had a presentation of some experimental physicist.  It was actually really boring because he mostly just showed us graphs, then the smart profs would ask crazy questions that he usually didn’t know the answer to.  Whenever he did say anything that could have been interesting it went way over my head.  During the presentation Andreas got out some paper and proceeded to scribble away.  After a few minuets of this, he just walked out of the presentation.  It was really loud and a bit awkward!  Later I went to his office to discover he had solved a problem with his model that I had pointed out earlier.  He was so excited that he had to try it out right then!  He told me there are two types of colloquium, one type is good because it is interesting, and the other type is good because they are so boring that you start thinking about other stuff!

Ok, so I have had one other adventure.  Yesterday me and two of the RISE girls, Jennifer (biologist from Canada) and Elise (biochemist from Alabama) went to a random town in Germany to meet one of Jenifer’s friends from high school who was randomly also in Germany.  We just chose the town that was halfway in between us, and it turned out to be an awesome place!  We climbed a large hill (or small mountain) to get to a giant statue of herkules.  Elise and I dangerously climbed over a spiked fence (that was really high up) to get on to an abandoned aqueduct.  It was super cool.  We also saw a palace and an old awesome castle.  We spent hours walking around the woods to find all these places.

After these adventures, we began to forage for food (look for a restaurant).  We were hungry and tired and wandered the streets until we found a place to eat.  The rest of the day consisted of running across a 6ish lane road, going to an awesome Grimm brothers museum, and randomly finding a festival in the town.  I bought a giant bag of candy.  Then we took a train home.  Overall, it was a good day.

Thus the point becomes, dear reader, America is lame compared to Germany because even a randomly chosen German town has a statue of herkules with 535 steps leading up to him.

Well, I’ll update when I’ve done some more physics or adventuring… until then, have fun!

-Joey

Physik!

Hey!  This post is actually going to be about the physics im doing, so get ready!

The PhD student that I am paired with, Andreas Fedoseew, has developed a model for the structure of the nucleus that takes into account both quantum and relativistic effects.  Most of my work is writing programs in FORTRAN 90 (thank goodness its not FORTRAN 77) which carry out calculations with this model.  I will then analyze these results and he will take this into account as he modifies the model.  It is a good job, and I really like programming.

My job for the first few days was just to read and learn about the problem.  Andreas mentioned that since we are doing a purely theoretical project, I actually have to understand the Physics to be any sort of help.  I’m going to do my best here to describe the Physics, but I have yet to take quantum and it has been difficult for me to keep up with everything.  Here goes…

The traditional theory of nuclear structure is based on the nonrelativistic many-body Schrodinger equation, but this just isn’t good enough for several reasons.  Under many extreme conditions (such as particles in high density situations) it is important to take other (such as relativistic) effects into consideration.  Also it is important to consider that in quantum mech a vacuum is a dynamical object (because of pair production).  There is growing evidence that learning about these high density and high speed situations will give a lot of insight for the normal situations.  There is obviously a lot more to this… but this is a good summary I think.

Thus, the goal becomes:  Find a relativistic model for the nuclear many-body system (within quantum hadrodynamics(QHD)) where the degrees of freedom are baryons and mesons which is both Lorentz covariant and causal.  So we pretty much would like to make a theory that is like quantum electrodynamics (QED).  There is, of course, a bit of a problem here.  For those of you who remember your QED, it depends on a parameter alpha ~ 1/137.  Since alpha is small it is possible to do some sort of (Taylor i think) expansion in QED.  In QHD the coupling constants are much larger (thats why its called the strong nuclear force and the other is the weak nuclear) so the expansion does not converge.

That is a decent summary of the motivation I think.  From here I examined the Dirac Equation, and the Dirac Hole Theory.  This was a lot of crazy math, but nothing too bad.  I learned that the Dirac Equation provides a Lorentz covariant solution to free particles.  From here, using a little Lagrangian magic, we can end up with several fields which control the interaction of particles.  The particles change the fields and the fields change the particles, and we have several of each… so it is sort of a mess!

In the model we work with we use Mean Field Theory.  This theory is exactly what it sounds like, the field operators are replaced with their expectation values to make everything simpler (but still very complicated overall).  In this process we end up with what is called the effective mass(for each particle), Mstar:

Mstar = M - (coupling constant)(scaler meson field)

As it turns out, once you have Mstar you get everything else for free, chemical potential, baryon pressure, etc…  So we want to get Mstar, but when you solve for it in terms of things we get to know about, it is very very messy.  So that is my job!  Find Mstar, then find everything else.

Mstar depends on an integral which has no analytical solution.  Doesn’t sound so bad yet… but Mstar is also in this integral… which sucks!  Also we use 8 particles and each has two equations (one for Mstar and another for chem pot mu) so that is 16 linked equations which are self-consistency equations(we cant isolate the variable we care about).  To do this we use a program that is a generalization of newtons method for finding zeros (iterating over tangent lines, it is a simple idea that converges very quickly if you have a good starting point) changed to accommodate any number of dimensions which uses a Jacobian instead of a derivative.  This is the program i am optimizing.

The problem with newton’s algorithm is you need a starting point close to the zero in question.  Thus, to find solutions for high temperature we have to solve for T=0 (which is easy), then solve for a small T using the previous solution as a starting point, then work our way up to the T we care about.  This is slow and no fun.  So I have currently been programming the algorithm to decide what step size of T is the maximal possible at each point, so we dont have to do so many points just to get some high T.  it is going well so far.

So for the next few weeks i will be optimizing this program and extending it.  I will also be studying its output and looking for anything interesting.  I am glad that I am so interested in programming, because that has turned out to be my main job here!  Anyway, this is a summary of what physics is going on here.  It isnt very thorough because it is a lot of information, so feel free to ask me if you have any questions!  There is way more I could write but I feel like I have already written too much!

next post will be about my german adventures thus far, i suppose?

have fun!

-joey

Alles Besser Auf Deutsch!

[this post is pretty long and does not have any physics in it]

Guten Tag!

So I’m Joey Palmer.  I just finished my third year at Truman, I’m a Math and Physics double major with a minor in Computer Science… and right now I’m in Germany.

So why am I in Germany?  Well, for one, Tom Hogan convinced me it would be fun if we both got physics internships here, so I signed up for the RISE program and here I am!  Notice Tom is in Boston (making way more money than me…).

So the rise program is pretty awesome.  You sign up, look at some projects (that grad students here are working on) and see which ones you care about.  Tell RISE the ones you like and in a couple of weeks if you got in then you’re assigned a project.  You get about 650 Euro a month (approx 900 US dollars) and you chill in Europe.  You also get some train passes to go places for free!  The problem is you have to pay for the flight oversees (~$600) and then you have to pay to live here (~$200 per month) and then you’ve got to pay for food.  In the end, you’re lucky if you break even.

So here’ s how its gone so far… The flight was fine, I didn’t sleep much but I watched Paul Blart: Mall Cop in German, which was cool.  I landed in Germany last Friday and the grad student I’m paired with (Andreas) picked me up.  I’ve been here a week and I have yet to be in a car.  We took a train from Frankfurt to Giessen and he showed me where I’d be living.  It’s a pretty okay place, and I get to live by myself, which is nice, although I do have to use a community bathroom (I’m in a dorm).

So I forgot to mention I know very little German!  There is a language course you can take through RISE in Berlin or something… but it costs money and I am already beyond broke.  It’s fine though, almost everyone speaks fluent English, and everyone I’ve met speaks at least a little.  So we’re a little spoiled, but knowing German is not vital to living in Germany.

So he shows me my office (yes I have an office!) and he shows me the break room (and it turns out my office is also the break room…) and I get to meet some people but then I go home to sleep.  So that was a good day.  Also, jetlag is horrible… I went through a 7 hour time shift, so I’m wide awake at 4:00 in my bed and really really tired at 13:00 when I’m at work.  Oh, and for the first few days I had no internet or phone… so that was fun.  So other than a quick call with Andreas’s phone to my parents and girlfriend to say “hey, I’m in Germany and still alive” I had no communication with the outside world.  By Monday I had bought a new phone here and gotten internet in my room, so that was nice.

Now, since Monday I have been working and exploring Giessen a bit.  It is an interesting town.  Apparently it is really old (like older than our country) and used to be a very cultural German town, but then it was bombed all to hell during the war and thus the architechure here is a mixture of old German style and build-quickly-in-the-60s style.  It’s pretty easy to tell which is which…

I see alot of the other people in the Theoretical Physics department here, and they are all really nice.  They have often spoken English around me so I could understand their conversations and they are very okay with me not knowing anything about their culture.  I also met with one of the other RISE students here in Giessen today, we ate lunch and explored a little bit.  It was pretty fun.  Apparently there are nine other RISE students here, and they are all female!  I think the chance of that happening was no so high…

Also, I’ve been spending a lot of time with Andreas, which is pretty cool.  He is a really nice guy.  Last night he took me out around the town and I got to try some German beer and whatnot.  The beer was pretty good, I’m not a big drinker but who could be in Germany for more than a few days and not try some of their beer?  Then later I had some Apfelwine (I’m going to let you translate that on your own) and that was good too.  It tasted a little like I had left apple juice out for to long, and then I realized that is pretty much what it is.  We eat together a lot, and have gone a few places.  So I came into this country not knowing anyone, but now I’ll be able to spend time with the RISE girls and Andreas and the physics crew.  Things are working out well so far!

So yeah, thats the last few days in a nutshell.  Its been interesting to be here and the physics is really cool too (I’m saving that for the next post).  There is a lot more to write… but I am sick of writing and I think this is enough for now.

Auf Wiedersehen!!  (i think thats spelled right…)