UW Update Oct 4-6

1.     Saturday Oct. 4

a.     Wake up in Bellingham home! Feel a bit disoriented with mild confusion about whether “home” is Bham or UW.

b.     Continue reading “Logicomix”, assigned graphic novel about history of logic and life of Bertrand Russell for my computer science honors section.

c.      Go to Bagelry with family.

d.     Go to boffing. Play some Sprout, some clans, some Next; have a lot of fun.

e.     Go to pool with family. Hang out in the hot tub with Mom and Dad and try to convince Izzy to pass herself off as 16 and join us.

f.      Go to Grandma’s for dinner, delicious BLT sandwiches! Hang out and chat, and then…

g.     Walk over to Monica and Isabelle’s house with Mary and Izzy. Sisters play Minecraft with Isabelle and I chat with Monica and Beth.

h.     Go home, eat blondie bar with ice cream, watch an episode of Korra with family.

i.       Do physics tutorial homework before calling it a night.

2.     Sunday Oct. 5

a.     Sleep in.

b.     Help make breakfast and read more Logicomix.

c.      Eat delicious family breakfast of eggs and pancakes.

d.     Go to Cloud Mountain Farm with Grandma and Isabelle (Isabelle McGuire). Izzy comes too—no confusion intended. (This is a bit of a family tradition; we all sample every different kind of fruit that can be grown in the NW, Mom looks at fruit trees, we go home with lots of apples and cider.) This time is little different; everyone just enjoys the gorgeous day and beautiful setting. I get some apples and cider to take back to the dorm.

e.     Come back, take care of a few details like tuition payment access for my parents, pack up with lots of dish soap and bananas and oatmeal and all the posters and hexagons from my room.

f.      Drive back to the UW with Dad. It’s a beautiful drive with little traffic. I work on a paper for Intro to Honors.

g.     Eat dinner with Dad at a little barbeque joint, Pinky’s, near campus. It’s absolutely delicious. The fried chicken sandwich is incredible.

h.     Return to dorm room, unpack stuff. Dad leaves. I work more on my paper, do some physics with Eleanor, read a little Stephen King, then hit the hay.

3.     Monday Oct. 6

a.     Head to physics.

b.     Run into Calob Symmonds, an old chess opponent who studied at Whatcom, as I go to turn in tutorial homework. He tells me about a programming competition that looks interesting. Turns out he took those 90 RS credits and rolled with them, planning to graduate this year as a double major (!).

c.      Study at tables outside physics.

d.     Go to Lunchbox Seminar, a terrific weekly event in the Society of Physics Students lounge where the professor giving a colloquium to the entire physics faculty later that day gives the same talk to interested undergrads and answers questions. It’s pretty crazy. The guest today was a physicist from Harvard who talked about his work measuring the “dipole electric and magnetic moments” of the electron. Basically, even though the electron theoretically has no size (its size is smaller than the most precise measurements that could measure a size, 10^-18 m), it has quantities analogous to angular momentum and dipole moments (separation of charge across distance). Angular momentum is well established, but only a very small, as yet unmeasurable dipole moment is predicted by the standard model. Other theories indicate different values for the dipole moment, so knowing whether measurements the dipole moment are consistent with 0 (the standard model) or other values (other theories of physics) to a certain degree of precision is important. So when an electron is put in an electric field, it tends to “orient” (again, no size, so my understanding here is not very precise) itself a certain way, just like a water molecule will rotate when placed into a field so that the negatively-charged oxygen end points towards positive charge. But because the dipole moment is so small, a ridiculously large electric field is required to measure the potential dipole moment of the electron. This field can’t be produced by lab equipment, plus such a field would fling the electron out of the apparatus if the electron were not held down. So the Harvard researchers took advantage of strong natural electric fields within a molecule that they somehow (again, my understanding is fuzzy) managed to orient with only a small external field. Using these fields and some quantum-mechanical fudgery involving measuring a very small difference in energy by converting it to wave functions that moved in and out of phase, leading to a measureable oscillation in the sum of the functions, they calculated the result to be consistent with 0, and thus the standard model, within the precision of the experiment (12 times more precise than the last experiment, 10^(-29) (charge of electron)(cm)). The units are in charge*distance since dipole moment is difference in charge across distance.

e.     Afterwards, I chat with a guy who asked interesting questions during the class at a higher level of complexity than the professor wanted to get into. He and I both mention hydrodynamical analogies to quantum dynamics (http://www.wired.com/2014/06/the-new-quantum-reality/) which the professor dismisses, saying that quantum mechanics just needs to be accepted as is, as unintuitive and  inexpressible in classical terms as it is, and that other interpretations are mostly attention-grabbing baloney preying on our desire to intuitively explain the fundamentally unintuitive. So we chat for a while, which mostly means he teaches me cool physics. He turns out to be a graduate who worked under a Nobel laureate here at the UW, but who now is living the slacker lifestyle as a physics tutor hanging around the physics buildings and physics lounge. Fascinating.

f.      I’m late to computer science, which is just an intro to linked lists.

g.     Afterwards I go help Eleanor with more physics homework.

h.     Then I go to Chess Club, play a few games, meet a new potential friend over a good close match.

i.       I head back to the dorm to meet Jamie before the first game of Fall League, an ultimate Frisbee league we signed up for on the same team.

j.       Turns out we aren’t playing until 9 and have time for a leisurely dinner at the 8 (more chicken strips J).

k.     Play ultimate! It’s fun, but my offense needs work (I don’t score a goal, but no goals are scored on me.) Lose game on a tiebreak technicality. Come back, send emails, write this update.