I had a busy day today! I spent the morning working on my Python course over at Codecademy. I finished going through the “review” material from when I previously completed the first few lessons and got into new stuff–which meant actually writing code! That was exciting. I made a (very rudimentary) Battleship game, and it worked with only a few issues to be debugged, so good for me. I’m at 61% through the course now, so a couple more sessions should finish it up.
After a busy interlude of running errands and finally getting to the gym for the first time in weeks, I dove back into Tipler and Mosca. I’m on to Part III now, and I covered the first two chapters: Temperature and the Kinetic Theory of Gases and Heat and the First Law of Thermodynamics. This is pretty familiar territory for me, since thermodynamics composed a large part of my Navy nuclear studies, but it’s also a somewhat tricky topic. Will I ever understand the equipartition theorem on a deep level? Ah, well, I shall have to be content with being semi-able to apply it for now.
Had a talk with my boyfriend this afternoon about whether I’m overdoing it or worrying too much about being prepared for school. I know he is a bit surprised I’m not relaxing more during my time off, but I think this is important. My fellow incoming students are all bright people (will admit I initially typed “kids” there), coming right out of undergrad, from prestigious universities. I was pretty good at physics back in my day, but the rust from the intervening years is very, very real. I want to be able to do quality research as soon as possible, and that means having the basics down, not struggling to remember the zeroth law of thermodynamics. I don’t think I will regret any of my self-study. Besides, I enjoy it!
Today’s fun “new” fact: The rms speed of hydrogen molecules is about 17% of the earth’s escape speed (11.2 km/s), which is (simplistically) why the atmosphere doesn’t retain hydrogen. The molecules eventually all just rocket off into space! This is a sort of duh fact, but one I hadn’t thought about in a while, and I think it is very cool. It’s also hugely relevant for me, as planetary atmospheres is a big component of the exoplanet field right now!
Photo by Cmglee / CC BY-SA 3.0
