I haven’t updated all week! But not because I haven’t been studying, dear readers. Never that! It’s just that I fell behind rather early on this week (Tuesday), and I kept telling myself I’d post when I caught up. But then I never caught up. At least, not until today! Had to devote some of my “weekend” time (as if I don’t have enough free time right now, but it’s nice to have designated days that I don’t stress myself out as much—plus I usually use the extra time for writing) to studying, but I finished my self-assigned studies for the week!
It was quite an interesting week, really. The Bob material ramped up really quickly and got very tough, but it’s all fascinating. I continued the section on stars, and I covered 4 chapters: The Classification of Stellar Spectra, Stellar Atmospheres, The Interiors of Stars, and The Sun. The chapter on atmospheres was a doozy and the one that got me behind on Tuesday. Really, these chapters had everything. Complicated math, analytical solutions, numerical solutions, searing temperatures, nuclear fusion. Super cool stuff. The proton-proton chains! I forgot that in astrophysics we just call everything that isn’t hydrogen or helium “metals”. Oxygen, carbon, nitrogen—all metals!
Speaking of complicated math, I had a couple chapters in Mathematical Methods this week as well. They covered Fourier series and integral transformations (primarily Fourier transforms, but also Laplace transforms). For some reason I was intimidated by the faint memory of Fourier series, but it actually ended up being relatively straightforward. I was able to follow along and work out the examples, and I only swore a couple times. Definitely useful material to review.
As if that weren’t enough, I also hit the Computation Physics book this week as well. I’m about halfway through the third chapter, which deals with graphing. This is totally new for me, as this type of visual coding wasn’t covered by Codecademy at all. It’s not super difficult, but the results are pretty awesome. I wrote a program in only a few lines that shows a diffraction pattern of circular waves! This type of thing is going to be super important for me in my research (I expect), so I’m glad to be getting a taste of it now. I’m starting to feel pretty comfortable in Python. I know it can (and will!) get a lot more complicated, but I’ve got the basics down well enough to be able to tackle the more complicated stuff.
So, all in all, it was a productive week for me! Now I shall take my shortened weekend and begin again on Monday. &9786;