Happy Monday! I didn’t sleep well last night, so I was a bit surprised that I woke up relatively early and ready to go. I guess I’m just too excited about studying!
Today I had the short chapter in Mathematical Methods that I didn’t get to last week. It dealt with normal modes. Due to the length and the subject matter (oscillations, we meet again!), I thought it would be easy. I was wrong. This was mostly more advanced-level matrix manipulation. I don’t find this intuitive at all, so when the text claims that this is an “easier” way of doing the math, I have to scoff. I know that it is, really, but to me it just doesn’t quite click. Still, I did get through the chapter. I really hope that I can get better with matrices. I’ve always had a knack for math and enjoyed it, so it doesn’t sit right to be struggling here!
The afternoon was devoted to diving into some physics Python programming. I made it about halfway through the chapter I was working on, and got to write up several neat little programs to do things like calculate a planetary orbit, the probabilities of reflection and transmission of a particle wave function, and so on. I wrote a lot of code, and I was pretty pleased with it. For the examples, I didn’t even need to follow along with the author’s coding, I just took the prompt and did it. Of course, this chapter is intended for people who have no programming experience, so it should be easy for me with at least the basics under my belt.