Update Chunk / Mostly Ranting

Here's something I wrote about KELROF for the Tech
Also my photos
and Mike's Photos

KELROF was amazing. Everything fell into place perfectly. I couldn't have imagined a better series of performances from our guys, or a cooler bunch of people to suffer with.

Now that it's over, I'm having a hard time training seriously. School is just kicking my butt. I've gotten out there and run easy a few times, but I don't have the mental energy to divide between hard, consistent studying and trying to focus on three straight weeks of sharpening/peaking. The stress of trying to graduate just doesn't go well with peak athletic performance. So I'm not worrying about it. I'm putting Jim Bush on ice. I'm a slow-heat kind of guy at that meet, anyway. I still want to run, but there are priorities.

On the one hand, I know that really all I need to do is just turn in anything. I really doubt the profs will make me stay another year. But relying on that pity-pass phenomenon is too fitting an end to my entire Caltech education. When I look back at it, I actually have learned an awful lot of physics. When I'm presented with a problem in the real world, I have some idea how to understand it to order of magnitude right off the bat, and know the general idea behind how I would start researching it if I wanted to do a good job. It's the morass of details and technicalities that fill up the problem sets that I'm pissed off about. The problem is the profs need some way to differentiate the students, so they choose problems not for their instructive value or the physical insight they grant, and not for their innate interest or applicability to physical research, but for their technical difficulty. If you know everything forwards and backwards, you shoot through those details to the heart of the problem. If you know everything forwards only and not backwards, you can wade through. Finally, if you know everything in outline but don't really know it forwards, you can say a thing or two about the problem but can't really solve it. Right now, I know the E&M stuff forwards but not backwards, and the QM stuff in vague outline. Still, vague outline is a significant improvement.

It seems there's three or four physics majors (out of twenty) in each class who can actually handle Caltech. They come in two types - brilliant (future eminent physicists) and extremely hard-working (future competent physicists). The rest are sort of getting dragged along for the ride, giving answers that satisfy the professors and TA's, picking up a bit of stuff here and there, but mostly it's a process of being tethered behind a fast-moving vehicle and just fighting the keep your legs underneath you as it pulls you along.

I frequently find myself distracted from the "advanced undergraduate" studies, and going back on a whim to examine the basic stuff (i.e. what if we define the natural logarithm by *this* property instead of *that* one, now how do you show the two are equivalent?, or, how do we justify this theorem we always use on the commutativity of partial derivatives?, or, is it just coincidence that the cross product can be written as a determinant, and how does this generalize to higher dimensions?, or, how can I derive the vector derivatives in curvilinear coordinates based solely on their physical interpretations?, etc). I know all that stuff forwards, and over the past year I've been learning bit by bit of it backwards as well. This is an enjoyable process for me. When you understand something in a superficial way, it becomes a bit of knowledge stored on a shelf somewhere in your brain, hopefully in a prominent-enough location that you can pull it down when someone asks you to. But when you understand something in four or five different ways, you get the entire picture. It comes down off the shelf and gets incorporated into you. It fits in neatly with all the rest of your knowledge. You can wield it like a tool that's become an extension of your body. But instead of violin bow extending your hand and arm, it's Fourier series extending your understanding of physical resonance, or vector calculus extending your understanding of 3-dimensional geometry. I'm not allowed to do that though. There isn't enough leeway, isn't enough time, to go through and master that steps bit by bit so that the more advanced material, when you come to it, grows up naturally as an extension of what you already know, or as a necessary and logical outgrowth in a new direction. Instead, it's frequently a strange, unconnected, and confusing formalism floating out there and demanding to be used on the next set.

I think that the professors, who have been using their mathematical tools as aids to their physical intuition for decades, tend to forget that we're not yet as competent. We can't follow their lucid explanations and clever formulations in real time during lecture, even though we can, with considerable effort, answer their questions correctly on the problem sets. It's like a college orchestra, though it may sound technically proficient, still can't interpret the subtlety in cues from Herbert von Karajan.

So what I want to do is to finish the degree, understanding the best I'm able, and then to explore things on my own terms, and at my own pace. My pace is, unfortunately, not genius pace. But not-genius pace is just fine for someone who delights in the little bits of understanding they chance upon, treasures them one by one, and over time builds an ever-more coherent, ever-more elegant model of reality.