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Phys(ics)Geek
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"When something that's complex is easier to do than something that's real, you know you've reached advanced theoretical electrodynamics."
I don't have much time to write this one, as I've got to get back to the lab and finish some work... I'm bloody exhausted, I tells ya. It's week nine here at the 'bein and things are starting to get a wee hectic... for instance, Today, I have a relativity take-home midterm that I had to have done by noon. I'm going to get an A on it, I believe. Tomorrow at four I have an Advanced Electrodynamics problem set due, which includes a proof that you have to do *without* using complex notation. Yeah... it's electromagnetic waves, and I have to prove that you can write any EM wave as a combination of two separate waves (I believe using what I like to call Fourier's Trick, but that's just my thinking...). This is all fine and dandy, almost easy, even... save for one thing... I have to do it WITHOUT expressing the wavefunctions as being of the form:
f( z, t) = A * e ^ [ i * ( k * z - omega * t + delta ) ] (I'll replace that with a nice looking equation later, I'm too busy to fire up MathType. By the way: A is the real part of a constant complex amplitude, k is the wavenumber, omega is the angular frequency, delta is the phase, z is the position vector, and, of course, t is time.) Which sucks... Because now I have do all sorts of stuff with cosines and sines and argh!!! So I'll be looking up trig identities all night. As well as doing ACTUAL physics... But yeah... I really got to get going... Cheers... Feeling:
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