The SATisfying Physics of Phase Transitions
For the past few months, I’ve been thinking about the following equation.
For the past few months, I’ve been thinking about the following equation.
As a writer, I’ve spent a lot of time crafting sentences and paragraphs. Writing a sentence is easy. Writing a sentence that communicates the idea in your mind to another is much more challenging. The translation from mind to words to mind again is lossy.
If I ask you what comes to mind when you think of physics, what would you answer?
When I was an undergraduate, I did my best to stay away from a computer to do physics. I saw myself as a theorist, and in my head, a good theorist could get everything they wanted done with pencil and paper. I remember one particularly vivid time that I used a computer algebra system to calculate Riemann tensors for my research in gravitation theory, and I hated dealing with the complexity of the program. It wasn’t easy to work with, the answers were often garbled and not simplified, and it almost felt like I was wasting more time using a computer.