Saturday, December 22, 2012

Vinit's Confession

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 Dear Sir,

Just now I went through your today's blog "Dosage and Frequency". 

You have very truly mentioned what your typical student will write about Electrodynamics course. I would just like to add that I would have written the following about Quantum Mechanics course (You didn't teach us Electrodynamics!):

Quantum Mechanics - II  ---   Class notes (mine) + 16 problems (solutions checked by GPS)    -- GPS.

I must confess that I really never read any QM text book thoroughly in my life. I work in the area of particle accelerators, where you mostly depend on Classical Mechanics and Electrodynamics (with little bit of QM here and there). Therefore, I really never needed very high funda QM, and read small parts here and there from different text-books for fun only. For basics, I always relied on your notes (no text book). 

There was one incident, which I would like to share with you. During the final year at IIT, in Nuclear Physics course, we were supposed to read about the calculation of magnetic moment of deuteron described in Roy and Nigam. I was finding the derivation in Roy and Nigam very difficult to follow. I closed the book and tried to derive the stuff using the basics that I learnt in your course. And I could, on my own, get the result given in Roy and Nigam. Felt so happy! Who needed Roy and Nigam for that derivation now! There were couple of more instances later like that, which made me feel (may be falsely) that from your class notes, I have acquired at least a good working level knowledge of QM. 

Thank you!

Best regards,

Vinit.


(M. Sc. 1992, IIT KGP)

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 Dunique?

 "Two unique features of politics in 2012 were:

1......

2..... "


Page 2 DC, Friday 21, December 2012

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