Physics. Eh? Physics. Phyyyyyyyysics. Physics! Physics. Physics, physics, physics, physics, physics, physics, physics.

I hope one of you is getting all this down.

I spent much of this week going through various orientation activities¹. For the most part this was pretty generic information, the kind of thing most people should have already read on various web pages but which some might find comforting to hear in person.

But the information wasn't the real point, the real point was to give the new students a chance to meet each other and the rest of the department. It's been great! I've sort of hit it off with a few of the other incoming students (though whether we have anything in common beyond physics remains to be seen). The department secretary (fulfilling that title's usual role of "person who knows everyone and everything that's going on") introduced me to a fourth-year student who is doing exactly the kind of research I want to do. We talked quite a bit and at some point I'll definitely want to meet his advisor. And I spoke to a bunch of members of the faculty, including Mark Trodden (of Cosmic Variance fame) whose group I could also see myself working with.

There were also very nice short presentations of the major research areas, and there's lots of nifty stuff going on here! I never thought I'd be much interested in condensed matter/solid state stuff, which I always thought of as a kind of glorified electrical engineering (shudder) . The talk opened my eyes to the fact that it's really about a whole variety of interesting emergent properties — even the study of the formation of traffic jams is solid state physics! There's an introductory course this semester, but I can't take it due to a conflict.

Speaking of which, ( This semester I'll be taking )

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1. Having been oriented I can now be sure I'm not a klein bottle. Not that I thought I was.

Today I correctly applied symmetry principles to calculate the possible isospin values in pion production, as well as the relative probabilities of producing different kinds of Δ particles in pion-nucleon scattering.

Plus, there's a two day general relativity symposium coming up on Thursday and Friday that I'll be attending.

Conquest of the Ghost Pyramid.

Okay, it's actually "Conquest of the ghost pyramid of the superstring", but I like the shorter version better because it sounds like some kind of game for the Atari 2600.