Where to learn entry-level particle physics? Like most people, I have been hearing about words like “quarks, hadrons, leptons” since junior high school. However, I have never known the next step for learning more about them. The talk by David Gross during a summer school in Sweden last summer completely aroused interest in this subject.

During the lunar new year season, which was early February this year, I found time to dive into this subject a little. I want to first get an overview of this subject, focusing on building a physical picture and intuitive feelings, avoiding technical details as much as possible. Therefore, I started exploring all kinds of textbooks and videos to searchfor what I want.

I learned how to build a simple personal webpage using Hugo and deploy it on GitHub today. I must say it is not the simplest way to build your own personal website. In order to do this, you should be comforable with

• basic coding process and
• command line: for Mac it is terminal application, for windows, it is PowerShell

Why? The whole process isn’t through graphic interface through clicking and dragging. Instead, we rely heavily on create and editing files to modify and add contents to our webpage.

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I was trained to be a structural engineer but I want to be a theoretical physicist.

I was major in Japanese when I was a freshman in 2013. It was exciting and happy to study with so many young girls together: there are about 50 students who were major in Japanese but only five fellows! For a boy focusing on science side in high school in China, he had hardly seen over 10 girls during his whole high school life. Such a situation could not be better! Sadly, the boy read too many science popular books and was more curious about peculiar quantum mechanics, or even string theory at that time, so he decided to change his major. He first did some research on physics major in his university, but it turned out the people in the physics department look nothing like the characters in his book: Niels Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli, Richard Feynman, Albert Einstein, etc. As a result, he had to take the second best and went to civil engineering major, hoping he could meet more geek-like people there, since it was (and still is) the department with the most eminent professors and students in the country. He started his undergraduate training in structure engineering in 2014.

Here are a few things that I want to achieve in 2019.

Non-physics

I hope I can finish writing up my master thesis before September. The plan is to finish the first draft before mid July, and working on its revision starting from mid August.

About Physics

I’m so happy that The University of Tokyo (UTokyo) gives me one graduate school offer, so I can start my physics journey! Before attending UTokyo in September this year, I still need to learn more physics on my own. Here are my plans for first half year:

I learned a lot of physics in 2018, and here is a summary!

First Half the Year

In January, I finished 8.04x, Quantum Mechanics an online course provided by MITx and got perfect grades, 92, 94, and 88 for three exams. 8.04x was lectured by Professor Barton Zwiebach, whose doctoral advisor is Murray Gell-mann. This course introduced basic concepts of Quantum Mechanics and did standard 1-D potential examples, such as square wells, Dirac-delta potential and harmonic oscillators, along with several important theorems for 1-D potential. Besides, it gave a detailed treatment on scattering states in 1-D, covering topics like time delay, Levinson’s theorem and resonance. The course ended with central potential and Hydrogen Atom. It was a challenging but rewarding course, and of course, interesting! What makes this course stand out among all other online courses is its active discussion forum. I met lots of interesting physics and math geeks there, Mark, Jolyon, Jim, BlueFlow and Jonathan, and the discussion about physics with them made my learn experience vivid and lovely (Actually, I read their discussions in forum most of the time). Later in September 2018, Jim offered me an unexpected research experience, which was the first time I worked with a real physicist!