In modern people’s mind, science like fundament physics and spirituality (or mysticism) like the Bible are contradictory to each other. From my experience of interacting with my physicist friends and colleagues here in Japan, I think this perception is correct. At least, most physicists aren’t interested in spirituality.

However, there is a very crucial exception. When studying Newtonian physics in high school, I was not satisfied with learning just from the textbook and went on browsing through Newton’s Principia. I was shocked when reading an essay, known as General Scholium, attached to respond some of the criticism to the first edition. There is a whole paragraph saying that one of the purpose of Principia is understanding Lord God:

During January to April in 2023, while studying quantum error correction in the textbook reading session of our research group, I discovered several wonderful resources other than Preskill’s notes. I list them below:

• Artur Ekert’s Introduction to Quantum Information on YouTube. I have watched the last part about quantum error correction and I think Ekert’s explanation is the most intuitive one. It is crystal clear. He can use a simple diagram and baby example to make a complicated idea transparent.
• Daniel Gottesman’s and Ben Yoshida’s Quantum Error Correction videos in Perimeter Institute. I think I just finished watching half of them. Gottesman’s exposition of this topic has a different style than Ekert. It is more mathematical, with theorems followed by proofs. I feel these two are good to be watched together. In last lecture by Ben Yoshida, he even explains a fair advanced topic of treating black hole information paradox using the quantum error correction as a tool.
• Daniel Gottesman’s Quantum Information videos in Perimeter Institute. I only watched the last video about quantum channel capacity as a complement to Preskill’s notes. I think Gottesman’s proof is more complete and detailed than Preskill’s notes. I benefited a lot from Gottesman.

Polyakov’s great show in modern classical dynamics

Apart from black hole physics, the other experience that makes my 2023’s physics journey unforgettable is Polyakov’s Modern Classical Physics course, along with various topics inspired by this course. Polyakov uses classical physics to thread several beautiful modern topics together. Here are several examples:

Traveling aboard: APS Marching Meeting and Quantum Connection summer school in Sweden

The first on-site APS (stands for American Physical Society) March Meeting after the pandemic occurred in Las Vegas. There is no way to miss this opportunity to visit this city, which appears in many movies. What’s more, one of my friends that I met when learning physics course online, a professional poker, Mark Weitzman, is in Las Vegas! He really helped me a lot during my self-study project from 2016 to 2019. It’s a great opportunity to meet him. I also got to meet my first professor in physics, Jim Freericks, during the meeting.

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.

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!