Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Work and more work

I foresee a busy time with work this weekend... like any other weekend in grad school so far. The things to do list looks like:

  1. Do limiting cases for the thermodynamics in the new formalism. More number crunching.
  2. Read, no, study a couple of review papers. See if there are any possible thesis topics.
  3. Homework.

I have been working through the field theory notes and find the whole business of Dirac spinors to be quite tedious. Everything is fine when you do a Wick rotation to make get a Spin(4,0) from a Spin(3,1) because with a Spin(4,0), you can pretend it has a tensor representation i.e. SU(2) x SU(2) and then use the familiar spin-1/2 formalism. Of course, when you have to go back and work with Spin(3,1), things become a little more complicated because the representation no longer be block diagonal with independent blocks and you have all the rules with the gamma matrices to ensure that you recover the correct Lie algebra and transformation properties for Spin(3,1), generators and all. Just everything is just about 2x2 representation about the homogeneous Lorentz group...

Researchwise, the 'oomph' value in my project has been largely exhausted after a couple of months. It is not likely to be of any use a thesis topic. I will probably have to ask for another project or think of one myself. Hence, I will have to go through the papers. Since there is no job waiting for Fox after getting a PhD, unlike the bonded sojourners from Buona Vista, I need to do a thesis with substance, a mother of all theses.

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