Physics 410 Fall 2005: Computational Physics: Student Project
Highlights
One of the absolutely best things
about teaching this course is grading the term projects, and this year
was no exception. In the table below are links to online
material from 5 of the best of this year's typically excellent crop,
primarily mpegs of solutions of time dependent PDEs in 1- or
2- spatial dimensions, or particle motion in 3 dimensions.
It is also interesting to note the profound impact that the
still-inexorable advance of computing technology has had on this
course. Compare term projects from the Fall 1996 offering of Physics 329
at UT Austin, where the state of the art had Alan Chiang (who left physics
for medicine, I believe, following the completion of his degree at UT)
solving the 1-d Schrodinger equation with a few interesting and
illuminating potentials, and making some MPEGs, such as this one of tunneling, with
software which, at that time, only ran on Silicon Graphics
"workstations" that tended to cost $30,000 (US!) or more.
Now, as the table below makes manifest, the "bar" in this course is
markedly higher, and top grades are reserved for those solving PDEs in
two- or
three-spatial dimensions as well as time. The numerical methods
haven't changed. Students haven't gotten (much) smarter. The
physics is the same. But, even with only a single processor and,
more importantly, with the appropriate visualization tools, the
numerical analysis of 2+1 PDEs is now within the reach of an "average"
undergraduate
research student in Physics & Astronomy/Astrophsyics (a.k.a
"rookie"). Such was NOT the case back in 1995.