Computational physics

Specifically, a course on computational physics which I am taking this semester. Sorry if you were expecting something different or something broader! Either way, given that I have a course viva tomorrow for which I need to clean up my codes and get together my results, I thought that I'd talk about it today. As part of the course so far, we've simulated classical (say rutherford scattering) and quantum scattering, learnt the verlet and velocity verlet algorithms to simulate molecular dynamics, learnt the metropolis-hastings sampling method to implement markov chain monte carlo techniques to simulate said molecular systems. Coming to an end, we're learning the entropic sampling method to implement monte carlo and using said method to measure the free energy of systems. And eventually, we will be taught parallel programming as well but as I've written before, it's pretty easy to do parallel processing in python so I implemented a rudimentary version. You can check all of the codes here, using the online nbviewer.

I always heard about monte carlo techniques and I've wanted to learn it for a while now. One thing I've come to realize over these 3 months is that I learn best when someone introduces me to the topic, instead of me having to learn the ropes all on my own. I've had to pick up python this way and I now feel that it would've been much faster had I used it as part of a course with people I could've bugged for doubts. Also, it's dawning on my that almost everyone in grad school writes code (duh! it took me so long? STUPID!) and that if i wanted to be better at it than the rest, I needed to do more courses, learn more techniques and practice more. Well, I intend to do a couple more computational courses next semester so with a good amount of practice, I might be able to say that I'm a bit better than the rest, at computational physics. Hey, I have to be better at something! I wouldn't be able to live with myself otherwise! :D

PS - I should start noting down the time it takes for me to write one of these blog posts. It might be interesting to see trends like how long it takes for me to write an article against it's length and if the time it takes for me to write an article increases or decreases with time. Interesting...

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