SHO, DHO and a week filled with popular talks

Since I learnt how to use ipywidgets to make small visualizations, I've wanted to make a model of simple and damped harmonic oscillators, using euler's or runge-kutta methods to solve the second order differential equation. And I finally make them, here and here.

Otherwise, it's been a week filled with popular science talks. I attended a talk on tuesday on the landau theory describing fermi liquids. On wednesday, there was a talk on light that twists inside optical fibers, followed by a talk on particle physics and the Belle detector in Japan. The first talk was about modes of polarization and the methods to be able to generate vortex beams in fibers. He then talked about how vortex modes can be used advance communication technologies. In the following talk on high energy physics, the speaker talked about how the BELLE detector upgrade will help in understanding the CP violation, to study dark matter and how the new instrument is a huge upgrade on it's predecessor.

And today, there were two talks, one on Seismology of Sun and Stars and the second by Viswanathan Anand. The first talk was on the study of the sun's interior and the use of acoustic waves to do so, how studying the intensity of the surface of the sun at various scales helps in understanding convection, which in turn helps understand the underlying magnetic structure of the sun. He talked about how Kepler has contributed to astroseismology and how the upcoming missions, PLATO and Gaia are expected to take the field to new heights. And finally, Viswanathan Anand talked about how he got introduced to Chess, his experiences from his early professional life, his games and in general, playing Chess for a living. Filled with interesting anecdotes from his past, it was a talk that showed how practice and perseverance are what really matter in life, just being smart isn't of much use.

I shall get back to practicing problems on general relativity...

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