Postdoctoral Fellowship in Thermal Transport or Phase Change Materials
Shandong University

See the full job description on jobRxiv: https://jobrxiv.org/job/shandong-university-27778-postdoctoral-fellowship-in-thermal-transport-or-phase-change-materials/

#computationalphysics #materialsscience #phasetransitions #thermaltransport #ScienceJobs #hiring #researc...
https://jobrxiv.org/job/shandong-university-27778-postdoctoral-fellowship-in-thermal-transport-or-phase-change-materials/?fsp_sid=9921

「本資料は原子核三者若手夏の学校 2025の原子核パート「Julia言語による原子核構造計算入門」での使用を目的として開発した資料です。」

https://sotayoshida.github.io/Lecture_SummerSchool2025/home.html

https://github.com/sotayoshida/pairinghamiltonians.jl

#Julia #Physics #NuclearPhysics #ComputationalPhysics #Hamiltonian

The Next Semester

There’s just a week to go before the next Semester at Maynooth University so I’ve been looking at my calendar for the weeks ahead. Actually, I won’t start teaching again until Tuesday 3rd February, because Monday 2nd February is a national holiday. As it turns out, however, I don’t have any lectures, labs or tutorials on Mondays anyway so I won’t be missing a session either on February 2nd or on May 4th, another holiday. I will have to miss one on Friday 3rd April (Good Friday), though.

The Timetable has given me two 9 o’clock lectures a week for the forthcoming Semester, one on Tuesdays and the other on Thursdays. I don’t think the students like 9am lectures very much, but I don’t mind them at all. I find it quite agreeable to have accomplished something concrete by 10am, which I don’t always do. This schedule might mean that I defer publishing papers at the Open Journal of Astrophysics on those days. I usually do this before breakfast, but I might not have time if I have to be on campus and ready to teach for 9am.

As usual, Semester 2 is a stop-start affair. We have six weeks until the Study Break, which includes the St Patrick’s Day holiday, then we’re back for two weeks (minus Good Friday) before another week off for Easter. We return on Monday April 13th to complete the Semester; the last lectures are on Friday 8th May and exams start a week later. This arrangement creates no problems for lecture-based teaching, but it takes some planning to organize labs and project deadlines around the breaks. I’ll have to think about that for my Computational Physics module.

A more serious issue for Computational Physics is how to deal with the use of Generative AI. I’ve written about this before, in general terms, but now it’s time to write down some specific rules for a specific module. A default position favoured by some in the Department is that students should not use GenAI at all. I think that would be silly. Graduates will definitely be using CoPilot or equivalent if they write code in the world outside university so we should teach them how to use it properly and effectively.

In particular, such methods usually produce a plausible answer, but how can a student be sure it is correct? It seems to me that we should place an emphasis on what steps a student has taken to check an answer, which of course they should do whether they used GenAI or did it themselves. If it’s a piece of code to do a numerical integration of a differential equation, for example, the student should test it using known analytic solutions to check it gets them right. If it’s the answer to a mathematical problem, one can check whether it does indeed solve the original equation (with the appropriate boundary conditions).

If anyone out there reading this blog has any advice to share, or even a link to their own Department’s policy on the use of GenAI in computational physics for me to copy adapt for use in Maynooth, I’d be very grateful!

(My backup plan is to ask ChatGPT to generate an appropriate policy…)

#ArtificialIntelligence #ChatGPT #ComputationalPhysics #Copilot #education #GenAI #generativeAI #theoreticalPhysics

An important piece of history:
#computationalphysics #womeninstem #research #science #history
👩‍🔬

https://physicsworld.com/a/the-forgotten-pioneers-of-computational-physics/

Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics

https://tgvaughan.github.io/sicm/toc.html

#HackerNews #StructureAndInterpretation #ClassicalMechanics #Physics #Education #ComputationalPhysics

#PhysicsFactlet
In its simplest form Monte-Carlo integration allows to estimate a area/volume with complicated boundaries by taking a number of samples and looking at which fraction fall inside the object of interest.

#ComputationalPhysics #Integration