Large Hardon Collider

[Psion]

You make it sound like most of what we learned in science didn't go against common sense at some point. <_<;

I find it interesting myself. I hope they do more testing, and others as well, instead of this being one of those potentially fascinating discoveries that fall by the wayside because it's too outlandish. If the experiment isn't flawed somewhere, and it's repeatable, we can figure out the whole "fucking DNA, how does it work" part after. If it turns out to be flawed, well, I guess all the biologists of the world can sleep easy for now.

[Kaylia]

You make it sound like most of what we learned in science didn't go against common sense at some point. <_<;

You don't seem to grasp the implication of this study, and how game changing it is for sciences.

It doesn't go against common sense because it's a groundbreaking discovery , it goes against common sense because it's unlikely that such interaction would have escaped us for so long. Molecular interactions are well understood and documented, and this result conflict big time with what we know from statisticals physics and molecular theories.

It's true that farfetched ideas in the past might have ended up true, but it's usually at the edge of what we know, not in the middle of a domain we understand relatively well.

No experiment can't be ignored, but one that shake the foundation of a century worth of physics need a little more than a single article published in a biology journal to be accepted

[Mizango]

So I guess they're shutting down afterall

Recalling a Fallen Star’s Legacy in High-Energy Particle Physics

Spoiler: show

The machine known as the Tevatron is four miles around. Bison graze nearby on the 6,800 acres of former farmland occupied by the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill. Occasionally, physicists run races around the top of it.
It was turned on in 1983 to the sound of protesters who worried that its high-energy collisions between protons and antiprotons could bring about the end of the world or perhaps the whole universe.

For the next three decades it reigned as a symbol of human curiosity and of American technological might, becoming the biggest, grandest, most violent physics experiment of its time, devouring a small city’s worth of electricity to collide subatomic particles with energies of up to a trillion electron volts apiece in an effort to retrieve forces and laws that prevailed during the Big Bang.

The world as a whole never did end, but for American physicists a small piece of it has now. Last Monday the Department of Energy, which runs Fermilab, as it is known, announced that despite last-minute appeals by physicists, the Tevatron will shut down as scheduled in September.

The news disappointed American physicists who had hoped that three more years of running might give them a glimpse of as yet unobserved phenomena like the Higgs boson, a storied particle said to imbue other particles with mass.

“It’s a shame to shut it down,” said Lisa Randall, a Harvard physicist, who says she thinks the physics community gave up too easily. Dr. Randall organized a bunch of some 40 theorists to write a letter to the Department of Energy last summer urging them to keep the machine running. A message on her new Twitter account last week broke the news of the decision to shut down the Tevatron.

That leaves the field of future discovery free for the Large Hadron Collider, which started up a year ago outside Geneva at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, and is now the world champion. The collider is 17 miles around and capable eventually, CERN says, of producing 7 trillion-electron-volt protons. Hobbled with bad electrical connections, it ran at half that energy in 2010.

“How are we going to feel if they find it at the LHC?” Dr. Randall said. “The Tevatron had the capacity to give us complementary information.”

This moment has been coming ever since 1993, when Congress canceled the Superconducting Supercollider, a physics machine in Texas that would have been the biggest, most powerful machine on the planet. CERN’s collider is expected to dominate physics for the next 20 years.

The impending death of the Tevatron adds to a gloomy time for American science, coming as it does just as NASA has announced that its flagship project, the James Webb Space Telescope, is $1.6 billion over budget and will be years late, knocking the pins out from under hopes of mounting a mission anytime soon to investigate the dark energy that is boosting the expansion of the universe.

Michael Turner, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago and vice president of the American Physical Society, said American scientists were struggling to adjust to a world in which Europe and Asia are attaining parity with the United States. “We are used to dominating in science,” Dr. Turner said. “We seem to be unable to make decisions, and instead continue to chase every opportunity, in the end doing nothing.”

For the last year the Tevatron and the CERN collider have been engaged in a race to discover, among other things, the Higgs. By all accounts the Tevatron, with a 20-year head start, was ahead. Moreover, CERN had been scheduled to shut down for a year in 2012 to fix their machine and bring it up to par. In response to the prospect of the Tevatron extending its run, CERN had been talking recently about postponing its own shutdown for a year.

But the squeeze is on science budgets, and the continuation of the Tevatron was not to be. “Unfortunately the current budgetary climate is very challenging and additional funding has not been identified,” William Brinkman, director of the office of science at the Department of Energy, said in a letter to the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel on Jan. 6.

The Tevatron will be remembered scientifically for the discovery of the top quark, the last missing part of the ensemble that makes up ordinary matter, in 1995, and a host of other intriguing results like the controversial discovery last summer of a particle that goes back and forth between being itself and its evil-twin antiparticle a little faster in one direction than the other, providing a possible clue to why the universe is now made of matter and not antimatter.

Physicists will be analyzing and studying the data from its two big detectors, DZero and the Collider Detector at Fermilab, CDF, for years.

It will also be remembered as a fount of technological development whose influence spread far beyond high-energy physics. The development, in partnership with industry, of superconducting magnets for Fermilab’s machine, said Young-Kee Kim, deputy director of the lab, helped pave the way for cheap M.R.I. machines for hospitals.

Although it is the end for the Tevatron, it is not the end for Fermilab, which helped build the Large Hadron Collider and which hosts a control room for one of that accelerator’s gigantic particle detectors, and is also home to a thriving cosmology program. The lab has bet its long-term future on a new-generation accelerator program called Project X which would produce intense proton beams for producing and scrutinizing other particles like neutrinos.

Robert Roser, a Fermilab physicist, said, “I always knew it would be a long shot to run three additional years.” He credited the competition with Fermilab with spurring on the Europeans.

“I believe they made machine progress more rapidly than they would have had we not been part of the landscape in the coming years,” Dr. Roser wrote in an e-mail message. He and others pointed out that the machines were complementary — the Tevatron collides protons and their opposites, antiprotrons, while the CERN collider bangs together protons and thus produces slightly different fireballs with different mixtures of particles and radiation coming out of them. Without the Tevatron’s data, Dr. Roser said, it would take the CERN longer to confirm the Higgs when and if they finally find it.

Physicists are trained to be unsentimental about facts, theories and machines, but the rest of us are not obliged to be so unsentimental about the Tevatron and what it meant for American science. Robert Wilson, Fermilab’s founding director, was an artist as well as physicist, and he took pains to ensure that the lab’s physical presence was as elegant as the ideas it was built to explore. The Tevatron was buried underground, to shield the world from the radiation of its beams, but Dr. Wilson had a circular berm built over it, so that the ring would be visible. From high in the sky the berm and the roads that circle it make a pattern that might intrigue an alien civilization that had sufficiently acute vision and lure them in.

Some day alien archaeologists could excavate the tunnel in which giant machines replayed the Big Bang and wonder what happened to the people who built it, and what they thought about their place in the universe.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/sc...ider.html?_r=2

RIP, Fermilab

Nooooooooo This is the first im hearing of this.

You don't seem to grasp the implication of this study, and how game changing it is for sciences.

It doesn't go against common sense because it's a groundbreaking , it goes against common sense because it's unlikely that such interaction would have escaped us for so long. Molecular interactions are very well understood and documented...trying to fit something like this just seem impossible.

Preach!

[Woozie]

So now I have another reason to hate engineers.

I signed up for Advanced Linear Algebra this semester, thinking I was going to to get to study cool stuff like functional spaces, bilinear forms, and stuff like that (heck, there's even a special relativity section in the book). Turns out, graduate engineers can register for this class without taking regular Linear Algebra. Instead of doing what I would do as a professor and say "screw you, I'm teaching advanced stuff anyways", he's going to cater to the engineers and go over everything that would have learned in linear algebra... which makes this class incredibly boring for the math majors (who have already taken linear algebra). We're going at the same rate as linear algebra, which means we probably wont even cover anything that the math majors don't already know.

I'd drop this if it wasn't already the third week of class (at which point classes become a pain to add and drop. And since this or Number Theory is required, I may as well finish up a requirement).

[Kaylia]

Try talking to your teacher about the issue, or bring it indirectly if you think its more appropriate (ie: ask when you will see the section on relativity or something). When you sign up for a class, the teachers are suposed to teach you the contents you signed up for, and they know that.

[Woozie]

I did talk to him. That's how I figured out about the engineers signing up without having taken Linear Algebra. His best suggestion was to sign up for the (non-existent) functional analysis class.

[Kaylia]

That's kinda lame. Every teacher I had found some sort of compromise in that kind of situation (ie: see everything, but easy exam).

Picking a fight with your teacher isnt worth it, but I would try talking to another teacher you trust from the same department..maybe he has better advice.

[Woozie]

I'm pretty sure that no one I talk to will do a thing about it. And plus, I don't want to go talking to other professors and end up offending this professor when he finds out. He seems like a pretty cool guy and plus I'll probably have him again at some point next year (in an all math majors class, so this issue wont arise again). I'm already somewhat familiar with some of the cool stuff in the end of the book, so I could probably learn it on my own (I'll have time since I wont be spending much on this class). Plus, he's shown that he's willing to help me out a bit on the more advanced stuff. I asked him a question in class on Friday and he came to my job that afternoon to explain it to me.

It's just frustrating to have to sit through class for 50 minutes and "learn" about vector spaces and basis and other stuff anyone in the class should already know. It will probably be less boring when my girlfriend gets her phone back (long story) and I can use those 50 minutes for texting.

[Ferion]

Are all your classes only 50 minutes? Or is my school weird that it has either class twice a week for 80 minutes each or once a week for three hours. This isn't including classes with recitation or labs.

But yeah, it sounds like the best option is to teach yourself the material, especially if the professor is willing to help you with any questions you have.

[Mizango]

That's kinda lame. Every teacher I had found some sort of compromise in that kind of situation (ie: see everything, but easy exam).

Picking a fight with your teacher isnt worth it, but I would try talking to another teacher you trust from the same department..maybe he has better advice.

^ This. Man that sucks, I know thats irritating.

[Woozie]

Are all your classes only 50 minutes? Or is my school weird that it has either class twice a week for 80 minutes each or once a week for three hours. This isn't including classes with recitation or labs.

But yeah, it sounds like the best option is to teach yourself the material, especially if the professor is willing to help you with any questions you have.

MWF 50 minutes
T Th 75 minutes (for a 3 credit hour class)

I HATE T Th classes. I can't sit and focus for that long. I start to go insane about 30 minutes into any class. But on MWF, at least the insanity only lasts about 20 minutes.

I'm taking Advanced PDE's II this semester, which is really important because my thesis is going to be PDE's related (and my thesis advisor teaches the class). But this class happens to fall on T Th, and I'm honestly considering restarting my meds and therapy for my learning disabilities just so I can stay in this class and actually learn from it. He got really irritated when I never showed up or took notes for Real Analysis, and that was a MWF class (which I'm less likely to skip). So skipping this isn't really an option if I want to graduate. He's really stressing that I *have* to take notes (even though I told him about my learning disabilities). I just hate meds because they ruin my sleep.

Some of my classmates have said I should just try to *look like* I'm taking notes, but I've come to realize that I can't even fake it. After about 30~40 minutes it's pretty obvious to anyone who looks at me that I'm not taking notes or paying attention at all.

[Woozie]

There was an interesting article on NewScientist today about interpretations of quantum mechanics. There's absolutely nothing new in this article that you (we) physics nerds don't already know, so if you're familiar with the interpretations already, I'd say don't bother reading it unless you feel like it. I'm mainly posting this for people who are interested in physics but aren't as familiar with it.

Quantum reality: The many meanings of life

Spoiler: show

Quantum theory is a scientific masterpiece – but physicists still aren't sure what to make of it

A CENTURY, it seems, is not enough. One hundred years ago this year, the first world physics conference took place in Brussels, Belgium. The topic under discussion was how to deal with the strange new quantum theory and whether it would ever be possible to marry it to our everyday experience, leaving us with one coherent description of the world.

It is a question physicists are still wrestling with today. Quantum particles such as atoms and molecules have an uncanny ability to appear in two places at once, spin clockwise and anticlockwise at the same time, or instantaneously influence each other when they are half a universe apart. The thing is, we are made of atoms and molecules, and we can't do any of that. Why? "At what point does quantum mechanics cease to apply?" asks Harvey Brown, a philosopher of science at the University of Oxford.

Although an answer has yet to emerge, the struggle to come up with one is proving to be its own reward. It has, for instance, given birth to the new field of quantum information that has gained the attention of high-tech industries and government spies. It is giving us a new angle of attack on the problem of finding the ultimate theory of physics, and it might even tell us where the universe came from. Not bad for a pursuit that a quantum cynic - one Albert Einstein - dismissed as a "gentle pillow" that lulls good physicists to sleep.

Unfortunately for Einstein quantum theory has turned out to be a masterpiece. No experiment has ever disagreed with its predictions, and we can be confident that it is a good way to describe how the universe works on the smallest scales. Which leaves us with only one problem: what does it mean?

Physicists try to answer this with "interpretations" - philosophical speculations, fully compliant with experiments, of what lies beneath quantum theory. "There is a zoo of interpretations," says Vlatko Vedral, who divides his time between the University of Oxford and the Centre for Quantum Technologies in Singapore.

No other theory in science has so many different ways of looking at it. How so? And will any one win out over the others?

Take what is now known as the Copenhagen interpretation, for example, introduced by the Danish physicist Niels Bohr. It says that any attempt to talk about an electron's location within an atom, for instance, is meaningless without making a measurement of it. Only when we interact with an electron by trying to observe it with a non-quantum, or "classical", device does it take on any attribute that we would call a physical property and therefore become part of reality.

Then there is the "many worlds" interpretation, where quantum strangeness is explained by everything having multiple existences in myriad parallel universes. Or you might prefer the de Broglie-Bohm interpretation, where quantum theory is considered incomplete: we are lacking some hidden properties that, if we knew them, would make sense of everything.

There are plenty more, such as the Ghirardi-Rimini-Weber interpretation, the transactional interpretation (which has particles travelling backwards in time), Roger Penrose's gravity-induced collapse interpretation, the modal interpretation... in the last 100 years, the quantum zoo has become a crowded and noisy place (see diagram).

For all the hustle and bustle, though, there are only a few interpretations that seem to matter to most physicists.
Wonderful Copenhagen

The most popular of all is Bohr's Copenhagen interpretation. Its popularity is largely due to the fact that physicists don't, by and large, want to trouble themselves with philosophy. Questions over what, exactly, constitutes a measurement, or why it might induce a change in the fabric of reality, can be ignored in favour of simply getting a useful answer from quantum theory.

That is why unquestioning use of the Copenhagen interpretation is sometimes known as the "shut up and calculate" interpretation. "Given that most physicists just want to do calculations and apply their results, the majority of them are in the shut up and calculate group," Vedral says.

This approach has a couple of downsides, though. First, it is never going to teach us anything about the fundamental nature of reality. That requires a willingness to look for places where quantum theory might fail, rather than where it succeeds (New Scientist, 26 June 2010, p 34). "If there is going to be some new theory, I don't think it's going to come from solid state physics, where the majority of physicists work," says Vedral.

Second, working in a self-imposed box also means that new applications of quantum theory are unlikely to emerge. The many perspectives we can take on quantum mechanics can be the catalyst for new ideas. "If you're solving different problems, it's useful to be able to think in terms of different interpretations," Vedral says.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the field of quantum information. "This field wouldn't even exist if people hadn't worried about the foundations of quantum physics," says Anton Zeilinger of the University of Vienna in Austria.

At the heart of this field is the phenomenon of entanglement, where the information about the properties of a set of quantum particles becomes shared between all of them. The result is what Einstein famously termed "spooky action at a distance": measuring a property of one particle will instantaneously affect the properties of its entangled partners, no matter how far apart they are.

When first spotted in the equations of quantum theory, entanglement seemed such a weird idea that the Irish physicist John Bell created a thought experiment to show that it couldn't possibly manifest itself in the real world. When it became possible to do the experiment, it proved Bell wrong and told physicists a great deal about the subtleties of quantum measurement. It also created the foundations of quantum computing, where a single measurement could give you the answer to thousands, perhaps millions, of calculations done in parallel by quantum particles, and quantum cryptography, which protects information by exploiting the very nature of quantum measurement.

Both of these technologies have, understandably, attracted the attention of governments and industry keen to possess the best technologies - and to prevent them falling into the wrong hands.

Physicists, however, are actually more interested in what these phenomena tell us about the nature of reality. One implication of quantum information experiments seems to be that information held in quantum particles lies at the root of reality.

Adherents of the Copenhagen interpretation, such as Zeilinger, see quantum systems as carriers of information, and measurement using classical apparatus as nothing special: it's just a way of registering change in the information content of the system. "Measurement updates the information," Zeilinger says. This new focus on information as a fundamental component of reality has also led some to suggest that the universe itself is a vast quantum computer.

However, for all the strides taken as a result of the Copenhagen interpretation, there are plenty of physicists who would like to see the back of it. That is largely because it requires what seems like an artificial distinction between tiny quantum systems and the classical apparatus or observers that perform the measurement on them.

Vedral, for instance, has been probing the role of quantum mechanics in biology: various processes and mechanisms in the cell are quantum at heart, as are photosynthesis and radiation-sensing systems (New Scientist, 27 November, p 42). "We are discovering that more and more of the world can be described quantum mechanically - I don't think there is a hard boundary between quantum and classical," he says.

Considering the nature of things on the scale of the universe has also provided Copenhagen's critics with ammunition. If the process of measurement by a classical observer is fundamental to creating the reality we observe, what performed the observations that brought the contents of the universe into existence? "You really need to have an observer outside the system to make sense - but there's nothing outside the universe by definition," says Brown.

That's why, Brown says, cosmologists now tend to be more sympathetic to an interpretation created in the late 1950s by Princeton University physicist Hugh Everett. His "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics says that reality is not bound to a concept of measurement.

Instead, the myriad different possibilities inherent in a quantum system each manifest in their own universe. David Deutsch, a physicist at the University of Oxford and the person who drew up the blueprint for the first quantum computer, says he can now only think of the computer's operation in terms of these multiple universes. To him, no other interpretation makes sense.

Not that many worlds is without its critics - far from it. Tim Maudlin, a philosopher of science based at Rutgers University in New Jersey, applauds its attempt to demote measurement from the status of a special process. At the same time, though, he is not convinced that many worlds provides a good framework for explaining why some quantum outcomes are more probable than others.

When quantum theory predicts that one outcome of a measurement is 10 times more probable than another, repeated experiments have always borne that out. According to Maudlin, many worlds says all possible outcomes will occur, given the multiplicity of worlds, but doesn't explain why observers still see the most probable outcome. "There's a very deep problem here," he says.

Deutsch says these issues have been resolved in the last year or so. "The way that Everett dealt with probabilities was deficient, but over the years many-worlds theorists have been picking away at this - and we have solved it," he says.

However Deutsch's argument is abstruse and his claim has yet to convince everyone. Even more difficult to answer is what proponents of many worlds call the "incredulous stare objection". The obvious implication of many worlds is that there are multiple copies of you, for instance - and that Elvis is still performing in Vegas in another universe. Few people can stomach this idea.

Persistence will be the only solution here, Brown reckons. "There is a widespread reluctance to accept the multiplicity of yourself and others," he says. "But it's just a question of getting used to it."

Deutsch thinks this will happen when technology starts to use the quantum world's stranger sides. Once we have quantum computers that perform tasks by being in many states at the same time, we will not be able to think of these worlds as anything other than physically real. "It will be very difficult to maintain the idea that this is just a manner of speaking," Deutsch says.

He and Brown both claim that many worlds is already gaining traction among cosmologists. Arguments from string theory, cosmology and observational astronomy have led some cosmologists to suggest we live in one of many universes. Last year, Anthony Aguirre of the University of California, Santa Cruz, Max Tegmark of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and David Layzer of Harvard University laid out a scheme that ties together ideas from cosmology and many worlds (New Scientist, 28 August 2010, p 6).

But many worlds is not the only interpretation laying claim to cosmologists' attention. In 2008, Anthony Valentini of Imperial College London suggested that the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) that has filled space since just after the big bang might support the de Broglie-Bohm interpretation. In this scheme, quantum particles possess as yet undiscovered properties dubbed hidden variables.

The idea behind this interpretation is that taking these hidden variables into account would explain the strange behaviours of the quantum world, which would leave an imprint on detailed maps of the CMB. Valentini says that hidden variables could provide a closer match with the observed CMB structure than standard quantum mechanics does.

Though it is a nice idea, as yet there is no conclusive evidence that he might be onto something. What's more, if something unexpected does turn up in the CMB, it won't be proof of Valentini's hypothesis, Vedral reckons: any of the interpretations could claim that the conditions of the early universe would lead to unexpected results.

"We're stuck in a situation where we probably won't ever be able to decide experimentally between Everett and de Broglie-Bohm," Brown admits. But, he adds, that is no reason for pessimism. "I think there has been significant progress. A lot of people say we can't do anything because of a lack of a crucial differentiating experiment but it is definitely the case that some interpretations are better than others."

For now, Brown, Deutsch and Zeilinger are refusing to relinquish their favourite views of quantum mechanics. Zeilinger is happy, though, that the debate about what quantum theory means shows no sign of going away.

Vedral agrees. Although he puts himself "in the many worlds club", which interpretation you choose to follow is largely a matter of taste, he reckons. "In most of these cases you can't discriminate experimentally, so you really just have to follow your instincts."

The idea that physicists wander round the quantum zoo, choosing a favourite creature on a whim might seem rather unscientific, but it hasn't done us any harm so far.

Quantum theory has transformed the world through its spin-offs - the transistor and the laser, for example - and there may be more to come. Having different interpretations to follow gives physicists ideas for doing experiments in different ways. If history is anything to go by, keeping an open mind about what quantum theory means might yet open up another new field of physics, Vedral says. "Now that really would be exciting."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...html?full=true

[Kaylia]

Reading more interpretation of Quantum mechanics can't hurt, I'm not sure I will ever grasp it properly.

[Max™]

Wow, dunno if anyone here is into pure number theory much, but this is one hell of a find: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0120090950.htm

ScienceDaily (Jan. 24, 2011) — For centuries, some of the greatest names in math have tried to make sense of partition numbers, the basis for adding and counting. Many mathematicians added major pieces to the puzzle, but all of them fell short of a full theory to explain partitions. Instead, their work raised more questions about this fundamental area of math.

...

A eureka moment happened in September, when Ono and Zach Kent were hiking to Tallulah Falls in northern Georgia. As they walked through the woods, noticing patterns in clumps of trees, Ono and Kent began thinking about what it would be like to "walk" through partition numbers.
"We were standing on some huge rocks, where we could see out over this valley and hear the falls, when we realized partition numbers are fractal," Ono says. "We both just started laughing."
The term fractal was invented in 1980 by Benoit Mandelbrot, to describe what seem like irregularities in the geometry of natural forms. The more a viewer zooms into "rough" natural forms, the clearer it becomes that they actually consist of repeating patterns. Not only are fractals beautiful, they have immense practical value in fields as diverse as art to medicine.
Their hike sparked a theory that reveals a new class of fractals, one that dispensed with the problem of infinity. "It's as though we no longer needed to see all the stars in the universe, because the pattern that keeps repeating forever can be seen on a three-mile walk to Tallulah Falls," Ono says.
Ramanujan's congruences are explained by their fractal theory. The team also demonstrated that the divisibility properties of partition numbers are "fractal" for every prime. "The sequences are all eventually periodic, and they repeat themselves over and over at precise intervals," Ono says. "It's like zooming in on the Mandelbrot set," he adds, referring to the most famous fractal of them all.

"We found a function, that we call P, that is like a magical oracle," Ono says. "I can take any number, plug it into P, and instantly calculate the partitions of that number. P does not return gruesome numbers with infinitely many decimal places. It's the finite, algebraic formula that we have all been looking for."

http://www.aimath.org/news/partition...m-kent-ono.pdf

[Max™]

http://www.valdostamuseum.org/hamsmith/MatrixCode.gif

[Max™]

"Dude, check this shit out, if you input this p-adic string, it spits out an infinite array of seemingly randomly constructed values, which actually have an underlying fractal structure. I bet if any sentients in this simulation tried to figure it out, it would take em thousands of cycles!"

[Eliseos]

MWF 50 minutes
T Th 75 minutes (for a 3 credit hour class)

I HATE T Th classes. I can't sit and focus for that long. I start to go insane about 30 minutes into any class. But on MWF, at least the insanity only lasts about 20 minutes.

Ugh, I just finished my first Tuesday for this semester. My school schedules the same as you, and I believe South Carolina did as well. I have two 75 minute classes and a 3 hour lab today, and on Thursdays I have the same two 75 minute classes and two 2 hour labs. Do not like.

And depending on the class, I can usually make it to the 50-60 minute mark before I start losing focus (so MWF classes are fine, usually, and TR classes are not, usually). It all depends on the teacher though, last semester I was near comatose within 20 minutes of the class starting.

[Kaylia]

Did they post the actual formula that generate the partition number?

[Max™]

It's in here, but doesn't paste cleanly due to some settings I had changed.
http://www.aimath.org/news/partition...m-kent-ono.pdf

[Mizango]

Ugh, I just finished my first Tuesday for this semester. My school schedules the same as you, and I believe South Carolina did as well.

Yes, USC does. See fellas, this will be a trivia question in the future. Eli and I are both Gamecocks! Team hadron goooo

Yes, there will be a test on this.