Epiphany

I've been studying thermodynamics the past couple weeks, since I have very little knowledge of that particular subject. I'm going through Maria's notes (she's a TA for thermo) and it's actually helping, even though I didn't start sitting in on the class until last week. And this is only because Jerry is teaching it. He's such a good teacher because he effectively brings the subject matter down to a level that people can understand.

But, I digress. My point is this. As I was copying the notes (I could have photocopied them, but I retain information better if I write it down), there was a lecture about the attractive forces between molecules. There was a short table listing different molecules (N2, O2, CO2, and H2O) and a value measuring the attractive forces between them. It turns out that H2O has a much larger attractive force than any of the other gases, and this is why H2O can change phase from vapor to liquid. I know this may not sound like much, and I'm sure other people knew this, but I didn't. (Or if I did, I didn't retain it.) It's just something I never really thought about, and to see it there made total sense to me. I had always just taken for granted that H2O could be in any phase, because that's what I've seen.

See, this is one of the things about grad school that sucks. (Yes, I know there are many, but I'm sticking around because I'm a masochist.) In the core classes, at least in the meteorology department, they don't focus on giving physical examples a lot of the time. The main focus is deriving equations, which is all well and good (I like equations, but I was a math major, so that's a given). But deriving equations just for the sake of deriving equations is not all that helpful. That's the problem I had with being a math major. In the upper-level classes we were proving things for the sake of proving them, and I didn't really see the point in that. Basically what I'm saying is that I need some sort of motivation as to why the equations are important. Physical examples help out so much.

Of course, it would also help if the profs realized that we all didn't come from a meteorological background, so they would keep going and going and expect us to follow what they're talking about. True, in our acceptance packets they recommend us reading a textbook on meteorology. And I didn't even buy that book because I was trying to save all the money I was earning to actually be able to move out here. (Isn't that a silly reason not to buy a textbook?) They also offer a intro to meteo course for new grads, which is somewhat helpful, but it's still cramming a BS in meteorology into one semester. So, we hit on topics very lightly and quickly.

My point in all this is that the department should highly encourage people to sit in on undergrad classes. That would have been so useful for me, because it's in undergrad classes that things are explained in physical terms as well as equations. But, anyway, I wanted to share my epiphany with the world, or at least the people who read my blog regularly.