a new project

I want to earn my Masters degree. In fact, I want to earn my PhD. I'm having a hard time staying on task and doing the work to get there. I spent a little time studying for my written Candidacy exam tonight. I also spent some time writing. Like this blog, I have a target audience of one: myself. I am going to participate in a homegrown version on Nanowrimo. I say homegrown because it isn't a novel, I'm starting a day early, and I'm not guaranteed to write the 50,000 words. So far I have 983. Instead my goal for November is to write about my research every day. Either specifics about what I'm actually doing or generals about background and understanding. Hopefully this work can develop into a more technical document that will be my thesis, but in the spirit of Nanowrimo, I'm just trying to get going. A very boring excerpt:

A Brief Explanation of the Many-Body Problem:
Any given atom has at least one electron (if not you’ve got yourself an ion or a bare nucleus). The most basic atom is Hydrogen: one proton and one electron and some relatively simple mathematics. Hydrogen makes up most of the known universe (I’m ignoring dark matter and energy here) and understanding it goes a surprisingly long way. Unfortunately, go one element up on the Periodic Table to Helium, and you’ve got a nucleus and two electrons. I say unfortunate because adding that third particle doesn’t just make the math harder, it makes it impossible (literally, you have to make approximations and compare these to experiments and you never quite get it right). Most physicists just plain quit after Helium, the math is too hard and they hand the problem over to chemists.

Electrons interact with each other, they interact with the nucleus, and they interact with any other particle that happens to be around. If you’re not counting, that is a lot of interactions. Now imagine that you don’t just have one atom, you’ve got, say N of them. Each one of them has a nucleus and electrons. Oh my. Yep, the math just became really really complicated, and as I mentioned earlier, you can’t solve the equations. Density functional theory is a way of writing the problem so that a computer can make an approximate solution. Sometimes this is a good solution because it compares well with experiments. Sometimes it isn’t a good solution, but I'll get to that later.