Statisical and Solid State Physics

Well it's nearly the end of SM358 unfortunately the open university has no where else to go as far as quantum physics is concerned. A next logical step is Statistical Physics and Solid State Physics A search through the internet has yielded these two courses which seem to give a good over view of the subject and are based on courses given to those in their third year at Oxford and Cambridge whats more they have problem sheets associated with them


Statistical Physics

http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/tong/statphys.html

Solid State Physics

http://www-thphys.physics.ox.ac.uk/people/SteveSimon/condmat2013/condmat.html

If any one is interested in forming a study group to work through these courses after the exams could they please let me know. Obviously we would have to share any solutions amongst our selves as if they were published on the internet then the authors might well restrict access to the lecture notes.

Two suitable textbooks to accompany both might be

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Concepts-Thermal-Physics-Stephen-Blundell/dp/0199562105

and by the author of the solid state course himself (and honour would suggest the least we could do is buy his book)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Oxford-Solid-State-Basics/dp/0199680779/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1376838763&sr=1-1&keywords=Simon+Solid+State+physics

I have also been looking at the diffraction theory behind the discovery of DNA it really is quite clever and I hope to write up a paper which covers the theory and goes through the actual calculations. Watch this space

Coursera

Ok so there is an alternative to the OU which I’m going to use to supplement my current OU studies. I’m sure most people reading this blog will have heard of Coursera which is a free on-line set of courses provided by mainly American Universities. It’s like being a kid in a sweet shop. The courses are short.

I’m doing a) Mathematical Philosophy whiich started last week and I’m grateful for Gavin who pointed this out to me in a comment he made on the last post

https://class.coursera.org/mathphil-001/wiki/view?page=syllabus

b) Introduction to Logic which starts in September and should hopefully complement the Logic part of M381 https://www.coursera.org/#course/intrologic?utm_classid=971129&utm_nottype=class.welcome.before&utm_notid=-1&utm_linknum=1

c) Finally (for now) Analysis of a Complex Kind which starts end of October this hopefully will remind me about complex analysis and help me revise the topic

https://www.coursera.org/#course/complexanalysis?utm_classid=971056&utm_nottype=class.welcome.before&utm_notid=-1&utm_linknum=1

 It might also be a good introduction for those who are contemplating doing M337 next year

I really am begining to think the OU days are numbered for those who want to do courses mainly for interest given the cost of fees.Ok one gets more support but as Free internet provision of University level courses continues to grow it's difficult to see how the OU can justify it's expensive fee structure.

Incidentally I've just had a hell of a nightmare trying to publish this post I was using Internet Explorer 8 however blogger in their infinite wisdom have decided to withdraw support from Internet Explorer 8 so I've had to change to FireFox a case of if it's working we'll break it. Most inconvenient and tedious. Also in order to access the Coursera courses I had to download VLC media and access the videos that way but that came with a whole load of crap such as sweetsearch so I had to remove these manually. I hate computers.