My thoughts on graduate school


I am drawn to the idea of graduate school mostly for by my desire to keep learing physics. I can't really picture myself doing much in the near future besides plowing through physics books.

I cannot picture myself dealing with experiments, I am too much in love with theory. Occasionally I get a question or idea that will not leave my mind for a few weeks. Maybe this is a sign that I should become a theorist, but I feel like I have been too often encouraged to not take this path.

As for fields of interest, I found quantum mechanics to be my most enjoyable class thus far and I have always been attracted to geometry in physics. The field theory I have read on my own is amazingly beautifull. Also, I think about relativity almost constantly. To help myself narrow down my ares of interest I am putting together a senior thesis on quantum field theory in curved space-times.

As to What I want to accmplish with my career in physics, I would like to understand how matter and space are connected. There seems to be more going on than the former sittng "in" the latter as space definitely places limits on matter, such as the speed at which it can travel, and matter definitely puts lmits on space, it seems to not just bend it, but keep it flat enough to be a differentiable manifold. What is the speed of light? A kind of naturural speed of space, like a speed of sound? Why the particular numerical value 3*10⁸m/s and why is this constant throughout spacetime? How does the presence of energy at one location come to affect the curvature of spacetime at a distant location? Field theory predicts pointlike particles, any massive pointlike particle must have an event horizon. Is space so ugly on the quanum scale that there are little black holes all over the place? Does this give particles some of their properties? These questions may be answered by a sucsessfull theory of quantum gravity, or perhaps by string theory, but no one knows yet if these contain such answers. I hope to explore this.


So, I am looing into which Universities have friendly advisors whom could guide me into this crazy world of dense mathematics and profound thinking.

If you have advice concerning any of these points, please share.

dmcherney@ucdavis.edu