The Cauchy Problem in General Relativity

So last week, I presented a talk on the Cauchy Problem in General relativity, at the science student research showcase run by my university. Today I wanted to do a brief overview of the problem and the developments made in it since Einstein published his theory of...

The beautiful language of tensors

You’ve probably heard the word ‘tensor’ before, but if you’re like me, you’ve gone through your entire physics degree without knowing what they are. So today, I’m going to express the relativistic wave equation in the language of...

Casba Wars: The Csaba Strikes back

A not so long time ago in a classroom not too far away, we arrived eagerly for our 9am, (in fact me and my friend Ivan, check him out at ivanbegic.wordpress.com, got there at 6am, back to the story), we arrived eagerly for our next encounter with the one and only...

Csaba Wars: A new hope

So, if you ever want to undertake a physics major at Monash University, you will probably want to learn some theoretical physics. Although, the title will lure you, you will enviably have to face the one and only Csaba Balazs, figure 1 below. Now, the man is a bit of...

Collapse that wave function!

In quantum mechanics, we cannot speak of the exact location of a particle, but rather, we talk about the probability of a particle being in a certain region of space. Mathematically, we describe this using a probability density function, known as the wave function,...

Curl and divergence of a vector field

The Curl of a vector field is defined to be     The curl is a measure of the vorticity, or “swirliness”, of the vector field. So imagine that describes some fluid and has the vector field plotted below. Now this field shows that the fluid is...