Apart from the distraction of having apply for the visa, my week so far has been characterised by almost nonstop studying (attempted nonstop studying, to be precise). I've mostly been crunching the stuff revolving around quantum physics, i.e. bits of my maths course, the quantum mechanics course, and the atomic and molecular physics course. For the former two, I can follow the arguments and derivations, but the challenge is in stepping back and seeing everything as a harmonious whole, which is not easy. It requires a complete divorce from the 'common sense' of what we intuitively feel things work. As Niels Bohr apparently stated, if one is not confused by quantum physics, then one does not understand it. I certainly got plenty of confusion, but it's still arguable if that has anything to do with understanding it!

For my Atomic & Molecular course, I am faced with a nightmare situation: crap lecturer. He has an enormous reluctance of actually writing things down on the board while teaching, so we often have to scribble stuff down while he talks without pause. Even his online notes make little sense, and are (I have since discovered) riddled with mistakes. The course is badly structured as well, although this may not be his fault...what he taught us was a lot of results without the underlying derivations and concepts, which makes it easy to memorise but difficult to understand. I spent over 16 hours in the past couple of days trying to piece together information from the reference books which might lend some sense to what he gave in his notes. And I'm still only half-way through. This is a real pity, because the subject matter of the course is something that truly interests me. Even when I was trawling through the books, trying to make head and tail of things, there was a part of me that was truly fascinated as well.

I just wish I didn't have to put up with lecturers like this. For quantum mech, we're lucky to get Andy Fisher. He makes the subject so clear and lucid, which is important because its a foundation for many fields of physics. He is incredibly knowledgeable, yet he's the only lecturer who's ever been brave enough to say "I don't the answer to that, but I'll think about it and tell you tommorow". When I become a lecturer, I can only hope that I'll be half as good as Fisher is.