Blog

  • Tales from five years as a Caltech Physics PhD student

    Tales from five years as a Caltech Physics PhD student

    I’m a doctor! Not the usual kind of doctor, but blood, sweat, and tears were certainly involved. In 2020, I graduated from UC Berkeley with my bachelor’s degree and wrote a blog post summarizing my undergrad years. Finishing grad school has been a similar transitional event in my life, but also one which many fewer Read more

  • Deriving the Ideal Gas Law: A Statistical Story

    The ideal gas law is , where is the pressure, is the volume, is the number of particles, , and is the temperature. It constitutes one of the simplest and most applied “equations of states” in all of physics, and is (or will become) incredibly familiar to any student of not only physics but also Read more

  • ComputerChessCup 2021

    Email: computerchesscup2021@gmail.comGithub repository: https://github.com/NicholasRui/chessbattleSubmission deadline: 31 January 2021 28 February 2021 (see extension email image below), 11:59 pm. Premise: Build a chess robot in python. Compete with other chess robots. Win the title of best chessed. Read more

  • COVID-19 in the USA, Measured in Tragedies

    The last few months have been devastating to our societies, our economies, and our ability to get out of bed before attending meetings. In anticipation of the tumultuous days that inevitably lie immediately ahead, I wanted to get out some thoughts about the pandemic. COVID-19 is, among many other things, a collection of “big” numbers—more Read more

  • Tales from Berkeley Undergraduate Physics and Astronomy

    After recently having graduated with a physics and astrophysics degree at the University of California, Berkeley, I can finally fulfill a long-awaited desire to write down a reflection of my college experiences with some sort of satisfying completeness. In writing this reflection, I hope to achieve two broad goals: (1) to view my experiences with Read more

  • The Squishy Pendulum

    The Squishy Pendulum

    Over my two-week vacation before I returned to Berkeley for the summer, I read Leonard Susskind and George Hrabovsky’s The Theoretical Minimum: What You Need to Know to Start Doing Physics. This book was based on the first course in a series of courses called the Theoretical Minimum, taught by Leonard Susskind at Stanford targeted at curious Read more