S197 Has entered the building

Two days ago the course book for S197 arrived - so now I have two very interesting courses sitting waiting for my attention. The topics on this one include:
Redshift calculations, Hubble constant, CMB, EMR, Quantum electrodynamics, Quarks and Feynman diagrams, Quantum chromodynamics, bosons, Curved Space, Gravitational radiation, the quark-lepton era, hadrons, nucleosynthesis, geometry of space, and many other interesting areas. I can't wait to get cracking on this pot of ideas.
But - it will have to wait - I have to make reasonable headway on M362 first.

M362 A familiar start

I started reading through Unit 1 of M362 the other day and felt immediately at home (and Unit 2 to boot). All those years as a Systems Programmer on IBM boxes and reading through much of the assembly source code of the Operating System (VM/SP, VM/ESA) means that I am on home ground when it comes to processes, context switching, interrupt handlers, various process states, user mode and supervisor mode, the fetch-execute cycle, and loads more. I know the course is going to move away from these topics eventually, but right now it feels good.

I am registered

Yesterday I still didn't know if I had successfully registered for M362 in time or not. Today I received a package containing all the course books and software.

I guess that means that I have my place on the course!

Major Tom to Ground Control

S194 is just about finished - a month ahead of schedule. The ECA was completed last night after a few hours trying to figure how the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation supports the Big Bang theory.

And today I registered for S197 "How the Universe Works" which is more cosmology and physics. I am expecting this to me a more challenging course that S194 - not because of the maths - but because of some of the concepts such as string theory, and 11-dimensional space. And then having to write a few thousands words that explains it in a coherent and intelligible manner. I have trouble explaining what I had for breakfast in a coherent and intelligible manner sometimes (not that I'm often asked - but since you did - it was porridge today).

So that's S197 and M362 starting in February. A jolly combination.