Thursday, February 22, 2007

Return to work

Carnaval ended and now it is time to return to work. Return to my more-than-a-hundred-page program code. Reading and understanding all the physics behind that code is not so easy as I early thought. I guess I have passed already more than half of the code, but now I'm on the worst part, where we have all the physics, all the radiative transfer and line profile calculations.

Radiative transfer is one of the most beautiful physics's subjects, but it is also the most difficult subject that I have seen. For people who doesn't have any idea about what is radiative transfer, it is the study about how light or radiation propagates through a medium, including absorbtions, scattering, emission and re-emission of light due to atoms, molecules and dust throughout the medium.

There are a lot of simplifications in the code, concerning radiative transfer, but even so it is still not a simple thing. The magneto-hydrodynamics calculations, also done by the program, seems really simple compared with the afore mentioned one. And I tell you, magneto-hydrodynamics have nothing simple about it.

Magneto-hydrodynamics is the study of charged fluids in the presence of magnetic fields. It is also a fascinating subject, but also a very difficult one.

I just expect that someday I could understand properly both subjects. They are really fascinating!

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