An Informal Supervision Session.

Term's quickly coming to a close again... This has been another intense term, but unlike last year, I've been able to handle this term much better.

An Informal Supervision
I'm really glad to be under the mentor of my supervisor this year. Hope to learn lots from him... He's a really nice guy, but he leads a somewhat sad life, cos he's so nice that he's bullied by people, and allows the system to get the better of him...

Well, true to his very kind nature, he offered to meet me yesterday at the train station for an 'Informal Supervision' session where I could clearify the numerous things we didn't have time to go through in detail during supervisions, while he waited for his train to london.

I took up the offer, living relatively close to the train station. But as the time approached, i realised that I havent really prepared the stuff I wanted to ask, and there was actually simply too much to cover in such an informal session. Hence, I thought that the time might be better spent learning about his life. Afterall, it's not everyday that you get to meet a genuine theoretical physicist.

We met at a cafe in the station, and chatted. Two astonishing things occured in our conversation The first was shocking, and the second literally caused my jaw to drop.

The shocking bit occured when he answered that he was going to london to "meet his boyfriend". I was shocked for a while, and felt a little saddened, wondering what might cause a person turn to another of the same gender...

The second, jaw dropping incident happened as he explained some thermodynamics he'd been working on to me. He'd been pondering the laws of thermodynamics in a non-inertial frame, pointing out that the laws were rather empherical, and had not very compelling reasons for them to be so. And beginning from the plausibility that the zeroth law may not hold in a non-inertial frame, i.e. a gravational field, he should that the second law would also be wrong. My jaw droped as it's implications hit me - that we could extract energy directly from the heat in our surroundings, and that the future of the universe might not be so bleak afterall.

I still do not know how credible the theory is, but coming from someone whom i'm learning the subject from, I believe there should be at least some reason to give it some thought, and i might have some opportunity to do so the next term when we'll be doing thermodynamics :p