The root cause of all the devil

It has been a really luxurious time for me to be in Delft. No any duties or any thing to take care of, so much so that there is no need to check the clock which days of the week is. All of my time is used entirely for reading and code writing. This is especially useful for me to rebuild all the necessary physics i have missed in the pass, in particular, QM calculations, theoretical classical mechanics (lagrangian, hamiltonian etc), statistical mechanics, solid state physics, and of course, computational methods. In the past i wasn't very sure of how to do research in many research areas outside particle physics. In many occasion, i can't truly understand many technical details of the materials i was reading, which could be sometimes frustrating.

After some times of constant contemplation during my reading/learning process over here, I found that the root cause of all the devil is simply that my basic knowledge in those hardcore fundamental physics is not enough. I find that many fresh/young graduate students I have met in overseas seem to have no problem to directly dive into their research topics without much trouble. I won't be able to do so when I was a graduate student. Slowly I come to realise that this contrast is happening because my training in fundamental physics at undergraduate level is simply too poor. I lack solid understanding, despite the fact that I did score some A's in certain subject e.g. stat. mech and atomic physics in undergraduate.

Physics for post graduates and undergraduates are thought rigorously, usually with depth and bredth over here. People who handle the subjects are experts in the fields they teach, so the teaching quality in most cases is excellent. This is a very different scenario back home, where lecturers teaching the subjects do not understand the subject, not to mention to make the students to understand.

I was thinking of a `phase transition' kind of leap in both my intellectual and spiritual level during this sabbatical which is going to end in about 1 1/2 months to come. I wasn't so sure if such kind of leap will really happen. But definitely I have gained certain level of intellectual maturity and have patched up certain 'holes' in the necessary fundamental physics knowledge (which was lacking in the past). I understand better my weakness as well as strength too.