Finally I decided to take a vacation for 2 weeks, which started from the last Monday. I have been working quite hard nonstop for several months since the beginning of the year, and I noticed that the productivity was becoming low and I got easily tired, which is a sign that I need a break.

But with the COVID situation, however, I cannot do anything special in the last years. I used to travel around with my partner. Staying in a hotel, eating in different restaurants, visiting torusitic places, … all seem to have happened a long time ago. I don’t know if I ever had a whole vacation at home so far in my life. I only remember that when I’m back from a trip, I had calm days at home 1-2 days before going back to work, checking emails and psychologically ready for the work. But now that I have whole 2 weeks at home, to be honest, I really don’t find what to do. What I’m doing is intentially a bit away from science, and I check my email only once a day in case there’s an urgent administration.

So far I have done various tiny things, mostly cooking nice foods, exercising a bit more than usual, watching series and documentaries, reading books, playing computer games alone or pplaying board games with my partner — leisure things that I also do at the end of working days. Though I was feeling a bit guilty for spending time like that, I intentially let myself to chill a bit, hoping that an inspiration comes naturally, something that is satisfying and broadening my perspective or developing my skills.

I’m slowly searching for simple physics problems that I can solve/demonstrate with computer codes. I think it doesn’t matter it’s studied or not. Even for well-known old problems, I always find them fascinating. A problem that is easy but not too easy but possibly giving cool plot/animation is what I’m looking for. Also, I’d like to explore Python a bit more. Although Python may not ben ideal for large-scale supercomputing, I believe that it can deal with most of the problems in physics. But so far, my Python skillset is quite limited, stricktly speaking.

For example, something like this would be cool.

Reflection of a #quantum particle from a mirror that is only three atomic layers thick. A small part of the probability density gets trapped by the mirror. pic.twitter.com/7hUDxA713N

— Quantum Physics Corner (@quant_phys) April 10, 2021

Also, it’s quite nice to get back to basics – solving time-dependent Schrödinger equation. I expect that I can get this result roughly within 5-10 hours or 2-3 days.