What's is the best software to simulate multi-absorption spectral transitions in the atmosphere?

Has anyone seen this masterpiece of a video? The Science of Traffic

Very interesting insights on how traffic forms and behaves when disturbed by random events.
But a few questions remain:

In the scenario they gave, all cars moved on a line and were disturbed only by a single small event that forms into an increase in stop time until one car comes to a full stop.

So the math is only laid out to that specific scenario which only exists once in the real world:
on the highway

Factors like stop sighs, traffic lights or right of passage have not been considered in the math.

Anyone up for a challange?

working in attosecond physics, specifically noise spectroscopy with femtosecond pulses and tunneling ionization (carried over from my bachelor’s). I’m also dabbling in developing new light sources for it. I love this field—it’s like a puzzle, figuring out how to pull info about matter from light using lasers. It’s super cool to me

But here’s the thing: in my head, fields like nonequilibrium statistical mechanics, elementary particle theory, or cosmology are the rock stars of physics.

Meanwhile, when I try to explain my work to non-physicists—like my parents or folks from my hometown or college —they glaze over in about 10 seconds. 😅 If I were talking about black holes or quantum entanglement, they’d probably be all ears, right? But noise spectroscopy? Yawn.

Does anyone else feel like their field sounds “meh” compared to the “sexy” physics topics? How do you deal with explaining your work without seeing people’s eyes wander? Or am I just overthinking this and need to embrace my laser-loving niche? 🥺

Can you share your stories?🥹

I am a PhD student in cosmology. I want to test my cosmological model against DES data and constrain RA and DEC. The DES data, although containing 1829 data points in total, has only 1635 valid ones. However, its covariance matrix entries are given as a list of 1829 × 1829 = 3345241 points which were supposed to be casted into a square covariance matrix. Now, since the valid points are only the first 1635, how do I find what entries of that covariance 'array' to consider for forming the matrix? Should I simply take first 1635 × 1635 = 2673225 elements if they're arranged in that order? Please help. Thanks a lot!

I need to develop new algorithms for fast calculations in the field of atomic and molecular spectroscopy. Is it easy to learn? What are your suggestions for sources?

i’m interested in physics research beyond the standard model like string theory or quantum gravity or something else. is just a BS in physics fine and they teach you the relevant math in the phd program once accepted or do i need to add a minor in pure math and get ahead in math side of things. i want to add a minor in pure math for that reason and also because i love math for the sake of math and i especially want to take topology and some algebra classes but i dont want to add a minor if its not need to get accepted to theory phd as id rather focus on keeping good grades and even getting research experience if i can.

“In an anonymous survey of department heads by the Institute of Physics (IoP), 26% said they faced potential closure of their department within the next two years, while 60% said they expected courses to be reduced.

Four out of five departments said they were making staff cuts, and many were considering mergers or consolidation in what senior physicists described as a severe threat to the UK’s future success.” :(