# All Questions

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### What's the difference between Capacitors, Ultra-Capacitors and Batteries

Capacitors are known to hold and release energy very quickly, unlike the slower release that batteries exhibit. If one were to bunch many (1000's of) capacitors together could they function as a ...
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### Calculating electromagnetic invariant in matrix form

I'm kind of confused. I want to calculate the electromagnetic invariant $I := F^{\mu\nu}F_{\mu\nu}$, but I'm not sure what is the easiest way to do so. So, I was trying to do it in matrix form, i.e. ...
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### Can a sound mathematical formula become a science theory?

Can a sound mathematical formula become a science theory if it is constructed using a pattern creation process from sense-data, applied to observations by an inductive mapping, in contrast to ...
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### Are more/other colors posible with other dimensions?

Like these impossible colors (yellow/blue and green/red) or these imaginary colors, for example saturated red more intense than pure spectral red can be viewed in ordinary viewing conditions. Can ...
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### Can ice have a higher entropy than water?

I've leant that entropy is a state of randomness, and that solids have a more structured form, therefore having less entropy. However, I saw a YouTube comment stating the following: a liquid NOT ...
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### Can wind blowing on smooth water create speckle interference patterns?

On a calm smooth lake, or even a large rain puddle, I've seen transient rough patches on the surface suddenly appear and disappear, and sometimes move across the water some distance before ...
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### Was the choice of red/green colors for traffic lights a happy coincidence?

All of us have learned since secondary school that the reason we use red in the traffic lights for "Stop" is because it travels the furthest without dispersion. According to wikipedia which cites ...
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### Movement of a ball on a curved ramp [duplicate]

Possible Duplicate: What is a natural movement of a ball on a upward curve (the two arrow lines pointing upward) given no external force? http://i47.tinypic.com/mt55s7.jpg -See for image ...
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### What name would you give to the method of approximating an arbitrary magnet with many smaller dipoles?

Let's say I had an arbitrarily shaped permanent magnet, with total magnetic moment $M_{0}$. Ways to calculate the magnetic field of this magnet include an analytic solution (if one exists), as well ...
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### The definition of entropy

As history of thermodynamics say, it was a mystery that what is the required condition for a given energy conversion to take place? Like there are two possible events each conserving energy but only ...
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### Expectation values-Wavefunction

I'm a bit puzzled about an excercise in which I have to find the expectation values for position and momentum. Normally this should be pretty easy but in this case I just don't get the point. ...
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### Does light reflect if incident at exactly the critical angle?

A lot of textbooks and exam boards claim that light incident at exactly the critical angle is transmitted along the media boundary (i.e. at right-angles to the normal), but this seems to violate the ...
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### How to calculate linar velocity of planet orbit?

I try to simulate a solar system with planets (with random mass) placed randomly around a sun with a mass $X \times \text{solar mass}$. The simulation is going well when I use real data ...
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### Partition function for quantum harmonic oscillator

Hi guys I'm currently trying to solve a mock exam for an exam in a few days and am a bit confused by the solutions they gave us for this exercise: Exercise: A solid is composed of N atoms which ...
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### Are QFT solitons expected to represent standard model particles? Or strings?

Is work on solitons in QFT's focused on finding solutions that could represent the fundamental particles of the Standard Model, or is the work focused on finding particles Beyond The Standard Model? ...
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### From differentials to differential equations

Suppose I have a function of time $t$ and position $(x,y)$ such that $$p_t \,dt = p \,dy - p_x (1-x) \,dx + p_y \,dy$$ where the subscript denotes a differentiation. In this ...
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### Amount of energy to separate Gases - relationship to concentration

I want to understand the efficiencies of separating mixed gases, and for that I want to understand the thermodynamic limit case. Looking at the wikipedia page for entropy of mixing, I find the ...
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### Depression of Water Surface by a Needle

Given a needle of mass $m$ modeled by a cylinder of length $l$ and radius $r$ placed on an infinitely large water surface, what is The maximum depression in the water surface; and The equation of ...
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### Contact force betweeen 2 objects

Suppose that we have 2 objects next to each other.The object at the left is A and the object at right is B.now we have these situations: 1) we push B to the left. 2) we pull A to the left.(in this ...
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### Quantum dimension in topological entanglement entropy

In 2D the entanglement entropy of a simply connected region goes like \begin{align} S_L \to \alpha L - \gamma + \cdots, \end{align} where $\gamma$ is the topological entanglement entropy. $\gamma$ is ...
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### Can spacetime exist in the absence of matter and energy?

I'm pretty sure Ernst Mach would have said that spacetime cannot exist without matter in it. But I'm also pretty sure that a black hole can be described as a self-sustaining gravitational field, ...
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### Does spacetime have momentum?

In what sense can it be said that spacetime possesses momentum? Can an experiment be envisaged to test this question?
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### particle accelerator in space

I'm attempting to learn special relativity and i'm having trouble calculating velocity and momentum for each part of the system after interactions. I wanted to know how fast a linear accelerator and ...
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### Ising Ferromagnet: Spontaneous symmetry breaking or not?

In explaining/introducing second-order phase transition using Ising system as an example, it is shown via mean-field theory that there are two magnetized phases below the critical temperature. This ...
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### Why aren't the graphs for black body radiation straight lines?

We know that a wave which has greater frequency will have low wavelength and high energy. So, by decreasing the wavelength, the frequency and consequently energy (intensity) of that wave will increase ...
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### Where might hertz per dioptre actually be useful?

I once came across the strange, artificial unit "hertz per dioptre", which is dimensionally equivalent to "metres per second". Could this unit, by some stretch of the imagination, be used in some ...
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### Photometer: measured Irradiance L converted to photon rate

I am conducting an experiment in which the power meter reading of $410\,nm$ narrow bandpass stimulus is noted to be 30 $\frac{\mu W}{cm^2}$ at a distance of 1 inch away from the light source. I wish ...
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### On the optics of high-resolution surveillance drones

In this youtube video (which is an except from a documentation I believe) a DARPA development for a high-resolution surveillance camera is presented. This question is regarding the optics that are ...
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### Could an ultra-relativistic particle tunnel directly through a stellar mass black hole?

It occurred to me in passing that the Lorentz contraction of a black hole from the perspective of an ultra-relativistic (Lorentz factor larger than about 10^16) particle could reduce the thickness of ...
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### Resonant inductive coupling and Schumann resonances

I was reading about WiTricity (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WiTricity) a technology developed by MIT to wirelessly transmit electricity through resonance, and I have this question: Given the ...
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### Differentiation and delta function

Need help doing this simple differentiation. Consider 4 d Euclidean(or Minkowskian) spacetime. $$\partial_{\mu}\frac{(a-x)_\mu}{(a-x)^4}= ?$$ where $a_\mu$ is a constant ...
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### stopping distance [closed]

if it takes a 4 door sedan x amount of feet to go from 65 mph to 45 mph (and i don't know how many feet that is) on a dry straight road, how many feet would it take for a large Mack truck ...
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### Apostol or Spivak for mathematical physics? [closed]

I came across many recommendations for both of these books, but I'm not sure which one should I use to study calculus... I know most of the methods used in calculus and I use them frequently, but I'm ...
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### Canonical quantization in supersymmetric quantum mechanics

Suppose you have a theory of maps $\phi: {\cal T} \to M$ with $M$ some Riemannian manifold, Lagrangian L~=~ \frac12 g_{ij}\dot\phi^i\dot\phi^j + \frac{i}{2}g_{ij}(\overline{\psi}^i ...
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### Why is the Yang-Mills gauge group assumed compact and semi-simple?

What is the motivation for including the compactness and semi-simplicity assumptions on the groups that one gauges to obtain Yang-Mills theories? I'd think that these hypotheses lead to physically ...
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### Paradox- Object thrown parallel to the ground will never fall down

Suppose an object is thrown parallel to the ground. The gravity acts downward (ie. perpendicular to the direction of motion of the object). The work done by gravity on that object will be given by : ...