# All Questions

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### What is the best evidence/theory about the first generation of stars

In particular, during what range of years after the Big Bang did the stars form? What is the expected range of masses of these stars and what is the expected lifetime before they supernova? I assume ...
291 views

### Levitation rotation speed involving laser acceleration, pyrolytic graphite and a vacuum

The experment would involve a small NIB magnet levitating between or on the diamagnetic material pyrolytic graphite, unlike other forms of levitation this doesn't require power to run such as ...
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### If LHC searches of a Higgs boson won't be a success, what consequences for the theory of electroweak interaction it can bear?

Whether it is necessary to search still for variants of an explanation of spontaneously breaking gauge symmetry, giving masses for a W, Z-bosons? Goldstone bosons are bosons that appear necessarily ...
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### Time-Dependent Potentials in Quantum Mechanics

A potential that depends on time is usually solved using the time dependent perturbation theory in standard undergraduate textbooks in quantum mechanics. The reason usually mentioned is that time ...
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### What is the magnetic susceptibility of NdFeB?

NdFeB is one of the most popular materials used for making permanent magnets. Yet I could find no link or reference reporting a decent value for the magnetic susceptibility of NdFeB. Magnetic ...
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### Spherical magnets shooting like bullets and demagnetizing

I was playing around with a 2x chain of bucky balls and winding it around itself. Suddenly several of the little balls went shooting like bullets across the room in 3 directions and now all of the ...
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### Examples of number theory showing up in physics

My question is very simple: Are there any interesting examples of number theory showing up unexpectedly in physics? This probably sounds like rather strange question, or rather like one of the ...
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### Are there any reasonable attempts at explaining the OPERA result

as there's so many papers on the opera result and it's a struggle flicking through them all combined with my limited knowledge meaning I cannot well differentiate silly nonsensical papers from ones ...
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### Is existence of cosmic dark energy falsifiable yet?

Is "existence of cosmic dark energy" falsifiable yet? And what about dark matters? Let me rephrase it again(pardon me for my previous poor expression)- Is there any condition discovered which can be ...
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### Difference between 1PI effective action and Wilsonian effective action?

What is the simplest ay to describe the difference between these two concepts, that often go by the same name?
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### how much heat i need to reach constant temperature

Is there an equation I can use to calculate the heat required (as a function of time) to sustain water at some specif temperature? I already know how much heat I need to reach the desired temparature ...
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### If the entire universe is the same age, can one assume that any potential life elsewhere is at the same stage of development as us?

There was some discussion in another question regarding whether you can consider all parts of the universe to have existed for the same length of time, and the conclusion seemed to be that, because of ...
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### Why can there be fire in space while there is no oxygen?

The sun is made of fire but fire needs oxygen right? So.. Why can there be flames in space, while there's no oxygen? Same idea as with the rocket engines of the spaceship, which also produce fire ...
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### Superconformal Multiplet Calculus in 6D

A convenient method for dealing with off-shell formulations of supergravity theories is provided by the superconformal multiplet calculus. This calculus was originally constructed for 4d ${\cal N}=2$ ...
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### Infinitesimal input, macroscopic output

I must admit that I never got well how physicists handle infinitesimal quantities, mainly because of my education as a mathematician. So the following lines (taken from the preface of Berezin and ...
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### Why is storage of spent nuclear fuel dangerous?

Just what the title states; there's a good deal of noise made about transport, and storage of spent nuclear fuel. Why all the hullabaloo when the fuel is all spent?
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### How plausible is a subsurface ocean on Pluto?

According to this article on physorg.com, it's likely that Pluto has a subsurface ocean of liquid water. It suggests that the ocean would be about 165 km deep, under an equally deep crust of solid ...
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### Can decoherence work when the environment itself is in a superposition without invoking collapse or splitting?

Decoherence is often presented as a program to solve the measurement problem using only the bare bones quantum mechanics framework of a Hilbert space and unitary Schrödinger time evolution. As ...
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### Why don't the actinides start at neptunium?

In their physical and chemical properties, actinium, thorium, protactinium, and uranium are respectively similar to lanthanum, hafnium, tantalum, and tungsten, and thus would seem to belong ...
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### Rigorous justification for rotating wave approximation

Whenever I have encountered the rotating wave approximation, I have seen "the terms that we are neglecting correspond to rapid oscillations in the interaction Hamiltonian, so they will average to 0 in ...
Let me explain in details. Let $\Psi=\Psi(x,t)$ be the wave function of a particle moving in a unidimensional space. Is there a way of writing $\Psi(x,t)$ so that $|\Psi(x,t)|^2$ represents the ...