# Tag Info

68

Well it has nothing to do with the Higgs, but it is due to some deep facts in special relativity and quantum mechanics that are known about. Unfortunately I don't know how to make the explanation really simple apart from relating some more basic facts. Maybe this will help you, maybe not, but this is currently the most fundamental explanation known. It's ...

56

The electron and proton aren't like pool balls. The electron is normally considered to be pointlike, i.e. has no size, but what this really means is that any apparent size we measure is a function of our probe energy and as we take the probe energy to infinity the measured size falls without limit. The proton has a size (about 1fm) but only because it's made ...

36

Electro-magnetism is a good guess, simply because it's the only force you commonly see that's powerful enough. It's not very useful as an explanation, though, because almost everything you see around you is due to electro-magnetism (e.g. the way the spoon holds together in the first place, or the light that allows you to see the sugar, or the way the water ...

28

In general the answer is "yes it is possible" - but in your case the answer is "that is not a Faraday cage". Radio waves are (partially) reflected by any discontinuity in dielectric constant of the medium they propagate through. The ones that propagate (through walls etc) will also experience attenuation. A faraday cage is a continuous conducting structure ...

28

The reason is that you have a boundary layer on the surface of the blade of the fan. On the frame of the blade (the blade moves with some velocity, but at the frame of the blade the air moves) the boundary layer starts from the surface of the blade where the fluids velocity is zero and as you move away from the blade, the velocity increases up to the value ...

26

Yes, absolutely. In fact, Gauss's law is generally considered to be the fundamental law, and Coulomb's law is simply a consequence of it (and of the Lorentz force law). You can actually simulate a 2D world by using a line charge instead of a point charge, and taking a cross section perpendicular to the line. In this case, you find that the force (or ...

21

This was a big mystery before quantum mechanics was discovered. Not only are electrons attracted to protons, electrons radiate away energy when accelerated. A classical electron in orbit around a proton should spiral into the nucleus in a small fraction of a second. The "explanation" is that classical physics doesn't work on a small scale. Quantum ...

19

You can use a high vertical tube to store water in it (fill it from the bottom by pushing the water in) How much water can you store? It obviously depends on the pressure you apply to push it in. If you push harder, there will be more water stored. The tube is characterized not the amount of water, but by how easy it is to store the water. Its "capacity" ...

19

What about this hypothesis: Dust sticks everywhere, but since the propeller cuts through a lot of air, it meets more dust particles. Thus, more dust sticks to the propeller than elsewhere. Evidence I (Mark) took photos my the fan my room to support Damien's hypothesis. The first photo is of the leading edge of the fan blade, which impacts a lot of air, ...

18

Charge is a fundamental conserved property of particles. It is, if you like, a measure of how much a particle interacts with electromagnetic fields. A particle with charge can produce and be affected by electromagnetic fields. This is what we mean when we say a particle has electric charge. It might help to think of it as a simple quantised way to measure ...

18

Gauss's law is always fine. It is one of the tenets of electromagnetism, as one of Maxwell's equations, and as far as we can tell they always agree with experiment. The problem you've uncovered is simply that "a uniform charge density of infinite extent" is not actually physically possible, and it turns out that (i) it is not possible to express it as the ...

17

The force does not change instantaneously, the correct way the electromagnetic field of (and thus the force exerted by) a moving electric charge is given by the Liénard-Wiechert potential, where one can see that the effect of the charge does not travel faster than light.

17

To add to ACuriousMind's answer on the Liénard-Weichert potentials, you can put these formulas into an even more wonderfully descriptive form since you can derive Feynman's formula from them for the radiation from a moving charge: $$\vec{E} = ... 17 First remember that k = \dfrac {1}{4 \pi \epsilon_r\epsilon_o} where \epsilon_r \ge 1 It is because a medium can be polarised by an external E-field. The dipoles so set up produce the external E-field produce an E-field in the opposite direction so the net E-field (the sum of the external and dipole produced E-fields) is smaller. Thus the force a given ... 17 Electric field lines are a visualization of the electrical vector field. At each point, the direction (tangent) of the field line is in the direction of the electric field. At each point in space (in the absence of any charge), the electric field has a single direction, whereas crossing field lines would somehow indicate the electric field pointing in two ... 16 The effect in which two objects get charged by rubbing and remain charged is called the triboelectric effect, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triboelectric_effect where the root "tribo" means friction in Greek (The Greek word \tau\rho\iota\beta\omega means 'to rub'). Friction is actually unnecessary: contact is enough in principle. This effect ... 16 There does seem to be a lot of mythology around about the "grape in a microwave" experiment. I have never see any publications on the subject in a respectable journal, however from chatting to other scientists there seems to be a consensus about what happens. It's all rather boring really. The grape is the right size (about a quarter wavelength) and shape ... 16 Just to add to what Floris has said. It is frequent (in the UK) that institutional settings would have toughened glass in windows, particularly in bathrooms, gyms etc. that would have the form of a wire mesh (of order 1cm grid) embedded in the glass. That would do a particularly good job of blocking phone signals that would otherwise penetrate the glass. 16 You smell ozone (\mathrm{O_3}, from the Greek word ozein for "smell"), and maybe nitrous oxide - the reaction product of oxygen and \mathrm{N_2}. There is a nice description of the formation and action of ozone at this link. Briefly: Oxygen molecules (\mathrm{O_2}) can be dissociated (broken into atoms or ions) by either UV light, or electrical ... 15 I have reconstructed your diagram computationally and numerically computed the potential energy as a function of the orientation of the ring: As you can see, when we neglect friction (something that you can't do in the real world) the machine is indeed capable of perpetual motion. However, some important points: The total change in energy of the system ... 15 Not magnetism but static electricity - the other side of the electromagnetic force. Sorry this answer is short, but I think the link will give you all the information you need. 15 Then will every field line originate from the +q and end up to -6q No, every field line won't end to negative charge. will there be some extra lines coming to -6q from infinity because of higher charge to get 6 times the number of field lines? Yes, many extra lines will come. I think it should be that every line will originate from the ... 15 Electrons just don't like each other, a point captured by the phrase that "like charges repel." So, imagine a gymnasium full of students pretending to be electrons, staying as far away from others as possible. Anyone near the center of the crowd will feel badly pressed and will try to work there way towards the edge of the gym, where at least one side will ... 15 Wind doesn't actually touch the surface. You can see the same effect on a car: even if you move at speeds beyond 70mph, the dust doesn't get blown away. If you look closely, there is a boundary layer between the matter of the fan and the air around the fan. When you get closer to the fan blades, the air starts to move with the fan (the blade pulls it ... 14 The maximum charge a capacitor stores depends on the voltage V_0 you've used to charge it according to the formula:$$ Q_0=CV_0 $$However, a real capacitor will only work for voltages up to the breakdown voltage of the dielectric medium in the capacitor. So in reality, for every capacitor there is a maximum possible charge Q_{max} given by:$$ ...

14

The electric and magnetic fields are real things: they can store energy and transfer momentum. "Field lines" or "lines of force" are a visualization tool suitable for drawing vector fields. They are maps of the fields and the fields are real things. Is that good enough for you? And, yes, the electromagnetic interaction can be described in another (more ...

14

Electrical analogies of mechanical elements such as springs, masses, and dash pots provide the answer. The "deep" connection is simply that the differential equations have the same form. In electric circuit theory, the across variable is voltage while the through variable is current. The analogous quantities in mechanics are force and velocity. Note that ...

14

I suppose you mean $k_e=\frac1{4\pi\epsilon_0}$. That comes from the fact that Coulomb's law can be stated as : $$F= \frac1{\epsilon_0}\frac1{4\pi r^2}q_1q_2$$ Now, $\epsilon_0$ is the electric constant, or the permittivity of free space, and it essentially scales the force. The $4\pi r^2$ comes from the surface ...

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If there was a closed field line a particle following that line would eventually return to the same place but having a different energy so the field would not be conservative.

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This is a good example of a procedure that happens in many areas of physics. In general, physical laws - and particularly conservation laws - tend to be most naturally phrased in integral form, or even in mixed integro-differential form. For an example of the latter, consider the integral form of Faraday's law:  \oint_{\partial S}\mathbf{E}\cdot\text ...

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