# Tag Info

## Hot answers tagged terminology

5

A paper came out this week pointing to them having a banal (if amusing) origin: they are from two 27 year old microwave ovens. When people get impatient and open the door before the timer runs down, a short burst from the ovens' magnetron is released, which appears as a peryton if the telescope is pointed in the right direction. Figure 7. shows the perytons ...

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The Weights and Measures Act (the origin of the Imperial Units) does not speak of temperature. It was intended to create a uniform system for trade. You don't sell temperature, in the way you sell a pint of milk or a yard of cloth. And frankly, when it was first conceived (before Magna Carta, which already stated: "There shall be but one Measure ...

4

I got a translation of the article from the German Wikipedia. Here's an excerpt: Perytons are in radio astronomy short radio signals having a length of a few milliseconds, which probably terrestrial are origin. The Perytons are named after mythical creatures . In radio astronomy, terrestrial are noise is always a problem. A well-known noise signal ...

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cms and kgs are wrong. The SI units are abbreviations which are also used in the plural. You will write 2.6 m/s or 1 m/s, but say "2.6 meters per second" or "1 meter per second" respectively. Keep in mind the SI units are also used in tons of other languages that do not form the plural by attaching an -s. The units look the same in those languages. (e.g. ...

3

A good question, you are right the frequency remains constant (unless you have Doppler effects due to relative movement, but that's not your question). For visible light, refraction properties are quite often in question and as such it make sense to speak in terms of wavelength. As you go even higher in "frequency", physicists start talking in keV and MeV ...

3

Let $M$ be your spacetime, a smooth manifold equipped with (pseudo) Riemannian metric (for example $\mathbb{R}^{(1,3)}$ for special relativity). The set of reference frames is the frame bundle over $M$, usually denoted $FM$. Explicitly a frame at point $p$ in $M$ can be viewed as an ordered orthonormal basis (with respect to the the inner product defined ...

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I think what he's saying is that $$F_{net} = F_{nc} + \nabla U,$$ which is pretty standard. $f^a$ is your net force, which is the sum of your conservative and nonconservative forces. Conservative forces can be written as the gradient of some potential, which is where you get your $\nabla U$ from. $f^e,$ then, are your nonconservative forces.

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When we say something is conserved or that there is a conservation law for a given thing, we mean that the quantity of it does not change. You neither lose nor gain any of that thing. More specifically, conservation can come in two flavours. Something can be globally conserved. This means that the total amount of that something in the universe does not ...

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When you say If something goes outside, then it will decrease inside! what you assume is exactly a conservation law. It may seem trivial, but it is not necessarily. Consider the population of a city, for example. At one point in time, you measure how many people are within the city borders; let's call this number $N_0$. Then, you observe all city ...

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Static comes from the same root as stasis, meaning stop, immovable, To create static electricity, you have to rub two different materials. At the moment you rub them, the electrons already moved Note the word "create", creation is not static, and yes there are transient fields and currents during creation of a static field. The static describes the ...

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To contract a tensor is to set two of the indices equal and sum over them, so given a tensor $A^i_j$ the contraction is $A=A^i_i=A^1_1+A^2_2+A^3_3+A^4_4$ The Bianchi identities you list have five indices. To contract them, you would set some pair equal and sum over them. Your second version is the same as the first, it just has the indices renamed. ...

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The order of a quantity in general refers to the exponent of the quantity in an expression, ie $$x^3y^2$$ would be 3rd order in $x$ and 2nd order in $y$. According to the Feynman rules, each vertex in a Feynman diagrams contributes a factor of the coupling constant, so the order of each coupling constant is simply the number of vertices of that interaction. ...

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Using elementary graph theory identities one can show that the number of loops in a connected diagram is related to the number of external lines and the number of vertices of type $i$ each of which has $n_i$ lines attached to it, is related by $$\sum \left(\frac{n_i}{2}-1\right) V_i -\tfrac{1}{2}E +1= L$$ So you can see that for a fixed process (fixed ...

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As I recall, covariant refers to how an object transforms when you boost to another inertial frame. An example would be the relativistic 4-momentum $P^{\mu}$. Invariant refers to quantities which are unchanged under boosts to different frames. For example the product $P^{\mu}P_{\mu}=m$ has the same numerical value in any frame. Sometimes a relativistic ...

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The kinetic term of the Lagrangian is proportional to $$g_{ij}v^iv^j$$ where the $v$s are the generalised velocities. Writing them as the time derivative of the generalised coordinates, i.e. $v^i\dot q^i$, taking the square root, and multiplying by a small time lapse $\epsilon$ you get $$\sqrt{g_{ij}\dot q^i\dot q^j}\epsilon,$$ which is a first order ...

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According to the wiki page on Imperial and US customary units Fahrenheit is part of both the Imperial and US customary system. I can't think of any reason it wouldn't be included in the Imperial system. Note that in the wiki page on Imperial units it is mentioned that the weight's and measures act (which defined the Imperial system) explicitly used the ...

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Dunno what book you're quoting, but you should realize that the index of refraction of air is $n = 1+ \epsilon$ (where I'm using the mathematics standard of $\epsilon$ being a tiny number). Thus the power in air is $1/F$

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The equation you are quoting gives the power of a lens in terms of its geometry and refractive index. Simply rearranging the terms (dividing by $n$) gives you an expression for $\frac{1}{f}$ which is known as the power of the lens and is expressed in diopters. For the usual situation of a lens in air, we can put $n=1$ which leaves you with an even simpler ...

1

Positron IS an elementary particle, the anti-particle to the electron as you already know. But we do not get a "free positron" as a "free electron". They are usually generated through pair-production and get annihilated fast, or through radioactive decay (beta-decay) in weak interactions or in particle accelerators, and are present in cosmic rays too. A ...

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The below seems to be a candidate for the first use of the term 'Majorana fermion'. (I'm not sure if it satisfies your other criteria.) Salam, Abdus, and J. Strathdee. Super-symmetry and non-Abelian gauges. International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Trieste (Italy), 1974.

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Four component formalism is the "right" formalism, but it has negative energy eigenstates corresponding to the antiparticles. Most chemists and solid state physics are not interested in the antiparticles, and such negative energy solution causes trouble for conventional variational methods, where you might end up falling to negative infinity energy. It is ...

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A site is just a place or location with given coordinates e.g. $(x_0,y_0,z_0)$

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I would like to bring the ladder paradox here to explain simultaneity of events.A ladder (an inertial frame) is moving horizontally with a relatively high constant speed with respect to a garage (another inertial frame). The garage has an open door where the ladder can not actually enter if the ladder was at rest in the garage's frame but that is not ...

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Regarding your assertions: Events $\varepsilon_{AJ}$ and $\varepsilon_{BK}$ were simultaneous in the inertial frame of participants $A$, $B$, $M$. This is a perfectly reasonable statement and it is the sort of language used in everyday physics. Participant $M$ was the middle between $J$ and $K$, in the inertial frame of participants $A$, $B$, $M$. ...

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"Coincident" is defined in the Google online dictionary as (1) "occurring together in space OR time" (emphasis mine), and (2) "in agreement or harmony". "Simultaneous" is defined in the same dictionary as "occurring, operating, or done at the same time". Unfortunately, this dictionary lists "coincident" as a synonym of "simultaneous". I do not think this ...

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This paper describes them. http://www.ursi.org/proceedings/procGA11/ursi/GP2-41.pdf They were apparently given a new name because their origin was uncertain.

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i searched for the exact same problem recently after a debate with one of my colleagues. In my opinion, you already gave the answer to your question yourself. A source dipole is the flow field resulting from a sink and a source brought together. In a sink, all streamlines point radially inward to the singularity at the origin, in a source, all point ...

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I think the magnon is a special case of the spin wave. Whereas spinon refers to the general quasiparticle that carries all spin of an electron, magnon refers to the limiting case of spin wave quantized in such a manner that it becomes part of an anti-magnetic cloud of quasiparticles. However, this may not be the complete story! Some usage of the terms: ...

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UV stands for Ultraviolet and it is referring to a special kind of divergences in quantum field theory. In NLO loop diagrams, we often encounter divergences (infinite integrals) when we investigate what happens at $k \to \infty$, where $k$ is the internal momentum of a virtual particle in Feynman diagrams. These are precisely the divergences we call "UV ...

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Of course they both give informations about the motion of bodies. The kinematic equations tell us simply what are the valors of the variables of the specific motion , that because kinematic studies only the variables of the motion and their changing. kinematic equations give us indications about : Velocities (the most simple and known equation of kinematic ...

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