# All Questions

136,347 questions
981 views

### What is the risk from radiation on imported food from Japan

I'm currently resident in Hong Kong a country which appars to import heavily from Japan. Last saturday 7th May I went to a restaurant: http://www.openrice.com/english/restaurant/sr2.htm?shopid=39760 ...
749 views

### How is perturbation theory applied to the Bunch-Davies state for an interacting quantum field theory?

Feynman diagrams are ordinarily the usual method of perturbative analysis for weakly interacting quantum field theories. However, over a de Sitter background, the total number of particles isn't even ...
506 views

### resistance of a flywheel to change of angular momentum

I've got a flywheel with angular momentum $\vec L$. Now I'd like to change the orientation of $\vec L$ by an angle $φ$ (in degrees). How do I calculate the angular momentum $\vec M$ for that change?
510 views

### Paradox of the Relativistic Record Player [duplicate]

Possible Duplicate: Invariant spacetime - distance - Circular Motion This is a question that I thought up a few years ago when I was taking mechanics. I asked the professor but didn't really get ...
14k views

### The meaning of action

The action $$S=\int L \;\mathrm{d}t$$ is an important physical quantity. But can it be understood more intuitively? The Hamiltonian corresponds to the energy, whereas the action has dimension of ...
1k views

### Noether's theorem and “translations” of the Hamiltonian function

In a nutshell, Noether's theorem states that for every continuous symmetry a corresponding conserved quantity exists. Now, the Hamiltonian equations of motion (let's talk about a classical system ...
2k views

### What gauge is used in the Lagrangian for a non-relativistic point particle in an electromagnetic potential

For the Lagrangian $$L = \frac{1}{2}mu^2 - q(\phi - \frac{\vec{A}}{c}\cdot \vec{u})$$ of a non-relativistic point particle in an electromagnetic potential, what gauge is used for the electromagnetic ...
2k views

### What happens if you try to freeze water in an water tight container

If I have a container that is full of water and I attempt to freeze the water by freezing the container, what would happen if the container is strong enough to prevent the water expansion? Could the ...
17k views

### Is it pions or gluons that mediate the strong force between nucleons?

From my recent experience teaching high school students I've found that they are taught that the strong force between nucleons is mediated by virtual-pion exchange, whereas between quarks it's gluons. ...
13k views

### Protons' repulsion within a nucleus

Do the protons inside the nucleus repel each other by the electrostatic force? If they do, why doesn't the repulsion drive the protons apart so that the nuclei get disintegrated?
2k views

### cm^3/g as a unit of adsorption

I recently saw cm^3/g as a unit for amount adsorbed. Usually, you see either kg adsorbate/kg adsorbent or mole adsorbate/kg adsorbent. Does anyone know the meaning of this unit?
176 views

### Why is the critical state in the Mean Field Bak-Sneppen Model a global attractor?

Simulations of the Bak-Sneppen Model of Species Evolution (introduced in http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.71.4083) show that it exhibits Self-Organized Criticality where after a transient ...
488 views

### Sterile Neutrinos as Dark Matter

There has been recent activity by astrophysicists to determine whether a fourth flavor of neutrino, a sterile neutrino, exists. It would likely be more massive than electron, muon or tau neutrinos. ...
472 views

### Space-time hospitality

Are there any reasons to assume that organic processes cannot arise in relatively flat spacetime environments? An argument for the existence of a critial value or window.
194 views

### equivalence principle and nontrivial compactifications

it is commonly argued that the equivalence principle implies that everything must fall locally in the same direction, because any local variation of accelerations in a small enough neighbourhood is ...
4k views

How is the shape of the blades of an air fan determined? Trial and error, or is there a theory behind it? What are they trying to maximize, volume of air dislocated per rotation?
2k views

### Weyl exponential form of the Canonical Commutation Relations

What is the physical meaning of the $c$-numbers $Q, P\in \mathbb{R}$ in the exponent of the Weyl system $\exp\left[\frac{i}{\hbar} Q \hat{p}\right]$ and $\exp\left[\frac{i}{\hbar}P\hat{q}\right]$? ...
704 views

### 7 GeV dark matter particle: how particle accelerators missed it?

This posting is regarding the recent confirmation of the DAMA results that might be due to underlying differences in proton and neutron cross section with the dark matter particles, which reflect on ...
1k views

### Correlation between outstanding hints in experimental particle physics

The 115 GeV ATLAS Higgs with enhanced diphoton decays has gone away but there are several other recent tantalizing hints relevant for particle physics, namely CoGeNT's 7-8 GeV dark matter particle ...
972 views

### Recently publicized experiment on destructive interference between two laser beams

Recently I've had several non-physicist friends ask me, independently of each other, about an experiment where two collinear laser beams destructively interfere along a certain length. Everybody wants ...
936 views

Quite new to all this - simple question. "A ball starting from rest rolls down a hill and reaches 10m/s at the bottom. If the same ball starts rolling down the hill from an initial velocity of 5m/s, ...
5k views

### How many digits of Pi are required in physics? [closed]

In other words: which physics experiment requires to know Pi with the highest precision?
41k views

### What do ants see?

After watching some ants in my garden today, and then looking at this very illuminating demonstration, I got to wondering, about what they would see. Not specifically ants (I understand their ...
27k views

### Why do power lines sag when they are heated up?

I was reading some information about the 2003 power blackout in the Northeastern US. Beginning early in the afternoon of August 14, 2003 big transmission lines began to fail in First Energy's ...
383 views

### Is this a weather phenomenon or an instrumental artifact?

The radar image of the midwest provided by Weatherunderground at 10:30 PM Central time, May 8 2011 has odd patterns. Are these patterns real? Perhaps caused by large scale convection over cities? Or ...
524 views

### Neutrino Speed in Supernova

I've read that neutrinos in supernova can be affected by "neutrino refraction." Is this analagous to the refraction of light, and if so, is the speed of these neutrinos similarly reduced from their ...
7k views

### Glycerol: refractive index & absorption spectra in 0.2-0.4um range

Could anyone suggest where can I find absorption spectra & refractive index of Glycerol? I am specifically interested in UV range, 200-400nm, everything I was able to find out was for standard ...
463 views

### $\nabla ^2\psi$ equals $\psi -$ average value of $\psi$ at neighboring points

Let $\psi (x,y,z)$ be a scalar field. I found the following statement in Morse & Feshbach Methods of Theoretical Physics: The limiting value of the difference between $\psi$ at a point and the ...
408 views

### Charges and Topology

I must apologize, I was a little bit excited when I began understanding some of this, I can not say I can compete with professionals, and words are still difficult concepts. In (1) S.H. et al. it is ...
797 views

### German book on introductory quantum mechanics [closed]

I'm looking for an originally German introduction to quantum mechanics. Is there such a canonical book used in German QM undergraduate courses?
166 views

### Black Holes and String states

We seem to know that black hole energy, and apparently event horizon geometry and topology, are functions of Mass, Charge and Angular Momentum. Area is a function of geometry and topology as well, ...
210 views

### Merge different wavelength rays

Let's say an array of rays of light is given. Each ray has a specific wavelength (in the range of visible light). Example: ...
415 views

### stability of hypothetical lunar atmosphere

Assume that by some means, the moon could be given an atmosphere, of the same density and pressure at the surface as the earth's. Obviously in a stable atmosphere there are temperature variations from ...
728 views

### Phenomena which are incorrectly declared as resonance phenomena?

In standard college physics text books, high-school books and popular level physics books, the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge is often taken as an example of resonance. However a more detailed ...
2k views

### Making symmetry between E and B fields manifest in Lagrangian

Maxwell's equations are nearly symmetric between $E$ and $B$. If we add magnetic monopoles, or of course if we restrict ourselves to the sourceless case, then this symmetry is exact. This is not ...
9k views

### Limit of Lorentzian is Dirac Delta

I have a quick question that just came up in my research and I could not find an answer anywhere so I thought I'd try here. So one of the definitions of the Dirac Delta is the limit of the Lorentzian ...
218 views

### How should I REALLY have done this continuous moment formula derivation?

One of my more recent hobbies is making "swords" out of PVC conduit, foam, and duct tape. As all the weight is forward of the cross guards, I needed to put some amount of some substance inside the ...
6k views

### How is the Breit-Rabi formula derived?

Does anyone know how the Breit-Rabi formula (energy dependence of the hyper-fine splitting in presence of any external magnetic field for alkali atoms when $F=I \pm 1/2$) is derived, or where to find ...
220 views

### Cassini 's and Pioneers RTG power output datafile

I'd like to have access to the datafile of the electrical output of the RTG (Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator) of the Pioneer's and Cassini missions, as can be seen in the figures 1 of the ...
4k views

### Theories that Relate Gravity, Electricity, and Magnetism [duplicate]

There are some people who (without having a stated theory that I know of) insist that Gravity, Electricity, and Magnetism are related. Some point to symmetry in Maxwell's Equations as a potential ...
2k views

### Why is there a minus sign in this wave equation derivation?

My book on quantum mechanics suggests a derivation of the wave equation $$\left(\Delta - \frac{1}{c^2} \frac{\partial^2}{\partial t^2} \right) \psi(\bar{r},t) = 0$$ from the photon energy-impulse ...
519 views

### Laplace's equation

I have got some mathematical difficulties in the following exercise : Calculate the potential of the polarized sphere along the z-axis. There are no free charges. For this, we need to solve ...
4k views

### Applications of the Spectral Theorem to Quantum Mechanics

I'm currently learning some basic functional analysis. Yesterday I arrived at the spectral theorem of self-adjoint operators. I've heard that this theorem has lots of applications in Quantum Mechanics....
540 views

### Seiberg Witten theory

I'm currently reading the Seiberg-Witten paper on $N=2$ supersymmetric Yang Mills pure gauge theory (i.e. no hypermultiplets). I have the following question: How does one understand that the metric ...
3k views

### Good books on elasticity

Can someone suggest good books/textbooks/treatises/etc on elasticity?
521 views

### Effect of spacetime curvature on the sea of virtual particles

Does the nature of the assortment of virtual particles depend upon the warping of spacetime in a direct manner ?
174 views

### Does the recent Gravity Probe - B mission mean both the mass of an object and the spin of an object affect time?

I'm a non-engineer interested in the recent GP-B mission results: http://www.engadget.com/2011/05/06/nasa-concludes-gravity-probe-b-space-time-experiment-proves-e/#disqus_thread Is it correct that ...
676 views

### Low-temperature hobby rocketry

I work with a lot of Boy Scouts who want to complete the Space Exploration merit badge. It's a great program, and one of the coolest requirements is building, launching, and recovering a model rocket....