Physics
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How does an electrical torch or flashlight work? According to the usual description, the lamp inside produces light, this light is shone on the objects we desire to see, partially reflected from their surfaces, and finally some of that light is captured by our eyes. This is not wrong, but it somewhat distorts the fundamentals of visual perception, which is not about perceiving light but about perceiving differences.
Actually, all the objects around us send out light all the time, even if the room appears completely dark to us. This light happens to be mostly infrared light. Nevertheless, if…
The Mystery of Entropy (1)
What is entropy and what does entropy have to do with order and disorder? We know what order is. The concepts of order and disorder have been part of our consciousness since long before the notion of entropy was ever invented.
What Order Is
Order is having everything in its proper place, behaving in its proper manner. Disorder is the opposite. Order is trains running on time, people getting to where they need to go, and shipments arriving on schedule. Order is troops reporting to their proper posts to perform their proper duties…
In case you haven't noticed, there is a new paper in the arxiv which you should not ignore if you are doing Higgs physics at the LHC. Of course, most of you are not involved in this, but still, it may feel good to know that there has recently been a collective effort of experimentalists and theorists to put together detailed and precise predictions for the Higgs boson production rate, in a way that can be easily used by the experiments.
The article is titled "Handbook of LHC Higgs Cross Sections - 1. Inclusive Observables". It is a hefty 150 pages document, which contains a lot of information…
Everybody knows that the orbital momentum is "quantized" and its z-projection has integer eigenvalues in units of . Too few, however, know that it is, in fact, a quasi-particle angular momentum which is integer-valued, not the particle one!
To see it, let us consider two spinless particles with masses m1 and m2 coupled with any central potential, say, with . The quasi-particle with the reduced mass describes the relative particle motion and depends on both particles in a two-particle compound system. It is its orbital momentum which is quantized in terms of…
2011 is the 100th anniversary of the discovery of superconductivity and I am thinking a blog of the puzzle would be a timely topic. When I was 17 I prayed to God for a challenge worthy of the skills I was given. I had seen a NOVA special on superconductivity and decided to research it at the local library. The impression I got than and even now is nobody has a clue of how it works and I should do it. This blog is a story of what I am thinking it is. I wanted to keep this brief, because I don’t like writing and I don’t know if its right. After 21 years, my view on superconductivity has changed…
NEW THEORIES OF COSMOLOGY for OPEN DISCUSSION History of the science always showed that the science is like a mirage. People will think that science has reached to an end ,there is no further discoveries etc,. But all the time we found that still we are at the begining only and l there is so much to go.Let us cultivate some of the potential ideas for further development of science.
Double Relativity Effect and Film theory of the UniverseABSTRACT Defined an imaginary group of particles called ‘Non Conventional particles’ and…
I know that some of the visitors of this blog are surprised to find personal stuff in my column every now and then. However, a blog is an online diary, and I do leave here my personal thoughts if I feel like it. This is one of those times. If you are not curious nor interested you are thus advised to visit some other physics-full post, for example this recent one here. In this post I wish to discuss my personal achievements and failures, my highs and lows of the past year.
All in all, 2010 was a good year for me, for several reasons. Let me provide some highlights in random order.
- For the…
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The old discussion about how an airplane, that is many tons of steel, can keep staying supported in mere air, is a perfect example for how discussions way too often polarize into two camps with both sides being wrong. Little headway is possible once any attempt at resolution is portrayed as either a dangerous accommodating that leads onto a slippery slope toward defeat, or worse belonging to the other, the evil side. There are too many such issues, not only in politics or largely yet to be explored scientific fields like climatology. Even in known physics, for instance in special relativity,…
In his book "Everything's Relative - And Other Fables From Science And Technology" Tony Rothman writes:
"[The term] 'special relativity' is probably the greatest misnomer in the history of science"
I wholeheartedly agree. Amongst all scientific terms, the single word 'relativity' stands out as absolute record holder for triggering an astonishing amount of utter nonsense.
It was not Einstein but Max Planck, who introduced the term 'relativity theory'. That was in 1906, the year following Einstein's annus mirabilis. Despite Einstein's opposition, the name stuck. Years later Einstein…
Dynamics can be surprising at times, even when applied to well-understood and tested physical systems such as a basketball and a basket. Look what happened to a free shot executed by Kamyl Kawrzydek in a match between Idaho State University and Utah State University, played at Gossner's Invitational: the ball bounces on the basket, and then stops there for three full seconds, before eventually dropping into the basket.
Nothing magic of course: just a one-in-a-million situation, whereby a unstable equilibrium point is reached by a physical system with insufficient kinetic energy to roll…