The closest I've ever come to making actual calculations involving Newtonian Gravity with more than two bodies was proving that there always existed a solution to the N-Body problem. That took three days and a lot of caffeine and I don't think I could do it twice. Something about it being...
Does latent heat of fusion typically go up or down with temperature? I'm trying to calculate the amount of pressure needed to move the melting point of Thorium Dioxide up by 444 degrees kelvin using the Clausius-Clapeyron Law to see whether it would be feasible to line the combustion chamber of...
I haven't been able to find an answer to this anywhere. Suppose there's a quench in a coil at a tokamak and confinement is lost. I understand that there is no longer anything keeping the fusion going, but it seems to me that the plasma should still have enough inertia that, however momentarily...
So we know gamma decays are directionally symmetric, but assume we have two detectors and we want to know the likelihood of two γs hitting each detector at the same time as a function of the angle between the line connecting the first detector and the source and the line connecting the second...
If y tends to zero then the taylor expansion of the exponential becomes exact. I think that's what he's getting at. Although if this were the case the limit would be D iy +D-1. Did you leave out parentheses?
3. Sorry, I hadn't read through all of your question. I don't know. It's an interesting question. I think you'd need a quantum theory of gravity to predict what would happen.
2. What we are talking about here are non-linear interactions between different quantum fields. It's helpful to think of these fields as being like quantum mechanical wavefunctions. Imagine you have two wave crests colliding. What do you get? You get the sum of the two waves, so when they move...
1. The wave-function measures the probability of a particle being in a particular position or momentum eigenstate. A collision occurs classically when position overlaps and momenta are different. So we're looking for the probability that the position overlaps and the momenta are different. When...
1: My understanding is that by "collision" we mean that the particles' wavefunctions overlap.
2: Don't think of annhilation processes as being like chemical reactions with intermediate steps and definate time-scales. What's going on here is that we have two or more quantum fields overlapping...
But point-like particles don't behave like they're only at one position at once, which is the point, I assume, of the question that started this discussion. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle isn't just some arbitrary rule - it comes from the wave-character of the particles. I know what point...
This is really a philosophical question. The wavefunction measures the probability of finding a particle in a certain state (technically the square of the norm does this, but whatever). The wavefunction measures the probability of finding a point particle at a position. So there's some...
No particle is truly pointlike because the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle tells us that in order for there to be absolute spatial localization (ie 0 Δx), we would need there to be zero specification of the momentum (ie 0 Δp). Momentum and energy, and therefore by implication mass by E=mc^2...
Does anyone know how to derive the Ward-Takahashi identity for a field starting from a known conserved Noether current (or equally helpful, from a known symmetry transformation of the Lagrangian)? It'll probably be enough to allow me to do it for myself if you could explain quantitatively what...