Recent content by Fiziqs

I watched a Youtube! video on black holes, and it said that black holes evaporate via Hawking radiation. If I understood the video correctly a virtual particle can pop into existence just outside the event horizon, and that one of the resulting pair can subsequently fall back into the black hole...

But is there an experiment that you can perform on an individual photon in which it would be correct to describe the results as displaying wavelike characteristics? Or are wavelike characteristics only applicable to a group of photons?

I've heard of photons being described as a wave/particle duality. But what evidence is there that individual photons behave like anything other than a particle? I can see how photons en masse can display wave/particle characteristics, but what evidence is there that any individual photon...

But even if the gravity acts upon the entire chain all the time, it's still a wave propagating through the chain, such that if the gravitational source should suddenly disappear, the bottom of the chain would be the first to be aware of the disappearance, correct? I would assume therefore that...

If I have a chain suspended from a hook, such that gravity is pulling it downward, how does that gravitational force propagate through the chain? What would happen if the gravitational source suddenly disappeared? What would happen if the hook suddenly disappeared? What I'm interested in, is...

Thanks everyone, it's going to take my 9th grade educated brain a while to muddle through all of this stuff, but hopefully I'll be able to glean some sense out of it. Your help is much appreciated.

But therein lies my problem, for this only seems to work if there are just two entangled particles. For any number more than that it doesn't seem to work. It does hold true for momentum as DrChinese indicated, but it doesn't hold true for something like spin, in which there are only two distinct...

Pardon me for asking a very simple question, but this is something that I'm confused about. If we have a pair of entangled particles, and we measure the state of one of the particles, then the state of the other particle becomes fixed instantaneously. But what if we have three entangled...

Thanks Nugatory. That helped. And I'm sorry if this sounds stupid, but how do things come to be in a "fixed" state? Like when one measures the position of a particle. It's my understanding that the act of measurement causes the particle to collapse into a "fixed" state. But how did the measuring...

These are just a few quick and simple questions. When are particles in a quantum state? Are they always in a quantum state in-between interactions, or once interacted with are they never in a quantum state again? At the instant of the big bang was everything in a quantum state? If so, what...

When we look at the world around us our minds create a three dimensional representation of the world based upon our sensory input, but how do we know that there aren't in fact more dimensions from which we either receive no sensory input, or from which we receive input, but our brains and our...

We do appear to be talking past each other. What I am simply proposing is that we use the temperature of the universe (or some other parameter) as a universal clock. Our own personal clocks become irrelevant. We no longer refer to our own relative concepts of time, but refer instead to a...

Let's go back to our twins again, but this time let's assume that both of them are going on a trip. They agree to rendezvous back at Earth at a future "universal" time. Or in other words, they agree to rendezvous back at Earth when the universe reaches a specific temperature. Regardless of any...

The twins paradox applies because it led me to realize that every observer sees the universe as being the same age and size regardless of their past or current motions. And it illustrates the problem quite well. I don't know the best way of measuring the age of the universe, so let's just say...

While contemplating the twin paradox the thought occurred to me that every observer should see the universe as being the same size, and the same age. If we consider a set of twins in which one twin flies off in a spaceship at near light speed, and then returns some time later, the two brothers...