Recent content by GRDixon

You might try Googling "Trouton Noble Revisited".

Thanks, Pervect. I have checked out the link and will spend more time thinking about the whole thing. I was aware of the Trouton-Noble experiment.

I must confess that I haven't considered any particular case. I simply used the right hand rule to convince myself that the electric force and the magnetic force on a given charge don't point in the same direction, when things are viewed from K'. The net Lorentz forces on the two charges...

The idea is that, relative to K', the electric force still points along the chord between the 2 charges, but the magnetic force is parallel to the y' axis. Thus the sum of the 2 forces (i.e., the Lorentz force) does not generally point along the chord between the 2 charges. Together, the 2...

K and K' are both rectangular coordinate systems, with their x/x', y/y' and z/z' axes overlaid at t=t'=0. Let K move in the negative x direction at constant speed v. In this case the cylinder and charges move in the positive x' direction of K' at constant speed v. I don't know how to do a...

Imagine a solid, non-conducting cylinder at rest in IRF K, with a positive spherical charge centered on one end and a negative spherical charge on the other end. Each charge experiences an electric force toward the other. The cylinder is compressed, but there is no torque. Let us say that the...

In SRT, Force (F) transforms identically to d(mV)/dt, which can in turn be transformed using the Lorentz transformations and the dependence of m upon speed. This raises the question whether Force in the force laws also transforms the same way among different reference frames. Certainly the...

You're right of course. Shame on me. I realized how dumb my answer was about 5 seconds after hitting the Submit button.

g does! Thus the buoyancy is indeed greater in a stronger gravitational field.

If the meteor and the satellite stick together (inelastic collision) following the collision, then the total momentum of the two following the collision will equal the sum of the two momenta prior to the collision. You can use this fact to calculate the amount of the total initial kinetic...

Correct. P.S. yungman: Thanks for the info. I must confess I thought that mass spectrometers all used magnetic lensing.

It's important to bear in mind that there are two kinds of acceleration: radial and longitudinal. Your thinking is correct for longitudinal acceleration, where the magnitude of the object's velocity is changing in time. In the case of radial acceleration, the velocity vector's direction...

The engineering answer is that its kinetic energy is not changed by the magnetic force (which acts perpendicular to its velocity at all times). But rigorously speaking the kinetic energy will be lessened slightly, owing to the synchrotron radiation emitted by any charged particle that...

For those who wonder if Abraham and Lorentz (vs. Lamor) got it right re radiated power, a Google search on "a non-radiating accelerating charge" may be of interest.

Thanks, guys. I personally think that the following resolves the conundrum: A charge, subjected to a constant FORCE, does not radiate (although it accelerates). Thus the accelerating charge does not radiate, and, as per the EP, it does not radiate when held at rest in the gravitational field...