Recent content by PhysicsDruid

I believe it was sodium (Na). However, experiments constantly refine our knowledge of materials (take AMO and Condensed Matter fields for example). Sometimes you will find Na quoted at 1.82, then higher as you found. Take this paper from the 70s for example. The research showed a jump from...

Haha, I think you just gave a very verbose quotation to what I said earlier nicksauce :-) Its a matter of perspective, aniketp. I suppose, if you really wanted, you could place a reference point at some... say.. 50% of the way to infinity and give yourself some energy. It all depends on where...

Mmmm... two things, perhaps. First, as R->0, I am assuming you have some uniform spread of Q over the surface. Thus the word required to compress all that charge toward a point would grow toward infinity as you tried to compress repelling charges all together into one point. It's similar to...

Hmm, I don't like just "giving" answers :-) But maybe a hint... I assume this is a parallel plate capacitor (just for imagery sake, doesn't necessarily have to be). If you have: +Q ------------------------------ -Q What is the electric field between them? What work would be required to...

Hence... the problem. This sounds like some sort of twisted related rates problem. From the sort of question you posted, I imagine you know how to calculate your moments of inertia (and maybe are familiar with the tensor forms even)... sounds like you just need to express the rate of change of...

Naele~ Fourier Series is a *special case* of a more general concept. Perhaps some key words you could look up online or in textbooks would be : orthogonality, basis states, fast Fourier transform (FFT), orthonormal basis, maybe even Hilbert Space, or Gram Schmidt, or Legendre polynomials, or...

Along the same lines of Chi Squares and Monte Carlos... in general, matters of this sort are done through Likelihood calculations. Are you familiar with the freely available software called ROOT ? This has a MINUIT routine in its structure that may be useful for you, as well as, already...