Recent content by Bob3141592

Yes, thanks, I get that. Let me ask this way. When the measurement is made, at that point is the coefficients of the imaginary components zero? Is the measurement only sampling the real part while the imaginary part could be anything, or is the measurement sampling the real part at it's...

I guess the summary says it all, if the question is clear enough. The last time I took physics courses was 45 years ago, and the QM course blew my mind, meaning I was mostly baffled. I could not wrap my head around it, and without a conceptual framework I couldn't remember the details. So I...

Wow! Excellent answers, just the kinds of things I was looking for! I have to look into the fine structure constant and think about it in that way. Lots of other points made in the replies I have to learn more about. It's early and I'm dashing off to work, but I'll ask more questions tomorrow...

I get it that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum, and that only massless particles can move that fast. Must move that fast. A photon, the massless boson that carries the electromagnetic force, moves as c, which is given by the inverse root of the electric permability...

I'm trying to get a handle on how general a space in R_n can be. Part of my motivation is the curled up dimensions physicists talk about. How does one dimension work differently than another dimension? Can one part of the dimensional structure follow one metric and another part follow a...

A north facing window never admits direct sunlight (in this northern hemisphere), but looks out over clear blue skies (or cloudy). It's light is consistent throughout much of the day and is fabled for its purity. My windows face east, and don't see direct sunlight much past 10 am.

Thanks to all for your comments. I'm going to build this thing and if it works at all see how well it works. Time to find out how many halogen bulbs it takes to ignite a swatch of canvas! In using opaque paints, one color is laid next to another, and each color has it's own identity. In...

I have need of a spectrometer to assist me in my artwork, so I plan to build one. Some of the paints I use are opaque, and many are transparent. I want to capture the spectrum as they would look painted over white canvas, or painted over other colors in several layers, so I will be reflecting...

I have a hard time phrasing this question, so my apologies in advance. e and pi are both very special numbers, with very special properties. Not only do they have really cool ways to define them, but a variety of series converge to exactly their values. That is, a variety of series without...

e is the limit of an exponential of a number that is approaching one. The exponential makes it want to blow up, but the closeness to 1 keeps that in check. It's really a remarkable number! My question is, how easy is it to find ways to converge to arbitrary numbers other then e? Almost every...

As a programming exercise I wrote a program to generate primes. First I generated a billion of them (the one billionth prime is 22,801,763,489). My program also scans through these numbers for Twin primes (adjacent primes that differ by two), cousin primes (adjacent primes that differ by four)...

No, not if the universe is a mixture of positive and negative energy, unevenly distributed on small scales. Then you could have an infinite universe with zero or really any finite amount of energy.

Sure, we see it now. But we didn't always see it, just almost always. My question is about that short period, after inflation ends to just before any signal from any other part gets 'here.' For some short but real interval, every particle had to exist in complete isolation. Whatever details...

Yes, but not whatever technology the ants obtain! They are by far more persistent little buggers than we are.

That sounds remarkably reasonable and simple, though I think my Higgs boson nonsense makes for a better SF story. I wonder if you would have any accretion disk issues with a mini black hole. At that point, it's mini enough to be the size of a nucleus or less, yes? Not much room for turbulent...