Recent content by bockerse

I like that Lisi mispronounces Schroedinger's name. It reminds me that he's a guy who probably spent lots of time reading the stuff and not hearing lecturers in courses or seminars actually saying words and names. When I heard the Feynman lectures I likewise realized how mispronounced by me some...

Dr Greg, You said what I thought I'd said. You are correct in that the 2 components can't be disentangled any more than can space and time. I should've just quoted Einstein referring to deflection of light by a gravitational field: "It may be added that, according to the theory, half of this...

I just thought I'd add something as I understand it from a book Einstein wrote entitled "Relativity": Einstein states that light passing a massive body through space(time) exerts and feels a gravitational influence, and is bent in accordance with that, BUT ALSO bent in additional accordance...

Big Pete Well as I understand, gravity and curvature each contribute 1/2 of the bending in the case of light bending 'around' the sun as seen from Earth. How is a tidal force exerted on light as it passes by a massive body, since light photons are 'points'? Why is each contribution precisely...

Pete: You mentioned spacetime isn't curved in a uniform gravitational field. What's that? Seems to me like anything producing a gravitational field inherently causes a 'gravitational gradient' with distance. The only circumstance under which I can imagine a uniform field is at the center of a...

Can anyone explain in words (or equations if you can't use words, or in words to describe the equations) how "...according to the theory [of gen relativity], half of this deflection [of light by any massive body, the sun in this quote's case] is produced by the Newtonian field of attraction of...

Actually, forget it. I'm not even sure whether anyone understood my ham-fisted questions, but I found the answers.

Since gluons are also 'their own antiparticles' this applies to them too.

Ahoy maties, I understand that spin 'direction' relates to helicity, bosons have integral spin (-1, 0, 1, 2, etc) and that photons and Z-bosons are unique in that they are 'their own antiparticles'. With this context, I have 2 question strings (so I don't have to post multiple times)...

Sound I know that's the classical description of a sound wave in air. This is what all the engineers and physicists say. So would that then mean "sound" is purely a macroscopic phenomenon (not the perception of sound, but the 'essence' of sound)? An example of such a macroscopic-only phenomenon...

Something I've been thinking about, and I just have no idea in which forum to post it. If the sensation of sound is due to the collisions of molecules against your eardrum, and they impart momentum transduced across your eardrum into phonons which occur in 'solids' as modes of vibration treated...

Starkind Hi, so I don't distract from the thread topic more than necessary this will be my only post on this, but you'd mentioned cuboctahedra earlier... my question is, do you or any physicists you know of seriously entertain Buckminster Fuller's Synergetic geometry as explanations for...

Answer Hi, my disclaimer as always is that I'm no physicist, but the acceleration of the ship refers to the TURNING AROUND to return to the starting point. The crew of the ship experiences forces that throw 'em to the walls, and the forces produce acceleration (F=ma). This ain't no paradox...

Light Arrow and Mentz L.A.: Yeah, that makes sense to me, but I didn't know enough about our observations of black holes to know whether they can be said to move in any reference frame, since they just suck everything in. Although if some are speculated to be at galaxy centers, as I've read...

Flat Spacetime Disclaimer: I'm not a physicist. Experts, am I wrong? Rab: If your question means why is space called "flat" on small scales then I don't know what you're talking about, but if you mean flat on the largest of known scales then here's my attempt at an answer. My understanding...