Recent content by cbetanco

You do not need to be a genius to be a good, or even a great physicist. That said, people like Feynman, Einstein, Maxwell, Newton WERE geniuses. For example, it was creativity and insight (helped along by hard work and experience) that lead Feynman on the path integral approach to QM or to...

"Then we figured out we could just park them in front of the TV. That’s how I was raised and I turned out TV." -Homer

I was kicked out of High School twice (in the same year!) and arrested once for drugs, never had straight As. Now I am a PhD student in Physics.

Wait until you are older... At first you love talking to girls and love when they talk to you, but then later on you love it when they stop talking. They might seem to love hearing about your life now, but later they will love to tell you how to live your life... Or maybe I am just getting...

I definitely think heigh matters. I personally have a cut-off of how tall a girl can be before I find them unattractive. The cut-off is exactly 5 ft 9 in (coincidentally my exact height!). I just don't find tall women attractive. Not that they don't have attractive features (nice face, breast...

Bloch's theorem says that anytime you have a periodic potential (like in a lattice of a metal or semiconductor where the atoms are equally spaced apart), then the solutions to Schrodinger's Equation will be plane waves, i.e. \psi ~ e^{i kx} where k is the wave number. When you actually solve...

Well, yes and no. For certain well known interaction, I would say yes, for example for a muon in the detector decaying into a neutrino and a charged pion (this is not the only decay mode for the muon, just the most likely), you would detect the pion, and the neutrino would be known to be...

I work for one of these detectors (ATLAS) at CERN, and we do not direct neutrinos anywhere. Yes, they are produced in the collisions, but we do not get to direct them in any way after that (at least not in the collisions at ATLAS). They simply leave the detector undetected, and the only way we...

How can something be "more of a point particle"? This doesn't make much sense, because both the neutrino and the electron are both modeled to be point particles, that is both are infinitely small, and one is no bigger or smaller than the other! We can't attribute a size to a point. Also, CERN is...

I work with the ATLAS detector for the LHC at CERN. It is one of the largest international collaborations in the world, with over 160 institutes from between 30-40 countries. Traveling and exchanging ideas at conferences around the whole world from people from various countries is a must. It is...

No, it is not too late. I don't think even if you were 32 that it would be too late. But I think at 22, you are still young and have the opportunity to explore what you really want.

The best engineer I personally know did not get accepted to university the first time around because of bad grades in high school and low AP test scores. He did appeal the rejection, got accepted, did a BS in Physics, then went on to get into an engineering PhD at Stanford. He left after his...

Both good grades and research experience is very important to have for grad school and/or industry. If it were me, I would work my butt off to get that B in your math class, and then take the research opportunity. Good grades are important, but a lot of people will want to see what you can...

It would probably require some Lorentz and CPT violations such as in the Standard Model Extension, but several measurements have put very tight contraints on such models. http://arxiv.org/abs/0801.0287 http://rmp.aps.org/abstract/RMP/v83/i1/p11_1

My thoughts exactly.