Recent content by chris1234

That's a prion :P A preon is a hypothetical element of quark substructure. Google reveals there's a big book written by Kalman and D'Souza on them called "Preons". astro-ph/0410417 might be a good place to start coz its written for astrophysicists (i.e. non-specialists)

I think this isn't quite right. Say I have a copper wire and I plug it into a terminal. Then some charge moves from the wire to the terminal until the wire and terminal come into equipotential. Now, the number of electrons that move into the terminal will probably be quite small compared to...

Yeah, but a bit of advertising for my field never hurts :smile:

Accelerators have stacks of existing uses: Televisions - Every TV has a tiny accelerator in it. Medical scanners - Lots of medical scanners use accelerators Medical treatment - Recent cancer treatments use accelerator beams. (bio)chemistry research - I think Watson and Crick used an...

Well here are the most important experimental discoveries of the past few years I would say: various quark masses/states Neutrino oscillations The number of light neutrinos (only confirmed by Aleph in the 80s I think) Mass ration Mw/Mz (or was that the theorists, I forget which bits the...

You do't need QM to answer these questions... 1. The canonical momentum is like the mechanical momentum but with a little bit added to take into account the electromagnetic field. This is usually called "A" and is a four vector. It is sometimes referred to as the "4-vector potential" This...

Okay, so here's a couple more things. There are some rules called conservation rules that tell us how things work. No one really knows why these things are the way they are, they just haven't seen them being broken yet - and they've looked very very hard. Here's one: "The total number of...