Recent content by chris_183

to attain local gauge invariance a simple term is added into the relativistic wave equations which exactly cancels the mistakes caused by the equations' derivative operator. the term is: qA(x)φ(x) what the higgs boson does is to make stop collision probabilities becoming greater than 1 (which...

it's like how nucleons (protons etc) don't exist themselves, it's the up & down quarks that exist. in the same way the subatomic particles aren't themselves structures which are then composed of strings. instead the notion of a subatomic particle is replaced by that of a vibrating string...

What distinguishes different gluons? All 8 have spin 1 and zero mass so what properties make a gluon different from any other?

Yeah but it's got a good section on QM. :-p

Although this question is simple it's been bugging me: If you were to take one kilo of antimatter and annihilate it with one kilo of matter is the energy (using E=mc^2) released proportional simply to the mass of the matter or to the sum of the masses of both the matter and antimatter? So...

Anything by Brian Greene is a good place to start - either "the fabric of the cosmos" or "the elegant universe" or maybe "the new quantum universe" by Tony Hey and Patrick Walters. Just out of interest - because you said you were at school - how old are you?

Thanks for the links/info Marcus :smile:

Yep he looks at black hole thermodynamics; LQG and string theory separately and in some detail. It's a good book; you should definitely read it when you have time.

I've read in a couple books (e.g. in Lee Smolin's three roads to quantum gravity) about the possible union of LQG and string theory. In other words, that string theory and LQG can possibly be reformulated into a single TOE. I've been unable to find anything more on this idea through google and...

it's called Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and it's just a fundamental aspect of reality...there isn't really a physical reason for it as such.

i've read that quantum field theory can be applied to condensed matter physics but i don't understand how: quantum field theory is the union of SR with QM but how is SR related to condensed matter physics? i understand that quantum field theory would be useful because it can describe...

i was reading about the mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics and how a system at any given time is described by a vector represented by an infinite number of spatial complex number coordinates. does this infinite-dimensional state space have any physical significance or is it just a...

i was using the quote to prove a point, of course i wasn't claiming that einstein was referring to LQG (especially seeing as LQG was only developed in the 1990s and einstein died in 1955!).

okay perhaps claiming that LQG has been more successful than string theory in every way was somewhat misstated, but i do think that LQG will prove to have more to teach us in the long run. as well as this i just find it impossible to accept what string theory has to say about reality (most...

string theory is a theory of quantum gravity in which subatomic particles are modeled as being one dimensional strings of energy vibrating in multidimensional spacetime (11 spacetime dimensions in M-theory, which is suppose to bring together all current string theories). basically, it's trying...