Recent content by Christopher G

There is always something falling into a black hole. Dark matter, CMB radiation... Other stuff? I may not have understood what you meant. I'm pretty tired at this point, so I'm just going to read it tomorrow.

Crap guys, looks like you might get incinerated after all... http://arxiv.org/abs/0811.1926 BUT, you would be 'comfortably' within the outer horizon before this happens... So I guess we are still correct!

The average energy over a large number of measurements. The 'expected' energy.==EDIT== If you knew the energy of a system exactly, it would forever remain exactly that. There is uncertainty in measuring energy however. ==EDIT2== I totally see how this is confusing. But I'm definitely not...

Well... you can't violate the expectation value for energy anyway!

I guess you could, but the probability would be 0.

Yes, but he would only be able to do so for a few attoseconds as he would be in violation of the conservation of energy (to get a guitar), so he would have to strum quickly.

The Schrodinger cat experiment does not indicate that the cat is in superposition. Is is certainly not experimental fact that the cat is in superposition. People seem to have a very difficult time understanding what the point of the experiment is. (Don't take this as offencive!) It simply...

I guess you will get allot of virtual photons... A: Roughly 10E-18 seconds A: I don't *think* so (at least not by much), not without creating real particles If you separate the particle-antiparticle pair they are now real particles. If you do this with a magnetic field you will get allot of...

It's not meant to describe how it works at the subatomic level. You cannot ignore the fact that the cat is a macroscopic object. If you have read my previous posts you will see that Shrodinger came up with that thought experiment to show how ridiculous it would be for a cat to be both live and...

That's all a cat is made of. A collection of particles with the mentioned properties. Living is the particles in a certain state, so is dead. So (to play devils advocate) QM does say that the cat will be alive/dead at the same time. But few people actually think that's what happenes.

I don't agree with this, even though the general prescription for QM would imply this is what happens. The original argument (if memory serves) was to point out this scenario as ridiculous, and illustrate that quantum mechanics seems to break down at the macro level (at some point the...

As far as I know, Schrodinger originally used that argument to illustrate the disconnect between quantum processes (wavefunction collapse in particular) and what we experience. It would be ridiculous for the cat to be both dead and alive. So the wavefunction must have collapsed at some time...

Because of what I said in the first line of my first post. "Publications about science for non-scientists (nearly) always misrepresent the facts to make things sound more exiting." But you don't have to take my word for it! Study physics yourself! It's fascinating, but you have to start with...

Yes, and for super-massive black holes you can fall far passed the event horizon before being 'spaghettified'. If you were to fall into one (please never let this happen! be careful when playing with black holes), you would agree that the event indeed did happen. More scientifically, you can...

My honest advice is to speak with your doctor. If you felt physical sensations and thought you were going to pass out you may have had a seizure or may have an issue with blood pressure.As for the clock and penny thing... The more you pay attention to something the more you can feel/see/hear it...