Recent content by CRichard

Hi everyone. I was wondering, just out of curiosity, what are some examples of physicists using mathematics to make physical predictions that are later verified by experiment? I'm not a student of physics, but I've heard of how Maxwell used mathematics to calculate the velocity of a postulated...

Definitely, I hear you! I also don't like all the memorization involved in biology, and am thinking about changing my major, though I don't know if it's feasible at this point.

Sorry for responding so late. Yes, PT is physical therapy. CLS is clinical laboratory science. Clinical laboratory scientists perform the lab tests at hospitals and reference labs. I’ve only taken single variable calculus at a college level, back in my freshman year in 2009. I only became really...

Hi everyone. I apologize, I’ve posted about the situation I’ve been going through before but I wanted to ask a different question. I've been feeling frustrated for a while with what I've been studying. Right after I graduated undergrad with a biology degree in 2013, I went into a PT program, but...

Thanks for the responses! I'll follow your suggestions and be upfront and honest about my situation. Thanks again.

Hello everyone. I have a quick question, not really about any career field but about a specific issue in job interviews. I received my bachelor’s degree in biology in 2013, but plan to go back to school in the fall to study clinical lab science, with the goal of working in a hospital lab. Right...

Thanks for the replies! Locrian, I've heard about the little room for upward mobility and less than desirable pay in some cases, but I've also heard that there is a shortage of clinical lab scientists and that the pay is substantial enough to live on. I'm actually taking an intro course in CLS...

Hi everyone. Sorry in advance for the long post.As much as I regret it, I didn’t spend as much time as I should have thinking about what I wanted to do for a career when I was in college. I graduated with a biology degree in May 2013, and entered a physical therapy program (a decision I had made...

Thanks! That makes sense to me now

Spivak defines a function as differentiable at x if the limit, as h approaches 0, of [f(x+h) - f(x)] / h exists. In this way, I think that you could say that the one-sided limit must exist because this 2-sided limit exists at x (by virtue of the function being differentiable at x). But I was...

Hello everyone! I'm studying out of Spivak's calculus on my own and ran into a problem I can't explain on Theorem 1 of Chapter 11 (of the third edition). It's probably a very simple problem (Spivak calls it an easy theorem), but I'm still at a roadblock. Spivak wants to prove that if f is a...

In Lewis Epstein’s book Thinking Physics, he says that, since an electron behaves as a standing wave around the nucleus (exhibiting no known position changes, and thus no acceleration and no emission of radiation), something has to push part of the wave into a lower orbit to get the radiation...

Sorry to bump this. I can't seem to find a clear answer online, but just to clarify: if you think about the analogy of standing waves on a circular drum, a 2p orbital has electron density farther from the nucleus than a 1s orbital. So, I think it would have a higher energy because of the charge...

"E = hv relates the frequency of light to the energy of a photon. It doesn't apply to a piano string." That's what I was thinking too, because you can have many water ripples too with a high frequency but low energy. But then, does E = hv also apply to matter waves like an electron wave?

Thanks, that makes sense. The only thing I don't get is how E = hv is not violated for example in the case of a piano string. I remember reading that it doesn't matter how much energy you give to a piano string by striking it hard, the pitch is the same because frequency doesn't change...