Recent content by eep

This question popped up while trying to solve problem 7.41 from Taylor's Classical Mechanics book. Basically we have the differential equation (1+4k^2\rho^2)\ddot{\rho} = \rho \omega^2 - 4k^2\rho{\dot{\rho}}^2-2gk\rho and we are looking if the equilibrium position \rho = 0 is stable...

I went to community college and now I'm a grad student at a top-5 school, so no it doesn't matter. My experience was that the courses at community college aren't as rigorous as at a 4-year so try and talk to your professors and study hard to compensate. It'll make it easier when you transfer.

Both hits are inside their bands...

Basically, the two events aren't statistically significant enough to claim a WIMP signal with the expected background, but they can't be ruled out either. All that they can really say is that there's a 23% chance the two events were due to background. So perhaps it is the beginning of a signal...

So the people who do have the capacity to learn the material at that age have some sort of significant disadvantage towards breeding and passing their genes? Ridiculous.

Massive objects cannot travel at the speed of light so I guess I would say the question itself is ill-posed. Your understanding of light cones appears to incorrect too. I would say keep reading and try and learn the math - it's been my experience that once you have equations to back things up...

Isn't dark matter believed to *not* interact with light?

I'm pretty sure that was Pauli :)

The load you are taking is not impossible, but I get the feeling you're going to constantly be struggling to finish your problem sets. It's too bad you're not taking the 111 lab. If there's some way you could take 111 ADV (the 2nd semester) I strongly encourage it. You basically perform 4...

I can tell you from personal experience that this is completely untrue. Pretty much everyone is very nice and often what happens is you'll find a group of people who are taking the same classes as you and can work together on the homework, etc. Most of the undergrads hang out and do their...

I recommend pondering with pen and paper if you really want to understand it

I think the situation is that two (neutron?) stars in orbit around one another were observed to spiral towards each other in the exact manner predicted by their emission of gravitational waves, but nobody's actually detected them in a lab before.

Consider the process of muon decay: muon (at rest) -> electron + 2 neutrinos. Assuming the neutrinos are massless and the muon decays from rest, what is the maximum possible electron energy? We are given the mass of the muon, the mass of the electron, and are told to treat the neutrinos as being...

Same here for Stanford. I'm wondering who they did let in, as I have a couple friends who got into either MIT or CalTech but were denied by Stanford as well!

I'd have to disagree with physics being less work than engineering, but I think the truth of the matter is that it really depends on the university.