Recent content by Eric Walker

In my blissful naivety about physics, I did not think to make a distinction. (Hopefully in this case not a distinction without difference.)

I have been trying to understand the implications of a thought experiment and am interested to know either where it's going off course or what those implications might be. Through some reading of earlier threads on this forum I have verified my starting hunch that photons bend spacetime despite...

I guess I was implicitly querying your assumption (and that of Bill Johnson, the author of the quote I excerpted) about the effect being tiny when asymmetry is involved. I suspect that if the matter has neither been explored theoretically nor investigated empirically, your assumption about a...

Those of course are examples of weak decay channels; there are yet others as well: zirconium-89 and strontium-85 (via electron capture) and rhenium-187 (via beta decay). The referenced page agrees with mfb on the matter of strong decays, which is what we're considering here: The author...

Thank you, mfb, for the helpful reply. In order to better understand it, I'll ask a further question. Consider a p electron orbital, which, roughly speaking, has the geometry of a dumbbell passing through the nucleus with a node at the origin. In the Rydberg case, I understand that it's...

In a heavy nucleus, the balance of the Coulomb and nuclear forces is a delicate one. This can be seen in two cases: First, in oblong deformed nuclei, alpha particle emission is more likely to occur at the poles, where the Coulomb barrier is thinner, than at the waist. Second, heavy synthetic...

I think my summary of his position was incorrect only on a minor point of terminology. What jarekduda has been referring to as "elementary charge" I referred to as "electron". With that misunderstanding out of the way, I think the heart of my summary of his argument still stands, which is that...

He's given the Penning trap as an experiment to sort between the various possibilities: a Penning trap, in his understanding, shows that the electron is highly localized in a very small region for an extended period of time. Taken at face value, without further elaboration, that reply of his...

I guess I'm trying to get my discussion partner to understand this point, and my discussion partner believes that the matter can be sorted out by referencing the Penning trap and other experiments. If I say to him, "you're essentially getting into philosophy, because there's other ways of...

I'm thinking specifically of this and similar descriptions I have come across on Wikipedia: My contention is that without an experiment to sift between the competing possibilities, a position such as this one can only be assessed on the basis of intuition and taste and cannot as such be...

I don't disagree. But my understanding is that one interpretation of the available experiments is that the electron is a wave, at least in certain contexts, and that the point you make does not invalidate that understanding. I am not prepared to weigh in on this specific take on things and...

I am in the midst of a discussion with someone who feels very confident that an electron is always and forever a point particle and never a wave; any wave-like behavior that is observed must be attributed to a pilot wave that guides the path of the electron. I have sought to argue that this...

To make my question a little clearer, here is a schematic diagram that depicts the intuition behind my question, which ignores everything but lattice sites A and B in the platinum sample: The thought is that the varying circumstances of A and B, which are situated in very different areas of the...

Consider two atoms of platinum, A and B, in a sample of platinum. Atom A lives deep within the sample, and atom B lives at the tip of a sharp protuberance at the surface. My understanding is that electrons in the sample will accumulate within a surface defect such as the tip of a sharp needle...

Hi, I am a dilettante without training in physics who has a qualitative understanding of some basic principles in nuclear physics, but no mastery of the math involved. I am interested in the experimental side of this topic and am here to observe and learn about the concrete details involved in...