Recent content by Feinman

Interestingly, I think Einstein saw it as a way of testing atomic theory. The method, of course, was to invent statistical mechanics. In the 1905 paper, though, he used different phenomena, Brownian motion, osmotic pressure to calculate Avogadro's number and when they gave the same number that...

My understanding is that force is real enough. We can feel it an measure it with m and a. If the force is the gradient of some f(x), that defines a potential energy, no? Where does the energy go as x gets smaller? Either into kinetic energy or some physical disturbance (rock hits the ground)...

Think of it the other way around. You specify points in the plane with two numbers. Now set up a rule so that multiplication by a number, call it i, will have the effect of rotating the point in the plane by 90o. Too make it all consistent, see how i lines up with the real numbers. Turns out...

Answer may apply to older problem. Heavy planes (like the raid on Tokyo WWII) could take off from aircraft carriers because the speed of the ship was added to the speed of the plane. I think that's similar.

I have related question about thermodynamic potentials. We learn (and teach) the first law as a conservation law and then the second law describes the requirement to maximize the entropy. We introduce the other thermodynamic potentials and describe how energy needs to be minimized, for example...

The simplest way that I think about it is to recognize that the real numbers describe things that go on in the real world for certain kinds of things, eg, linear translation and things with numeracy (ordering). In that sense, all numbers are imaginary, they just have relations that correspond to...

One aim of chemical thermodynamics is to predict whether a chemical reaction will proceed spontaneously (without added energy) or whether energy must be added to make it proceed in the forward direction. In this, the progress of a chemical reaction is identified with one of the energy functions...