Recent content by Feynman diagram

In answer to the original question, I don't think you can get far at all in understanding the details of GUT's, or many other branches of physics, without having some ability with the maths. That said, I don't believe that becoming a mathematician would be useful. I would pursue the theoretical...

Have you made any attempt at a solution? Moreover, have you typed that equation in correctly? (The sine of pi = 0, so the whole series as displayed above will be 0)!

Perhaps the thing I find most amazing is the variety of situations in which we encounter Pi in theoretical physics. Everything from the Scrodinger equation to n-body differential phase space formulae and beyond, to the extent that any relation to geometric interpretations is lost. We could...

You need the latent heat of vapourization of water for the last part of the calculation, not the specific heat of steam ;)

The temperature of the ice will be affected far more by the temperature of the ground than the air above it.

Bear in mind that the energy levels in an atom are not nice little spheres surrounding the nucleus as it is tempting to think of it. The shells of different energy levels have different geometries and overlap in many instances, allowing the electron to transit from one shell to another in a...

Yeah, it's somewhat unfortunate that the fine structure constant isn't smaller than it is, and thus avoid us having to calculate third and forth order corrections ;)

When I learned relativity at university the Mathematics department taught us to use the -+++ sign for the metric in Minkowski spacetime, whereas the Physics department taught us to use +--- (on the basis that spacetime intervals would be >0 for timelike separated events, which seems a more...

Why should the 11th dimension only contain gravity? M-theory posits that the particles of the standard model are described in terms of open strings which are attached at their endpoints to our 4-brane. The hypothesized graviton is described by a closed string which can thus propagate in higher...

A particle can actually, physically be in 2 places at once. This has recently been shown in an experiment (I'll post a link to the paper when I can find it). However, bear in mind that it's not the electron but the wavefunction for the electron (or rather, part of the wavefunction) which passes...

I think the idea of parallel universes has some credibility in the context of 11 dimensional M-theory, that is, if it turns out to be a valid theory of the universe. It seems conceivable that we could inhabit a 4-brane in a higher dimensional bulk in which it is then quite possible that other...

Yes, as cesiumfrog points out, acceleration is not relative; the reference frame of the electron is not inertial and any observer moving with the electron would agree that it is an accelerated frame of reference, hence the emission of x-rays (at least while it interacts with the magnetic field).

Being new to this forum, this may indeed have been discussed elsewhere and I apologise in advance if this is so. I do not really think that the mathematics of quantum physics is a genuine description of the reality underlying our experiments. It is fantastic as a calculational tool but when...

I think the biggest problem people have understanding the wave-particle duality is imagining that something is definitely a wave or definitely a particle. To explain diffraction for example we think of photons as waves. They are not waves - neither are they particles. That is the whole point...