Recent content by FizzyWizzy

I apologize. I didn't mean to suggest there was conflict between Gauss' law and Lorentz invariance, but that conflict in discussions concerning these topics tends to exist. (Conflict having a more social than mathematical meaning.) In fact, I often refer to the "Gauss model" (terminology...

This is an interesting comment on something in which I am not well-versed. While defending my dissertation a few years ago, concerning a classical electrostatic correspondence of point charges in a dielectric sphere with the first ionization energies of neutral atoms, one professor jokingly...

This is a fun thread. Would it be of interest to consider beta decay? That is when a neutron loses an electron it becomes a proton. The neutrino involved -- does it carry any charge? Perhaps it is on the order of the empirical difference between e and p? Is there really "positive" charge (as...

Let us not forget that both the Earth and the moon are pulling on each other. Why are we not asking about the Earth falling onto the moon? Furthermore, it's been decades since we landed on the moon. Why do we still consider outer space to be the in the direction of "up"? Is "up" intrinsically...

I once did a back-of-the-napkin calculation that, if we assume an electron is a dielectric-filled shell (mass) with a uniform surface charge (... total charge e ), the dielectric relative dielectric constant of the electron would be about 432. Probably not right. I've changed my model a bit in...

This problem is quite similar to one that I've published on. However, I would never assume that any three-dimensional system consisting of more than 4 point charges is "uniform". (What is meant by "uniform"?!) In this case, perhaps we are talking about the original Thomson problem (or...

LaTeX is -- hands-down -- superior to every version of GUI equation editors. Anyone who doesn't want to learn it is lazy. With LaTeX, you learn it ONCE, and you'll never need to learn a new equation editor again. It's like riding a bike. All these GUI editors are garbage. They want to...