Recent content by gulfcoastfella

Thanks for the in-depth reply, vanhees. Plenty of ideas for further reading.

Thanks for the replies.

I took a semester of QM as an undergrad engineering major, and I don't recall the motivation for replacing traditional vector notation with bracket notation. Can someone enlighten me? Thank you.

I don't think for a second that Trump is a Fascist; Fascism isn't good for business. Some of the people flocking to Trump, on the other hand...

Why can't distortions in spacetime be used to describe the fundamental forces other than gravity, i.e. the electromagnetic force, the strong nuclear force, and the weak force?

Thank you Dr. Courtney, that's a great resource and I'll keep it bookmarked.

I'm reading through an undergrad physics book, and the author says he looked up the answer to the below integral in a table. I've tried to find tables of integrals with this integral included in them, but have failed so far. Can someone direct me to an exhaustive table of integrals and their...

Thank you.

In Lagrangian Dynamics, I assume that generalized forces of constraint are applied at the location of the corresponding generalized coordinate. I don't recall seeing anything explicit about the point of application in the text.

An example problem in Chapter 7 of "Classical Dynamics of Particles and Systems" by Marion, Thornton uses Lagrangian equations with undetermined multipliers to solve for the motion of a disc rolling down an incline. The resulting Lagrangian equations are: Mg sin α - M d2y/dt2 + λ = 0...

mfb, I read that Neptune was discovered through the application of perturbation methods. Does this mean a combination of perturbation and variational methods, or did variational methods not enter into the discovery?

Thanks for the reply, Astronuc. When I said Hamiltonian Dynamics, I really meant Hamilton's Principle and Lagrangian Dynamics/Mechanics. I'm currently reading through chapter 7 (Hamilton's Principle - Lagrangian and Hamiltonian Dynamics) of Marion & Thornton's "Classical Dynamics of Particles...

I read an article on Phys.org (The Strange Case of the Missing Dwarf), and as I'm in the middle of reading and studying Hamiltonian Dynamics, the article made me wonder how the unexplained orbits of existing bodies are used to determine the orbits and masses of as-yet-undiscovered bodies. It...

Thanks for the link and reference to the PF thread Bandersnatch. I'll be interested to read it (understanding it is another matter altogether.) :)

Oh, yeah, that's very cool; I haven't heard that before, even though I'm reading a book on the Calculus of Variations, and it talks about describing a 3-dimensional coordinate system constrained by a surface as really only needing 2 dimensions. Very cool.