Recent content by hylander4

I second the comment about Tech companies. If your grades were okay, have you considered applying to any FFRDCs? JHU APL, MIT Lincoln Lab, Lawrence Livermore, Southwest Research Institute. They all hire people with Physics bachelors, and for work that actually uses physics! I work at...

Although I'm not very familiar with Einstein's equations, I feel like this line of reasoning does absolutely nothing to explain a physical process which converts vacuum energy (predicted by QFT) to more space/an expanding metric/etc. Are there theories about this? If there aren't, then I...

If this vacuum energy is fueling the expansion of the universe, what mechanism is it using to do this? Or do people think that space naturally provides a negative pressure on itself?

Sorry if I'm being pedantic here, but if photons are massless, why wouldn't v = c?

I mean, due to length contraction, if all distances in the light's direction of travel are infinitesimal, then there doesn't appear to be a third dimension according to the photon. Then again, from our reference point photons progress through time at an infinitely slow rate, so I guess its...

A couple thoughts: 1) To a photon moving at the speed of light, the world is two dimensional. 2) It's possible that we live in an 11 dimensional world (or whatever), but that, due to the limits on our senses, we can only detect phenomena that are transferred in three dimensions. I would...

So I was watching the show "Curiosity" on the Discovery channel last night. In the show, Stephen Hawking describes the birth of the Universe, and why our theory of inflation leaves no place for God. I'm not going to comment on the God thing, but Hawking said something that got me thinking...

I don't agree with your last sentence. Tesla's personal strangeness is definitely intriguing, but his inventions were almost equally as strange. A "mad scientist" who invented useful chemical compounds would never have achieved the same fame as Tesla because, to your average 19th century...

This summer I've been working in an experimental cosmology lab, and its really not inspiring me to go into the field of experimental cosmology at all. At first I was pretty gung-ho about everything, but the work never really got interesting. I spend half my week looking up information about...

I haven't really been given any frequencies to test. I was assuming I'd be testing DC fields. The coils are being used to test the effectiveness of magnetic shielding, and they have to fit around a ~1m wide cylinder. If it doesn't have to be too exact, would wood be alright? Or would wood be...

Hello PFs, I need to build some Helmholtz coils, and I was wondering if anybody here had suggestions on what to make the actual rims that hold the wire in a coil are generally made out of? So far its been suggested that I use bicycle rims, but even that creates a question--aluminum or steel...

My question is basically for any type of engineer that works for an Aerospace company. Do you work with many physicists? I've recently become very interested in the growing commercial space industry, so I've been researching ways to insert myself into it. I'm a rising senior...

I realize this. I'm looking into several possibilities. Still, I'm assuming that the application process will take the same amount of time no matter which field I choose to go into, so I would think that my above questions are still valid. Maybe not. Are engineering graduate schools...

I'm heading into my first semester as a senior physics major, and I'm still deciding how many courses I should take. I started studying for the physics GRE today and I plan on taking it, along with the General GRE, in October. Most of my graduate school applications appear to be due on...

I'm currently transitioning from my junior to senior year as a Physics major at a decently ranked university. I've been thinking about my future a lot lately. I try to think out rational reasons to follow certain career paths--money, travel opportunities, intellectual stimulation--but then...