Recent content by klotza

Weight is the force of gravity on a mass (typically, a mass that is not in freefall with respect to the source of the gravity). Because most human-related measurements and discussions occur near Earth's surface, we can take the proportionality between mass and weight to be g. g is not truly...

John Baez, who has written a lot of articles for this site, has a nice formulation of this, which involves considering the deformation of a falling ball of liquid and applying various conservation laws. He arrives at the Einstein equations without the standard appeal to Riemannian geometry...

At equilibrium, the electric field inside a metal is zero. This is because inside a metal the electrons can move freely, and if an electric field is applied to a metal, the electrons will move in the opposite direction leading to a polarization that points in the opposite direction of the...

Slinkies can actually get super complicated, math-wise. This paper has the most rigorous treatment that I know of, and includes discussions on the shapes formed by a slinky under various boundary conditions: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1403.6809.pdf This paper from the American Journal of physics...

I have a PhD in physics and I'm not sure what the seven basic quantities in physics are. Is that supposed to be asking about the SI base units?

George Jones, the only way the situation changed is that he (or someone) put his talk onto youtube, so now people can watch. The situation had evolved from "we can't really evaluate his theory based on a one paragraph abstract" to "we can't really evaluate his theory just based on his talk."...

This would work if you kept the computer in an inertial frame and then sent the Earth off on an out-and-back relativistic journey. Do not recommend.

I did a postdoc that was quite similar to my PhD (same sub-field, maybe even same sub-sub-field?) and I feel like there would have been some better opportunities to expand my knowledge and skillset. I don't regret it, but if you're applying for faculty positions it might be better to be an...

Hi, I did my undergrad at Queen's in physics. I took the first year astrophysics course there with Stephen Courteau, which was honestly perhaps the best and most informative course I took my entire time there. I also took general relativity with Laurence Widrow in my senior year, and did an...

The model you are looking for is the Ideal Chain. It is based on a chain of monomers that can rotate freely (or in one dimension, be aligned or anti-aligned with their neighbors) and ignores interactions between them. You can essentially treat the location of the Nth monomer like a Brownian...

If such an effect exists, it is certainly not a standard part of materials physics. You could perhaps handwave an argument for it that electrical and thermal conductivity are related through phonon mechanisms, and electrical magnetoresistance is a thing, so perhaps thermal magnetoconductance is...

The Stefan-Boltzmann law was initially empirical, but it can be derived by integrating Planck's blackbody spectrum over all wavelengths. The derivation of Planck's law explicitly uses entropy-maximization to figure out how energy is distributed between different electromagnetic wave modes, so...

Complex fluids is (are?) an area of physics research that is slowly morphing into the engineering domain. Sometimes this is known as rheology, but the study of complex fluids is a bit broader. There are a lot of nontrivial fluid mechanics that go into figuring out how thing like polymer...

Probably University of Chicago, but if there's someone at Brown you're excited to work with, don't let the school's rankings dissuade you.

The main domain of physics involved in fusion research is plasma physics, so you want a school with a good plasma physics program. The other things mentioned would also be useful, but plasma is number one. Nuclear engineering would be good for understanding the radiation safety aspects...