Recent content by mooglue

Actually, I think I may have a convincing argument for myself; however, if anyone still has anything to add, I'd of course still appreciate it.

Hey everyone, I've noticed that when paramagnetism is derived in the context of stat mech, we only consider the energy levels of the perturbation. Essentially, we take the fine structure of hydrogen, and we perturb it with a B-field, causing the weak zeeman effect to split the energy levels...

And yes, you wrote the correct expression for the poynting vector. In a medium like that, the waves are still going to be perpendicular. It's really only in a waveguide and other special circumstances that this is not the case, so you can just use that the magnitude of the pointing vector is...

It might be something simple like that given an EM wave in a medium of index of refraction n, you can use B(w,r) x ek = n(w) E(w,r).

If this helps make the results seem more sensical, Entropy is a macroscopic variable that relates to temperature and energy. Imagine you drop an ice cub into a pot of water. The temperature will eventually change, maybe 10 degrees, but imagine how many new microstates you created by dumping...

Also, it doesn't have to be a nice shape. For example in your last picture, it is not, and in this case, you'd need to use the differential formula for the flux, which involves the integration over the surface. This just takes into account that the flux through different portions of your...

A flux is defined as a dot product E dot A essentially, so your flux will be reduced if the surface is not perpendicular. Think about it like shining a flashlight at a friend. If you tilt the light away from him, he can still see the light, but it's not as bright. You can just imagine that...

I wouldn't worry about the units, as the Boltzmann constant will cause such a unfamiliar exponent to occur. Rather, think of it in relative terms. Aka, the multiplicity of one situation vs. another, and then the entropy is just a tuning of this value. The inherent stat mech is in the...

I think everyone can at least agree that a wavefunction the square of the probability density for a given system. Would you say "probability" is real? It's not something tangible, but it does carry tangible information. I think that if you can argue that a probability distribution is a real...