Recent content by nightvidcole

Soft X-rays are re-absorbed before they exit the X-ray tube. You would need a thin window of low-Z material (for example, beryllium) in order to allow the soft X-rays to come out.

If high energy charged particles were to hit your retina, you could "see" them, you'd probably need several multi-MeV particles at once to create a perceptible flash. Fundamental physics dictates that a high-energy charged particle interacts with matter much as photons do - there's even a...

Think about it in terms of the Feynman diagrams. Photon and Neutrino: You can produce a W boson and corresponding charged lepton. This would be 1 EM vertex and 1 weak vertex. Photon and Z0: You can produce a pair of charged leptons. Also 1 EM and 1 weak vertex. [A light quark pair is also...

When neutrons are emitted, nuclei of the surrounding material could capture a neutron and emit gamma rays. So even though the reaction itself may not emit gammas, you will get gamma rays "in real life" from any reaction with neutrons as a product.

You could, but it wouldn't be cost-effective. If you built a giant, modified version of this setup, you could use lightning to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. But you'd be waiting a very, very long time for lightning to strike your metal rod.

The steel "magnetic coupling" piece will have an induced magnetization - with a "north pole" on the right, and a "south pole" on the left. This will increase the strength of the magnetic field applied to the large steel block at the bottom, creating effectively a single large "north pole" on the...

It isn't purely perception, it's also background knowledge. Someone could, in theory, place a nonluminous disk there and shine a spotlight on it. If the spotlight beam were incredibly precise and aimed correctly, and/or the disk embedded with a retroreflector, you could be "fooled" into thinking...

If the entire planet were suddenly subject to a 1 T magnetic field, the Van Allen belts - made of moving charged particles, would be severely disrupted. Depending on the geometry of the field, it could result in an extremely bright aurora somewhere, and could cause large amounts of radiation to...

Another thing to keep in mind is that any fuel that could allow you to reach a relativistic speed before running out of fuel (in practice this would be nuclear or matter/antimatter), would be potentially very destructive due to the emission of large amounts of ionizing radiation. This radiation...

`Quantum effects become significant when you can make measurements precisely enough that Δx Δp ~ ℏ , or ΔE Δt ~ ℏ , where the uncertainties are defined based on the precision of your measurement. Somewhat relatedly, quantum effects show up when the dynamics of the system (such as its oscillation...

Everywhere I look, I see the claim that J/psi decays to "g g g" about 64% of the time, and to "gamma -----> hadrons" about 13% of the time. My question is, exactly how does one distinguish between (1) J/psi -----> g g g ------> hadrons, and (2) J/psi -----> gamma ------> hadrons? If you...

At MINIMUM you'd need ~140 MeV for pion production, which can be interpreted as removal of a quark followed by creation of a quark-antiquark pair.

Those fields come from a current density - but the analogous thing isn't true for QCD. The dual of the magnetic charge is electric charge - which can be isolated. But whatever the dual of color charge is - it does not at all behave like electric monopoles that can exist independently.

At low energies, color is confined because attempting to remove a quark from a hadron will cause a response in the glue field that is often described as "snapping", or more formally, quark-antiquark pair production. However, how does this work at ultrahigh energies, let's say around 10^21 or...

Partially: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adg3812