Recent content by Nugatory

I believe that the Einstein's statement of the postulates shouldn't be considered a question for physicists but instead for historians - history of science is an interesting and important discipline, but it's not the same discipline as the science itself. "Independent of the motion of the...

There’s not a lot of controversy about what Bell’s theorem says, nor about how it emerges from the mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics as a theory about the probabilities of measurement results. But that just invites another question: what is it about a physical system that makes...

From an unknown asymmetry in the initial conditions, perhaps. The coin flipping experiment you cite in #19 notes the effect of a known asymmetry. We could develop a coin-flipping machine that starts the coin in a vertical position to eliminate that known asymmetry, and in principle we could...

Mach 150 is a lot (as in four decimal orders of magnitude) less than the 100000 miles/sec that OP was considering. But while we’re doing math…. Try calculating the g-force required to follow a circular path a few hundred miles in a diameter at that speed. Of course no discussion of macroscopic...

Building on what @Herman Trivilino said above: Any time you say something about the speed of an object without including the words “relative to …” you are making a mistake.

You are describing non-relativistic quantum mechanics, the only kind you’ll encounter unless and until you’re well on the way to an advanced degree in physics. The way NRQM works, we describe the initial state of the entire quantum system with the wave function, the wave function evolves over...

For the sake of the analogy, we're assuming that the couples have been preselected to meet the conditions that every couple consists of one man and one woman and every couple consists of one blue-eyed and one brown-eyed person. If you prefer, we could state it as Victor selects two individuals...

Native speaker here, agrees with your edit. A gauge produces measurements, a guide points out a path to a conclusion or destination.

Your intuition is mistaken here. Away from the edge effects and if the two slabs are identical the field is zero. That’s just another way of saying

Goethe (actually not Goethe, that’s a loose paraphrase from an English language translation) has a good point but you’ve misunderstood it. Skipping the textbooks leaves you without a solid foundation for communicating with specialists. You may be getting something out of your experience here...

There remains the (rather discouraging) possibility that there is no natural interpretation.

There is no such thing as "real acceleration", at least until you provide a definition of this non-standard term. There is proper acceleration, which is invariant, independent of coordinate choice, what an accelerometer (calibrated to read zero in free fall, as opposed to zero at rest on the...

It's four-dimensional spacetime that is curved, and it is far easier to measure the effects of curvature in the time direction than in the spatial directions: they show up as tidal effects.

It's not "light", it's single photons and .7 mm is four orders of magnitude more than the 350 nm wavelength of the photons. They can easily resolve a .7mm feature.

Nothing. When QM allows something that is classically forbidden, the explanation is that it isn't really forbidden and the classical picture is inaccurate.