Recent content by PhilipF

I was reading about neutron stars and wonder if anyone can help me with something that puzzled me , namely what happens to the electrons in such a mass of atomic neuclii? I can only see there might be 2 possibilities .Either 1) that the electrons are expelled from the atoms during the collapse...

I have been reading Feynmanns 'QED' and am trying to understand what happens when light is reflected from a surface. I would be grateful if someone could answer the following question. I am not sure which of these views (if any) is correct. 1) When light is reflected from a surface a photon...

This partly answers a question I was going to ask but perhaps I have got this wrong .I read that in the p,d,and f orbitals the node seems to pass through the nucleus , which is the 1 place where the electron has a zero probability of being found. So It cannot be moving round the nucleus in a...

A vibrating point extended through space geometrically constitutes a wave . Since vibrating points i.e. electrons are the source of EM radiation. You don't need a medium, all you need is for the vibrating point to be extended by its relative motion through space or by the expansion of space...

I found agood explanation of this in 'The Periodic Kingdom' by Peter Atkins There is a link to similar diagrams here : http://www.chemguide.co.uk/atoms/properties/atomorbs.html There are also various programs that you can download to give 3d visualisations of electron shells to run on your...

I read somewhere that francium is one of the rarest elements and that the entire planet contains only about 17 atoms of it . I really wondered if this was right and if so how could they know the number of atoms and also does this make it the most valuable substance i.e. the rarest or totally...

hello Pete I was thinking about the situation where the Black hole has used up all the matter within reach of its gravitational field and from then on seems to have a future of losing mass due to quantum fluctuations (Hawking radiation) I did a search for the answer to this but only found the...

I read that the singularity at the centre of a black hole is always in the future since time slows down to zero the nearer you approach it . So when a black hole evaporates ,at the moment when its mass falls below where gravity overcomes the exclusion principle does the matter in the singularity...

'abstract thinking ' is sometimes used as a term in oppostition to 'concrete thinking ' for example in assessing whether people have certain cognitive deficits . So a person may be asked the meaning of a well known phrase such as 'too many cooks spoil the broth' or 'people in glass houses...

'Homophobia 'and 'Islamophobia' are political rather than psychiatric terms ,meaning 'hatred of 'rather than 'fear of '. So in one way they seem a misuse of the suffix 'phobia' but actually are closer to the original Greek meaning of the word which is 'fear' so they are at least etymologically...

Thanks for your reply Nereid ,You suggest I distill this question to its essence . So here goes; What I am suggesting is that many aspects of the physical universe which were taken for granted as being either well-understood or amenable to commmon-sense explanations such as light ,gravity...

'Occam' + 'Ockham '+ 'Occham' ! "immo entia non sunt triplicanda praeter necessitatem"

Thanks Tom and L.Y.N.for your replies. They are helpful and thoughtful .I am sorry I am not able to express my thoughts more clearly . What I had in mind was that I feel common-sense notions of scale that we use in everyday life do not have a fundamental physical basis . We learn the notion of...

I was surprised to hear about surviving fossil dna as I thought that in a fossil all the organic material was replaced by minerals . However I found this site which seems reliable : http://scienceworks.museum.vic.gov.au/pdf/TerrorsaurusKit1.pdf However it does state that the dna recovered was...

If you hollow the cube out , how do you measure the volume of the remaining walls ? you are still left with the same problem .