Recent content by PhyCurious

Very helpful, thank you!

Interesting. Would this be an argument for an infinite, rather than a really large but finite, Hilbert space for our universe? Or does that not follow? The whole concept of 'Hilbert spaces' is still really new to me, so trying to wrap my head around it...

Summary: How does many worlds deal with the measurement of an electron's position in space? Hi all - I am reading Sean Carroll's book on quantum mechanics and reached the end of the section on "branching and splitting" without getting an answer. I will lay out my assumptions and then get to...

OK this is helpful and makes sense. Does this mean that photons are always moving (and always at the speed of light)?

I get what you are saying and could probably repeat it back to you, but this is a fairly non-intuitive idea, right? Basically a photon can never be at rest, so it has momentum of magnitude ##p##? And as a result has energy but no mass (thereby violating the words of "mass-energy equivalence" but...

This, in a nutshell, is what I'm struggling to understand. The mass is zero but the energy is non-zero. Just trying to wrap my head around this, I've been reading different explanations of this all day (here and on other websites). It seems to have something to do with the inertial frame of the...

OK, this is helpful. I am still struggling to understand how something with zero rest mass can have energy without violating mass-energy equivalence. Would it be correct to say that the photons have zero rest mass but have relativistic mass (I understand this is a somewhat problematic or...

My question comes from reading the wikipedia page on mass-energy equivalence. The statement would seem to be contradictory: So photons contribute to the energy (and therefore mass) of the container; but photons are massless - that is, they have 0 rest mass. But doesn't this mean that we're...

I'm hanging by a thread here but I think this makes sense. I'll keep digging based on the info provided here to try and understand it better. Thanks!

This is helpful, thank you! I'm trying to wrap my head around these subatomic particles, I appreciate the help.

Hi Peter, your criticism of how I described time dilation seemed to be targeted at the language I used to describe it rather than a misunderstanding of the concept itself. It seemed to me like I should have just said "near the speed of light" rather than "at the speed of light" to resolve that...

Can you please help me understand these two things? Energy is a property of matter, as is mass. Mass and energy are equivalent for an object at rest (or in anyone particular frame of reference). So what is matter besides an object that occupies space and has mass and energy as properties? It...

Thank you for the clarification on time dilation, that makes a lot of sense. Can you expand on this a little bit? Perhaps a more specific question could be, what is energy in this context? Is there a way for a lay-person to understand or conceptualize it? I have always basically thought of it...

That's why I posted here asking the question. I start the question off saying I'm an amateur, I would just like to learn more about physics. I wasn't trying to present time dilation as a premise - it's just a relativistic effect that was relevant to the question I have. Could you please point...

I'm an amateur physics enthusiast, and there is a question that's been in the back of my mind for some time that I haven't been able to answer on my own, and haven't gotten a satisfactory answer elsewhere. First, I want to define a couple of terms and make sure my understanding isn't breaking...