Recent content by Robert Noel

I can't seem to wrap my head around the basic concept of the Schrödinger's cat experiment, the one in which a radioactive particle is either emitted or not emitted, a device is either triggered or not triggered, and the cat is both alive and dead (in a superposition of states) until one of us...

Well, I just can't logically accept that if we put antimatter on a train and quickly accelerate the train, the antimatter is going to want to shoot forward in the direction of travel and compress against the front side of the container, exhibiting anti-gravity...or would it be anti-inertia? If...

But as I said, I can't help but think even proposing such an experiment would be ludicrous. Gravity is gravity no matter what the charges of particles (or the constituent particles of atoms) happen to be. Again, if matter of any kind is put into a centrifuge and is made to experience...

That's what I thought. That's why I was surprised to hear a lecturer from a university mentioning that while most believe that antimatter reacts to gravity generated by matter just as any matter does, there are those to think otherwise. He even mentions a possible experiment to test the idea...

I'm watching a video on Youtube entitled "Angels and Demons - The Science Revealed" in which the topic of discussion is antimatter. During this video, the lecturer (from Berkeley) mentions that there are some who believe that antimatter would be repelled by the gravity produced by matter (in the...

Reminds me of some cool "corn-starch" videos that I saw on the same site. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCHPo3EA7oE&feature=channel_page And if that doesn't convince you there's something strange about corn-starch (heh heh)

Woops! I hope I didn't seem rude or ungrateful for not acknowledging all of these replies; I figured that since I wasn't getting any notifications of replies via email, the thread had died. Evidently the auto-notification stops working after a few replies(?). Doc Al, I had, of course...

This is what I mean when I wonder if I'm not just confused over semantics -If my objective is to continuously counter the force of gravity and keep the bar in the air, then it cannot be a case of "zero efficiency"...can it? The magnet would seem to be continuously working (or continuously...

Forces and "work". I've read that no matter what force is acting upon an object, no actual "work" is being done unless the object moves. This seems easy to accept if one is thinking about a bookshelf keeping a book from falling (the shelf is propping the book up and keeping it from falling...

But...but...if the mirror recoils when it reflects a photon, can this not be considered to be "which way" information when speaking of interferometers? How can an interference pattern occur if the photon clearly interacts with the matter in a mirror by making it recoil, leaving the possibility...

Heh heh, which unveils yet another mystery: How a photon can stimulate the emission of another photon with the same properties (interact with another atom) without having its own properties changed. But one mystery at a time is quite enough...I'll be spending a lot of time trying to...

I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying that the older photons taking both paths interfere while the newer ones forced to take one path don't. This is the part I just cannot get my mind to accept. Each atom emits its own photon, wether only one atom is doing it or billions. This idea that one...

Also, in the case of the first image I posted, where it looks as though an interference pattern is formed after both exit ports of the recombining beamsplitters (I really wish I hadn't posted that image, but rather, only the second image in post #41), when we block the long-path beam, I'm now...

Ok, I've been thinking about it and I've drawn a different conclusion: I realize that I've been ignoring all the photons taking the long path (of their 2-path journey) before before we divert it...that they still do interfere even after the "subject photons" (the ones we force to take only one...

Absolutely, and this is why I considered the exact time of emmision as somewhat irrellevant...in the case of a HeNe laser, a single photon could have been emitted from any atom along the length of its plasma tube, and further, could have bounced back and forth in the cavity dozens or millions of...