Recent content by siddharth5129

Hi I'm having a few conceptual difficulties with random variables and I was hoping someone could clear up a few things for me: 1) Firstly, what exactly do we mean when we say that two random variables X and Y are equal. I understand what identically distributed means, but my difficulty is with...

A push is a compression wave. Travels at the speed of sound in that medium. At any rate, the forces between the atoms are fundamentally electromagnetic in nature, so a 'push' cannot be transmitted at a speed greater than that of light. yes. they would.

yeah. that makes sense. I was confusing myself. Thanks.

If spherical harmonics are simultaneous eigenfunctions of \hat{L} and \hat{L}_{z}, then that means for a state at which l=1, and where you have three possible values of m (1, 0 , -1) that the value of L and L_{z} cannot really be determined simultaneously. Because the three fold degeneracy of...

I'm sorry. You're right. There is a net force on the container from the fluid. You'd think you have this stuff down to a tee after 2 years of advanced high school physics. *sigh* ... keep slipping up.

If your reference frame is inertial, then the fluid accelerates with the train (Once it's free surface has achieved the stated configuration of course. We cannot analyze the hydrodynamical situation here ... That would be messy. I'm simply talking about the final hydrostatic configuration ) This...

Where is this vacuum present? If it's present throughout your system, then the water flow won't terminate until all the water from the bottle has flown into the bigger container (Because there's no air pressure to counter the weight of the water in the bottle ) If you're talking about vacuum...

Wow. Thanks a ton. That cleared up the whole mess of ideas in my head for me.

The eigenstates of a hydrogen atom are stationary states with definite values of energy. Now, as I understand it, the quantum mechanical state of the electron in the hydrogen atom is really a linear superposition of all these energy eigenstates. So this should mean that there is a finite...

Thanks. That derivation seems to intensely mathematical for me, but i shall try to figure it out. So the whole thing can be traced back to the fact that physical laws should be invariant under certain kinds of transformations ?

The bouncing of a ball is a periodic event. So counting the number of bounces is the same as using a watch is it not? A watch essentially counts a recurring periodic event. So if you say that the number of bounces is invariant, then I have in fact devised a clock which is invariant at near light...

Does this derivation use light clocks? I would just like to see an argument that isn't hinged on the use of light clocks. Could you send me a link where they derive it formally without the use of light clocks ?

Thanks. That clears up a lot of things for me. I'm just confused about why use light to derive lorentz transformations. Does it have to do with the fact that we 'see' everything? Isn't information available to us via sound as well? Why not use sound to derive everything ? In that case would you...

Thanks. But this assumes that time dilation is true. My concern is with showing that it is true. So, why exactly would the vector quantities not add vectorially as in the galilean sense ? Can we show that they shouldn't add vectorially near light speeds without invoking light clocks ? Can we use...

So you're saying you could derive the time dilation equation by using the bouncy ball method too ? Has this been done anywhere ?