Recent content by Somerschool

Fascinating. So... does a cube with positively charged vertices behave the same as a metal sphere?

I'm assuming the deuterium nuclei have already had their electrons stripped--chemically, deuterium in such a state is just a hydrogen ion, which is always present in any acid solution. Are you saying that a positively charged ion inside a positively charged hollow sphere isn't "crowded" towards...

Palladium hydride can store up to 900 times its own volume of hydrogen. (See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palladium_hydride.) I want to know what would happen if two deuterium nuclei were "caged" inside an icosahedral palladium crystal (which is about 3.8 nanometers on a side) and then a...

I'm assuming there's a way to push these room-temperature nuclei together. The question I'm asking is, "How close do I have to push them?" Some quick googling tells me that quantum-tunneling diodes are on a 1-3 nanometer scale. Deuterium weighs about 3600 times one electron, so deuterium...

How close do two room temperature deuterium nuclei need to be to each other to have a one-in-a-quintillion chance of "tunneling" into each other so that the nuclear forces bind them together despite the repulsive effect of the positively-charged protons?

No takers yet? Let me add a little more definition to the problem. Start with an extremely simplified “unobserved system” that consists of a single particle moving at some initial velocity towards two slits, with some kind of screen on the other side that can detect the particle. Instead of...

Thanks, Todd. The folks at "Ask the Physicist" have been very kind to respond to my questions, as has this board.

I'm an interested amateur who DEFINITELY lacks the math and physics background I need to even set this problem up properly, much less solve it--but I'd appreciate some help in turning a "hunch" into an answerable question. From what I've heard about the "arrow of time" problem, I've begun to...

I seem to vaguely recall that high-energy photons have more momentum than low-energy photons. In my "w" space, the frequency of a photon measures the number of times a photon "spirals" around the very-tiny-curled-up w dimension. In this model, the w component of the vector is identical to what...

A.T., I assume, then, that one photon with twice the frequency of another has twice the rest mass?

I'm aware that the mass of particles in accelerators increases with velocity. My counterintuitive prediction is that mass accelerated by gravity does NOT behave exactly the same as mass accelerated by other forces. In my model, a particle accelerated nearly to the speed of light solely by...

I doubt this is the right thread for a discussion of pulsars. Any suggestions where I should take this conversation?

First of all, Adam, I LOVE the cartoons and animations on your site! What I meant by "an observer's experience of time" is the same as what a moving clock would measure. (I can see that relativity requires extreme precision of expression--it is so hard to use everyday terms to describe...

Yes, that's it exactly. "Proper time" is a new term to me, but in my tinkering around with the implications of vectors in a w-x cylinder or cone I had concluded that an observer's "experience" of time would be the same as his/her distance traveled in the w dimension. The "cylinder with a...

All my formula does is trace the path of a ray along a cone. The "cone" I have in mind is produced by a very tiny curled up "w" dimension with a diameter that gets larger as you move along the "x" axis. Kaluza showed that a ray traveling along an x-w CYLINDER went through all the Lorentz...