Recent content by sophiecentaur

Agreed. The teachers / explainers need to be capable of stating things in a way that's resistant to misinterpretation. The basic statement that heat flows from hot to cold can lead to the assumption that a hot object 'knows' that there's a cold object nearby. It's necessary to include the net...

The heart radiated from a surface depends just on its temperature and emissivity. The heat absorbed depends on the energy arriving and its absorptivity. The net flow is the balance between the two and (btw) for a given surface is the emissivity is the same value as the absorptivity. If that were...

I also have a problem with treating all photons arriving from a (series of?) emissions as if they have perfect coherence. What sort of oscillating equipment could have zero bandwidth? There has to be some degree of decoherence so, apart from what classical wave theory tells us, what would be the...

From this link: (QSNP) "Fock state is a quantum state that contains a precise number of non-interacting, identical particles," Does this imply that a beam of electrons, which will all interact with each other, will not have a Foch state? It confuses me (not a bit). Also, diffraction of...

I imagine that, as electrons are fermions and photons are bosons, the effects of any real aperture could be different. A slit behaves much as a n ideal slit for photons but electrons would be affected differently in detail when passing an edge of matter with a distribution of charge. So yes and...

The words "more" or "net" should be included in their statement. No resulting implied paradox there.

You seem to be implying that classical field theory cannot be used for any phenomena. That is throwing the baby out with the bath water. It seems to me that this question about diffraction and how to explain it in terms of photons can only be be done with a thought experiment. The...

But, if you want to describe the mechanism of light diffraction in this way then that is precisely what you are implying; the statistics of a huge number of photons which, of course, you haven't described adequately (they are not little bullets. Treating the wave travelling through the slits...

No differently. The rate of heat transfer will be proportional to the temperature difference of the two surfaces and their emissivity / absorptivity - and slightly modified / delayed by any intervening gas. The rate of burning will depend on the temperature but the process can be affected...

Overall a very refined machine. One bit I liked was the tapered winding drum. Years ago I bought an old pendulum 'School' clock. It has a Fusee movement which compensates for the drop in torque from the mainspring by using a light chain, wrapped round a long groove on a tapered drum. Exactly the...

It may be a good idea to approach Electromagnetism in the same way as the Science started off. It dealt with Charge sand Fields and assumed they are continuous. Forget about electrons in this context; Maxwell's Equations (well before electrons were discovered) deliver the right answers until you...

I think this is very relevant. All four ports will be involved. If the 'output port' is not terminated well then the reflected wave would appear at the fourth port. Using a range of terminations on the output should show this effect. I don't know what your simulation involves or what...

I think this approach is, at best, confusing. Getting involved with photons to describe the mechanism of interference (and diffraction) just takes you down a rabbit hole. Conventionally, the actual form of a diffraction pattern involves integrating over the whole bandwidth of the beam of light...

i.e. when we have found a working model We really don't need an apologist for Maths but, as it's based on axioms, it doesn't need measurements to 'prove' that it applies. Anything that crops up in Maths is part of Maths. But Maths is much too hard for most of us and most of us just have to...

To measure a quantity requires Energy, which is a function of Wave Energy (power times observation time) and Power is Amplitude Squared. The amplitude (and phase) are needed to calculate the resulting interference and you can only arrive at the Energy after the vector addition. The actual...