Recent content by Zeno Marx

A lot of cranks on the net make a lot of the torus - of course magnetic fields are toroidal - but not space time right? Or could it be - a torus is flat (zero gaussian curvature) which is how we observe the universe to be as far as we have measured it's curvature on large scales - and it would...

I always understood that a microwave oven heated things by the microwaves (wavelength about 10cm) vibrating the polar water molecules so they try to line up with the flipping electromagnetic field and they then impart their agitation to the surrounding matter of the food. Now if this story...

Hi, I was wondering about the interpretation of the Hamilton Jaccobi equation. Naively we have H + \partialS/\partialt = 0 where H is the Hamiltonian and S is the action. But the action is the time integral of the Lagrangian so you would expect \partialS/\partialt = L Thus H + L = KE +...

but my problem is how you define velocity WITHOUT inertial frames because we are all experiencing accelerations all the time so there is really not such a thing as an inertial frame except in deep space

I'm very much simpatico with least action physics richard feynman being my major scientific hero my point was really - ok maybe the thought experiment i posted didn;t do it properly but the idea wa to ask how you define velocity at all if you eliminate totally the concept of inertial observers...

I mean change in velocity means something in the same sense as change of gravitational potential as far as how fast your clocks go

I still don;t see how you haven;t put this into the equations by hand at some point - relative to what? we can it seems only draw conclusions about the universe relative to us but nothing about ourselves but the fact our clocks are alterered by gravitational fields to me says they are also...

i tseems we can only ever calculate velocity for others rather than ourselves but accelerations and gravitational fields sem to slow and speed clocks in a way which is totally path dependant so if you get accelerated to a certain speed your clock locks at that rate and then satys there even if...

Yes Lee Smolin and the folks at the Perimiter Institute seem to be proposing this is indeed the case

you have to put a figure in for 'v' but where do you get this from?

I still think the proper time integrals unless I have done them wrong support my original naive conclusion though - ie: we have a ceratin "velocity budget" we can spend in either the time or space dimension so the faster we go in space the slower we go in time but this implies some refernce to...

Thanks all for your contributions I was thinking about notions of absolute velocity because I had been reading Lee Smolin's new book "Time Reborn" and he and his mates at the Perimeter institute seem to be proposing a notion of absolute rest which is an observer who will see the CMB the same...

now the resolution of the twin paradox as put down in textbooks i have read relies on one observer being accelerated and one not so one can claim to be inertial and thus priveledged - this i always felt to be a cheat - even edward teller uses it in conversations on the dark secrets of physics -...

I have to admit that was my own corollary but a pretty straight forward one in that if massless particles don't travel in time then the origin of mass is the origin of time. It's just an obvious natural consequence of what i have absorbed (via penrose) as a law of nature and as such doesn't even...

None of my physics professors have ever had a problem with this concept (the timelessness of massless particles) but i did have an argument with my second year physics tutor about it - it is counter intuitive but a direct consequence of considering the space of inertial frames as a hyperbolic...