Recent content by zincshow

This recent article (https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-finally-nail-the-protons-size-and-hope-dies-20190911/) on the size of the proton left me with a couple of confusing questions: 1/ Is the amount of the lamb shift completely determined by Feynman diagrams or is "it spends part of its...

When an airy disk is formed, does using a polarizer in front of the pinhole change the shape of the disk?

The quote is from a different location in the article, but certainly not all of the burst of photons are exactly 775 nm. Some of the photons are probably 775.1, some 774.9 and a variety of values in between. The important aspect to this discussion is that a bunch of 775 (approximately 775nm or...

I like the wording they use in this recent study, they are using "A pulsed 775 nm-wavelength Ti:Sapphire picosecond mode-locked laser", I assume each pulse is a bunch of 775 nanometer wavelength (1.6 eVolt) photons. In the same paper, they talk about tracking locations and interactions with the...

Can we assign a location to "an excitation of a quantum field"? Can we say that "an excitation of a quantum field" has moved from one location to another location via a straight line at the speed of light?

I'm not sure what you mean by this. If someone talks about a 25 femtosecond burst of 1.97 eVolt photons, if you know the total energy, you will know the exact number of photons. Also, people talk about sending single photons in a 2-slit experiment where it is unknown which slit it goes through...

@Nugatory You often see people saying things like "photons takes about 8 minutes to get from the sun to the earth" or "photons trapped in a reflective cavity". You say this is wrong? Should this terminology be avoided? How else can a person express these ideas to other people?

How do they get from one location to another? Maybe they don't have a location either?

The wiki page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell's theorem states the following which I agree with: Suppose the two particles are perfectly anti-correlated—in the sense that whenever both measured in the same direction, one gets identically opposite outcomes, when both measured in opposite...

An article at NASA talks about a way to generate thrust without shooting something out the back. http://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=20140006052 From the article: Approximately 30-50 micro-Newtons of thrust were recorded from an electric propulsion test article consisting primarily of a...

One way to think of this: "All particles can exhibit wave properties. A particle that expands and contracts as it moves, will behave differently if it hits another particle when expanded compared to when it is contracted. In 1924, a physicist named Louis deBroglie proposed that the electron...

I used the word alternating only in the sense that when you measure it is one or the other, not to imply its state before the measurement.

Does the seesaw model mean the neutrino is alternating between a electron-neutrino, a muon-neutrino, a tau-neutrino? If a neutrino alternates between these states does that mean the mass of the three different neutrinos are the same?

So, in this model, a neutrino should be thought of as a single particle alternating in 2 states, left-chiral and right-chiral. It is this "superposition" that gives the neutrino a small but real mass.