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swansont

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Everything posted by swansont

  1. The issue is whether the electric field is vertical when the charges have rotated. It doesn’t look like it would be.
  2. Why? What requires that it be “nothing”? How was this chosen? What if R were much larger?
  3. The assertion that the electron would have 3ħ/2 of angular momentum already restricts this scenario to there not being a photon after the interaction. Unless you are asserting there can be a photon with no angular momentum. If you have linearly polarized light with the electric field in the vertical direction, it’s alway vertical. It doesn’t point in any other direction. Even with randomly polarized light, the field is perpendicular to the direction of propagation. With your configuration and twisting, that won’t be the case.
  4. It’s a tad more complicated, because an electron in an atom can have orbital angular momentum, and the spin is added to that but can be in the opposite direction. So an excited state electron can absorb a photon in the S orbital and still have h-bar/2 of angular momentum (the P1/2 state)
  5. What is polarization in terms of this twisting? How is this twisting possible for linearly polarized light? The fields do not change orientation. Why don’t these charge pairs cancel? What are these particles? Charge is a property, not a substance. How do we get these massless particles to have a charge? How do they respond to a static electric field? Off-resonant light is not absorbed by an atom, rather than being partly absorbed. e.g., if there is a transition at 1 eV and you shine a 1.5 eV source at the atom, you do not get photons absorbed and 0.5 eV photons emitted.
  6. The issue is the distance. Another solar system means light years of distance, which means years of delay in communication and several decades of travel time for cargo. You decide to mine something (“floof”) on planet X and send it to earth, but you run the risk that floof will still be worth it in 100 years — that a huge deposit won’t be discovered on earth or a planet/asteroid in our solar system, driving the price down. Exporting a finished product to X assumes it’s not cheaper to just build a facility on X to make it, and that it won’t be obsolete in 100 years. Is there any 100 year-old product you’d buy today?
  7. Except that it isn’t. A free electron never absorbs a photon.
  8. As the speculations guidelines say, we want a model of some sort. Some way that the idea makes specific predictions and makes it testable.
  9. The coordinate mass is just a proxy for total energy (rest mass energy and kinetic energy), so it’s redundant. The mass that shows up in most of the equations is the rest mass. Coordinate mass has nothing to do with center of mass calculations. “coordinate” and “proper” are used to refer to issues involving frames of reference
  10. Interstellar commerce might be an interesting topic to investigate, but any assumption that it would be a simple extrapolation from what we know and have is naive.
  11. The neutron doesn’t decay because it has a different entropy. Protons can decay, after all (beta plus). Just not free protons.
  12. Not directly, but relativity is based on it and it’s also found in electrodynamics so there’s a whole lot of physics that wouldn’t work without it.
  13. The problem with relying on pop-sci writing. The m in E=mc^2 is at rest (it’s a condition in Einstein’s derivation). The full equation is E^2 = p^2c^2 + m^2c^4 The energy of translational motion is include in the p^2c^2 term Mass can increase from motion, but not translational motion of the center of mass. Vibrational or rotational energy will increase the mass of the system. An atom or nucleus in an excited state is more massive than in the ground state.
  14. ! Moderator Note There’s not much science here; this falls well short of what we require for a discussion in speculations. You should be asking questions, not guessing solutions
  15. swansont replied to MJ kihara's topic in Speculations
    Why would they differ? You said you wanted to keep this simple.
  16. I didn’t say it was random. You have not connected it with anything. It’s not like it’s the volume of the proton that keeps it from decaying. Free neutrons decay.
  17. swansont replied to MJ kihara's topic in Speculations
    The simplest is an observer is fixed with respect to the sun, since the sun is stationary. Less time to cover what?
  18. swansont replied to MJ kihara's topic in Speculations
    You say that but then quote “The horizontal axis here is some x, e.g., ellipse's major axis” My summary refined it somewhat; since the major axis of an ellipse is just some number it doesn’t vary in time, so the only way for the graph and description to make sense is that it’s a projection. But Genady has clarified that it’s supposed to be the asteroid’s x-position. No, since that observer would be in motion relative to both. A velocity discerned from the graph would be of the asteroid relative to the sun.
  19. swansont replied to MJ kihara's topic in Speculations
    Per Genady’s description, it’s a graph showing how the x-projection of the major axis varies in time. The major axis is a constant value for an ellipse, so if it varies, it’s because the ellipse is precessing.
  20. What you’ve described is convenience, not something based on either experiment or theory. There’s nothing wrong with picking a convenient reference up until you assert there’s something physically meaningful about it.
  21. swansont replied to MJ kihara's topic in Speculations
    It’s not something that the graph definitively shows. The graph depicts the precession of an orbit.
  22. In the beginning of the thread I asked about the path to experimental confirmation. If you’re going to appeal to this, let’s see the evidence of these SU(3) atoms or the superconducting nature of dark energy.
  23. Musk’s secret talks with Putin that just came to light are a likely violation of his security clearance. I’m wondering if he gets his clearance yanked on Nov 6. (Before then might seem politically motivated)
  24. And there are people in this thread that disagree. Acting as a cheerleader does not bring any rigor to the discussion.

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