Modern and Theoretical Physics

Amusing row between Higgs and Hawking http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article4727894.ece somewhat overblown by the London Times reporter, who evidently saw it as a journalistic opportunity. Hawking is a great self-publicizer, but despite the name recognition he is not, as far as I know, in line to ever win the Nobel physics prize. Higgs on the other hand might be considered if LHC or some other colider find Higgs (or Higgses ) particles. You might say that the LHC was built largely for the purpose of finding the particle or set of particles involved in the mass-giving Higgs mechanism. Higgs must feel pretty pleased to see the LHC constructio…

Tribology is a branch of physics (or materials science) you don't hear about too often, but this is a very intriguing discovery: Physicists discover an unexpected source of X-rays "Even the lowliest kind of sticky tape can leave physicists befuddled. Unrolling tape in a vacuum produces X-rays — enough of them to do X-ray imaging, researchers have found. No current theory can explain such intensity of X-ray emissions, the scientists write in the Oct. 23 Nature." The mechanism resembles closely to that of X-ray tubes so it doesn't work without a vacuum, but it's still pretty damn amazing. MacGyver would be proud.

einstein theorized time and space over lap what about dimensions .What if the dimensions where already there as the dimensions over lap and as the super gravity produced became to great for the 5th dimension it collapses on the 4th in a pancake fasion an instead of a single point of entry i.e. big bang what if the whole 4th dimension erupted creating the hyper inflated 4th dimension our matter filled universe today. Maybe thats why the thoery of parallel universes is so right on the money.supersymmetric dimensions? but what are dimensions made of? maybe its just gravity at its quantum state condensed to a viable substance?

This might have been answered but does light have infinite energy. If a black hole has an event horizon, this is the point at which light cannot escape and hovers at a certain point. What keeps those particles at that point. I can understand that every mass has an escape velocity, but if that is even or more than 186000 mps what keeps that mass there?

I`v had an idea that may sound a bit Sci-Fi (and might well be) and I wanted to check if it has any scientific merit or plausibility. since light or photons are absorbed and re-emitted when it passes through a clear substance like glass, and the photons that exit aren`t the exact same photons that struck the material I wondered what would happen if the material was charged somehow? IE/ you pass an electrical current through a slice of quartz giving it energy, whilst passing a laser beam through it, will the emitted photons pick up this energy and perhaps Amplify the beam? I was thinking of the photons given off when an element is ionised (yellow for Sodium etc…

Physical phenomena explained or proved on the basis of WAVE theory is the misconception at the core of physics which leads to entanglement in going ahead in physics. I mean to say that wave theory was just like a mathematical tool which was used in physics just to go ahead in physics but the real concept is only particle (Dont merge here the DeBroglie equation). And I really discard wave theory and any phenomena explained or proved on its base.Every thing is particle. Wave, distribution of energy in space but the question here comes who is responsible for transferring energy from one place to another and its particle. From past 5 year I'd a great study over wave a…

Garrett Lisi was invited to give a slideshow talk at TED He explains the Standard Model plus extensions that might be seen at LHC. Then at the end he talks about his own ToE The thing is the visuals. He thinks and communicates with visual images. It's a great talk. Do watch it, if you haven't already!

Does anyone know how energetic the annihilation of neutrinos and antineutrinos is? When bombarded with neutrons aluminum produces Al28 which decomposes via negative beta decay with a half life of 2.24mins. When bombarded with neutrons potassium produces K40 which decomposes via positive beta decay with a half life of 1.3 billion years, If one were to alloy aluminum with potassium(some element with a shorter half life on the beta source would probably be better) in a vacuum and bombard the alloy with a powerful neutron beam what is the probability of the neutrinos and antineutrinos produced during beta decay of the two elements colliding(not to mention the elec…

In book "Motion Mountain-an adventure in physics"; I read about mass increase due to absorption of one green photon 3.7 * 10^(-31) kg. means on absorption of green photon mass of the object or body increases. Please tell me more about it.

Can anyone explain why c is squared in energy mass equivalence? Other than "it works"? edit: In other terms maybe, why is energy in units of m^2/s^2

As far as I can tell, an atom's instability is caused by a struggle in the nucleus between the nuclear force and the electromagnetic force. Are neutrons and protons bound by the nuclear force or is it only protons? Iron represents an equilibrium between these two forces. If an atom has more protons (e.g. 92 as is the case with uranium is I'm not mistaken), the electromagnetic force will "win more battles" than the nuclear force, and the atom will be prone to break up into smaller more stable atoms - fission - in which an amount of energy in some form is also released. The energy released is equal to the energy used to bind the original atom together by the nuc…

This is a shameless copy/paste of a thread I started on another forum, where I didn't get too much help. See if you guys can do better: Red Alert - I am NOT a physicist Start paste Dashed if I see what's going on here! The mathematics is not especially exotic, but I cannot get the full picture. As I am working from a mathematics, not a physics, text, I will lay it out roughly as I find it. So. We start, it seems, with a vector space [math]\mathcal{A}[/math] of 1-forms [math]A[/math] called "potentials". Is it not the case that the existence of a potential implies the existence of a physical field? I say "physical field" as I am having some trouble relating th…

I can comprehend up to 10 spacial dimentions, but I have a problem with 1 time dimension. With any spacial dimension (at least 3 right now), but if there were more, should there not be at least 3 time dimensions. And if m theory is correct should there a time dimension for all of the grouped spacial dimensions

It occured to me that time could just be another spacial dimension and the reason we can't go back and forth through time like we do in space is because we've been flattened. The best explanation I can think of is a flipbook with a 3D picture on it. Every page represents a slice of the fourth dimension. A fourth dimensional object would take up space on multiple pages, while we are just stuck on one, constantly traveling to the other pages. Does this idea hold any water at all? I'm sure I'm not the only one who's thought of it.

Back when I was in college physics, when we were talking about optics, my professor told us in passing that reflection isn't actually like balls bouncing off of a wall, that what really happens is that the incident light is absorbed by and then immediately re-emitted from the atoms of the surface. After class I told him of my understanding that exited atoms emit photons at random times and in random directions, and asked him how it could then be that in the case of reflected light the direction corresponds to the angle of incidence. If reflection actually involves an absorption/emission process, I'd expect reflections to be a lot more diffuse than they are. He beg…

THIS IS JUST MAILED TO MY FRIEND 'solidspin': In the photon stuff, Finkelstein says: "Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton were already certain that light was granular in the 17th century but hardly anyone anticipated the radical conceptual expansions in the physics of light that happened in the 20th century. Now a simple extrapolation tells us to expect more such expansions. These expansions have one basic thing in common: Each revealed that the resultant of a sequence of certain processes depends unexpectedly on their order. Processes are said to commute when their resultant does not depend on their order, so what astounded us each time was a non-commutativity. …

As we see in thread http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/showthread.php?t=34831 Higgs effect have simple interpretation: 2+2=3+1 Despite this, predictions mass of Higgs have different values: 1) M > 200 Gev; 2)135 < M < 200 ГэВ; 3) M < 135Gev; Also predictions are different about number of Higgs particles from 1 to 5 and more. What is cause ? There are different models of electroweak symmetry breaking.Not clear how mechanism of breaking working.Experiments that explore the energy regime around 1 TeV will put the electroweak theory to test.But can the analisis of triviality 2+2=3+1 to clarify how mechanism breaking of symmetry working?

This is something i posted here a few years ago, and got mixed responses. I have never looked back to these forums until today. Recently my mind has been wrapping itself back around this idea, and I have thought of new arguments for it. I recently took the idea of how we create fusion / fission, and why we dont have Fission known in the natural world. Also, the end of this post, is something i thought of as i was typing it. This is copy pasted, so if it seems generic thats why. Please id love input, and love to be proven wrong. Anything that is possible, occurs somewhere in the universe. The "Big Bang" , was an explosion from a single point, that spewwed the…

and before anyone complains about this post, I have express permission to post it! here`s how to build your own atomic reactor exploiting the decay principals and it`s physical effects. ALL radioactive isotopes with a high enough decay rate exhibit the physical effect of being several degrees warmer than their ambient temperature, Radium will always be 1 degree C above it`s ambient temp. the principal is simple, put enough radium into a thermos vacuum flask and fill it with boiling water, the water will gradualy get hotter and create steam. that steam may them be used to drive a small fan (turbine) and in turn a that rotation will turn a small generator ( a l…

What Wolfgang Pauli does mean? I meet book W..Heisenberg (Physics and Beyond, Harper and Row, New York (1974), where talking about some Christmascard send by Pauli to Heisenberg about some incomplete idea. Text was very enigmatic: "Division and reduction of symmetry, this then is the kernel of the brute! The former is an ancient attribute of the devil." i send letter to Professor Hans Primas, a explorer legacy of Pauli for more detail and get letter From Hans Primas Professor for Theoretical Chemistry at ETH; Zuerich, Switzerland Dear Yuri Danoyan, The original German quotation is: "Zweiteilung und Symmetrievemindeung, das ist de…

I believe that when a proton and an anti-proton connect they turn into energy yet produce powerful gamma rays that are very dangerous. When a positron and a electron combine i believe that the gamma ray "let off" is less that when the anit-proton and the proton combine. IF one was to combine a full anti-hydrogen with hydrogen would it give off a lot of gamma rays or less. MY question is basically was is more efficient and less dangerous: proton/anti-proton, positron/electron, or anti-atom/atom?

I'm still learning radioactivity. Alfa is a particle which owns two protons and two neutrons, right? So, if it is released, it may become helium, considering that the particle alfa catches two eletrons. Is what I am saying right? If it is right, is there a medium time that it happens? I mean, how long does it takes to alfa become helium?

In the Book P.Fraenkel, Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, FOUNDATIONS OF SET THEORY, North-Holland, 1958 you can read following : "The bridging of the chasm between the domains of the discrete and the continuous,or between arithmetic and geometry, is one of the most important - may, the most important - problem of the foundations of mathematics....Of course, the character of reasoning has changed, but,as always, the difficulties are due to the chasm between the discrete and the continuous - that permanent stumbling block which also plays an extremly important role in mathematics, philosophy,and even physics." This is present day problem or not to comparision of 1958 ? Because…

Dear Reaper and friends, According to general theory, space-time was curved in the present of the near by mass, it is alright, but there are two remaining questions involved! The first one is “how space-time is curved while it is an empty space-time”? The second question is “why mass causing space-time to be curved”? At first sight, it seems that Einstein could explain the “mechanism” of gravity, while Newton could not. Actually both of their theories have the same position about gravity, the only difference is that Newton explanation is a simple and approximate one, while Einstein explanation is elegant and more accurate, but also more complicate! Sincerely

This is one of those rather "pop-scientific" articles of New Scientist but I thought I'd make a thread about it anyway (even though it's also a "controversial claim"). How war debris could cause cancer But isn't this really old news though, or is the controversial part mentioned later in the article (assuming someone here has subscribed)? It has been known for ages that a single alpha particle can ionize many molecules, knocking off lots of electrons before it has slowed down enough to capture two for itself, so what's new? Or does that "mimicing beta radiation" part imply that the electrons are more energetic than previously thought?