Ask a bored physicist anything

Ask a bored physicist anything

Other urls found in this thread:

profmattstrassler.com/2012/10/15/why-the-higgs-and-gravity-are-unrelated/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_relativity
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

Do you believe it is possible to travel into the fifth dimension?

Why does it appear that time travels more slowly the closer you are to a large mass (blackhole)? By what process does mass cause gravity?

*time passes more slowly (corrected for clarity)

Nope, Given the length scale of every 4N+1 dimensional theory I don't think it will ever be possible to even probe the compact dimensions

The time dilation is due to special relativity, where in the most basic of senses space and time are altered to ensure that the speed of light isn't violated. As for mass causing gravity....well that's a really good question. We know that mass is created due to the higgs field, but there still isn't a solid theory of quantum gravity that can actually explain what the hell is going on. I could be wrong since I never really studied General Relativity and this is out of my research field

Do u accept all schools in your field or is there a sort of hierarchy? Where do U rank the theoretical shit like cosmology

Does quantum energy levels like you showed in your pic work for quarks?

Here's a pretty nice explanation of the difference between gravity and the higgs field

profmattstrassler.com/2012/10/15/why-the-higgs-and-gravity-are-unrelated/

What do you study?

memetic physics

I don't really consider there to be a true Hierarchy. I'm an experimental condensed matter physicist, but I really do appreciate the work being done from even the most theoretical mathematical physicist. Cosmology isn't really a theoretical field seeing as how we can actually observe and record the things going on.

Not really sure what you mean by this. The Lamb shift has to do with degenerate spin states of the hydrogen atom having different energies, when seemingly they shouldn't. I don't know much about quarks but I don't think they have degenerate energies of this nature

Never really understood something about the color of light. I believe it's determined by the frequency of the ray, but when light viewed as a particle, is it determined by the energy of the photon or..?

does violated mean changed from 300 million meters per second? Why is the speed of light a constant, and why can it not be increased or decreased?

And what causes light to begin traveling at this same speed, regardless of the star's speed?

How magnetic impurities in single electron transistors change the scattering of conduction electrons

what do you study??

Why is the sky blue?

This is actually a pretty interesting question, and still open for debate. So to start light doesn't always travel at the same speed; it's different for every medium that exists. So I can actually "freeze" a photon if I wanted using some lasers and such. What's interesting is that no one is sure if the photon actually has mass or not, so we don't know if the 300 million mps is the speed the photon actually travels at or not. This begs the question of which is more important, the absolute number, or the speed of a photon in a vacuum

not OP but please use Google to screen your questions first, in case it's something easy to answer or an epic joke

thanks for taking the time OP, quality thread so far

An effect called Rayleigh Scattering which causes the photons from the sun to hit the particles in our atmosphere and emit the blue wavelength you observe

wtf just google rayleigh scattering

...

wide a 22 kill my cuzin? my ucle said it was just a toy

because while a much smaller round than other rifle calibers, the .22lr is still a real bullet powered by real propellant

is the centrifugal force real?

can you please follow up more on this OP? I looked it up but I found information about squaring prime numbers and I guess I'm missing the conceptual background to understand this

Nope, it's a fictitious force, just like Centripetal force

Oh hey I understand that diagram. Hooray spin states

Not OP, but also physics.

Yes. They're the same thing.

What you're going to actually want to look up is something like N=4 SCFT. To expand a little bit( it's not my field but i've attended a few talks on the stuff) all string theories generally involve extra dimensions that are at such small length scales they don't really interact with us in any way. If you want to do some research on your own, just start by looking up simpler cases like N=2 CFT before moving on to SCFT (which stands for super-conformal field theory)

Does dark energy exist or is it more likely that our current understanding of gravity is incomplete?

i thank you for a anser.

To elaborate a little more on this. The energy of the photon is directly related to the wavelength (and thus frequency) that you observe. This is generally known as plancks equation

When i look at airplanes in the sky, i get angry. It just doesnt seem right that a plane can fly. Do you ever get angry at physics

Not OP, but I feel like his answer isn't making much sense and I'm also physics.

Essentially, the speed of light comes out as a constant from Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism. Because the laws of physics are supposed to be the same for whatever frame of reference you're in, everybody should observe the speed of light to be constant regardless of the frame you're in.

Then, changing mass and space according to the speed one moved or the gravity one felt resolved this, and its stood by the test of thousands of direct experiments.

how often does being a physicist make you cringe when you watch made-up fantasy technology in science fiction media? any specific examples would be nice.

>I can tell you with 100% certainty that our understanding of gravity is incomplete. But so far Dark energy is the best hypothesis we have for explaining the expansion coefficient of the universe

what about in a non inertial reference frame?

alright sweet, thanks a lot
looks very technical even on Wikipedia, I'll check youtube to see if there's anything there from Khan academy etc

Yes sorry for the crappy explanation, I was trying to keep it pretty simple. I don't want to go into the quantization of the vector potential and explain all that now...lol

Eh, I don't really cringe that often. It's media and it's meant to be dumb and magical. Most people that get frustrated by these things are self-proclaimed science experts who just can't let anyone else have a good time

I just don't like it. It's like a deus ex machina type of explanation.

Honestly you're not going to be able to get into string theory without a pretty daunting mathematical background. There might be a couple good layman videos on youtube, but to get to the meat of it requires years of QFT and shit like differential geometry

Does Mass actually exist?

I mean weight is dependent on the planet you're on. So does Mass actually existence outside of a planetary surface where there is a value for "g" ?

it's not uncommon in the modern era that a new discovery will sometimes disprove or throw doubt upon something in the scientific community that has been historically been assumed to be true.

are there any "truths" in science that you believe may be changing in the near or later future?

I kind of agree, but that's just how a lot of physics is. We see something that we can't explain, and we try to modify and alter what we know to match it. Dark energy isn't just someone going "fuck it we don't know" it's just a way of saying that there is clearly some form of energy that we can't currently interact with that has to be leading to the expansion of the universe at a scale not currently explained. After a while you get to a point where if the math checks out you just kind of accept it until even better math shows up

Yup, mass is directly related to the energy contained in something, which is why we have to make a distinction between "rest mass" and accelerated mass. Rest mass is the mass you have when you're not moving, and since as you move you gain energy your mass actually goes up.

Thanks for the reply. What about polarization though?

I can't think of any that are considered to be absolute truths that will be toppled. But I'm sure plenty of theories will be debunked and changed as we advance. There are a few competing models that try to explain away dark matter, and no one is really sure which one is correct. Most people accept that dark matter is a thing, but a few brave cosmologists are willing to try to find a model saying otherwise.

How far are we from being able to control the weather?

Ah okay. So does that mean anything with an electric charge has mass?

Does time actually exist, or is it just a human construct to cope with a simple succession of events ?

Yup. If there were massless charged particles things like the proton and electron would become unstable, and we'd have found them by now or simply wouldn't exist.

if you were confronted by a flat-earther IRL (let's assume you can't tell if this is a devil's advocate troll or someone who genuinely believes it) what would be the first thing you'd tell him or her to counter their claim?

about -140 years

What music do you listen to?

Depends on what you mean by "exist" I'd argue that simply because of the arrow of time in regards to entropy, and the fact that our constructed idea of time changes due to things like general and special relativity that "time" is real thing that exists in the universe. It's just as real as our definition for mass or energy or anything else that we try to describe

What about Neutrinos? Aren't they almost absent of mass but carry charge?

How much money do you make a year before taxes and how old are you?

bonus: what kind of company do you work for?

A mix of things like black-gaze and metal, as well as jazz

Who should the Browns draft this year?

Could you answer a mathematics question? On linear algebra?

But right there in your statement is the kicker. That "almost" means a hell of a lot to particle physicists.

Would you ever be interested in skydiving?

I'd immediately deem it necessary to waste my time by aspergeredly engaging in unfruitful discord because my insecurity of my own aptitude needs constant validation to the contrary.

coriolis force on hurricanes, then I'd say to read a classical mechanics textbook

If I could I would just give them a copy of Goldstein and tell them to read the chapter on central forces.

Hey OP and the other physics guy in here
What's your take on global warming (human contribution VS natural cycles, role of CO2 and greenhouse gasses). Might be outside your field to make overarching assessments on these things, but maybe you have ideas on underlying aspects (like how water/surface temperatures affect weather patterns and any trends etc)

Possibly, go for it

Oh ok. I meant is time an actual component of the universe or is it just the result of events happening one after another and thus something you can't really have an influence on (like time travel, reversing time, ...) ?

fusion energy when

What do you daily as a physicist? Do you mostly sit around until someone thinks of a theiry or experiment idea?

Why won't the jews stop ruining America?

I'll admit that I can't really answer this that well. It's much more of a meta-physics question and I never really focused much on that stuff. If the math works I'm happy, and that's what I consider real...lol

Was it worth becoming a physicist?

I'm an experimental physicist, so I play with machines and try to make shit work by stick rubber bands and glue to million dollar machines and samples...lol.

What would happen if every atom in the universe was split open at once?

I mean I get paid enough to live and I enjoy what I do, so I'd say so.

Does time go by at a different rate on Mars than it does on Earth?

where'd you do undergrad?

The universe would cease to exist as we know it.

Is there a BRST anomaly in the standard model?

What does this image mean?

UWF

Neat

I guess specifically what I'm curious about is, given an arbitrary linear system, why is the concept of direction in space sort of contained / stored in the variables when considering the system as linear equations, but then is stored in the vectors when considering the same system as a linear combination of vectors?

I know its sort of a strange question, so I'll phrase it using a more concrete yet still general example. Consider a linear system of three equations in three variables, where each equation is of the form (a_i)x + (b_i)y + (c_i)z = d_i. For convenience, and so that we may get some nice geometric intuition, suppose also they represent three distinct planes in R^3 (so we have linear independence). In the context of the system representing planes in space, it seems to me that dimension/direction is sort of "stored" in the variables x, y and z. Now this same system of 3 equations in 3 unknowns can also be expressed as a linear combination of vectors: x + y + z. Here direction of course is stored in the vectors themselves; the three variables that stored direction in the context of linear equations now simply scale the vectors.

and it gets even more bizarre when you consider that, considering the system as linear equations of planes in R^3, we can express each plane as a vector equation by dotting any vector parallel to it with the normal and setting it equal to zero!

are you male or female?
(that's a joke question - you don't have to respond to this)

It's showing a correction to the energy levels of the Hydrogen atom. The Lamb shift shows that what we thought were degenerate energy levels actually have a small splitting that occurs when you take into account relativistic corrections

That is very true. And they do have a VERY tiny amount of Mass.

Thanks for you responses, I have some reading to do!

How high of a fall would it take to kill someone with 100% certainty?

An em-wave consists of a magnetic and an electric field, both of them stand are 90° different from each other and the direction of the wave
Some things only let these fields pass in a specific direction
You can think of coins you stick into a slot
Only one way goes, if you rotate the coin it cant fit into the slot, and if you put to slots behind each other the coin can only pass if the slots are aligned in the same direction
Sorry for bad English, don't know all of the specific vocabulary

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_relativity
>it only applies in the special case where the curvature of spacetime due to gravity is negligible.
>"""Physicist""" doesn't know what special relativity is

>What would happen if every atom in the universe was split open at once?

You'd have a lot of energy release and smaller, daughter particles for atoms larger than iron, and you'd lose energy and have even smaller daughter particles for atoms smaller than iron.

Chance we're living in a computer simulation?

Where are you from?

Germany

OK OP, you're on Sup Forums, and this topic kinda proves you're the real deal and not a Star Trek LARPer.. why do you you come to Sup Forums? YLYL threads? like traps? loli threads? what's the socially deviant part of this physicist?

What am I thinking ???

Former physicist here. Are you like every other physicist I worked with where you only fall into one of two categories:

1) Aspergers 2.0

2) Never ending quest to tell people how fucking smart you are

So glad I left research 10 years ago,