Copasetic Flow

The currently widely held wisdom is that quarks, the subatomic constituents that make up protons and neutrons, cannot be found in an unbound state, (i.e. roaming freely outside of a proton, neutron, or other particle made up of quarks).  The reasoning goes that the attractive force due to the strong force between two quarks is so powerful that if they are separated far enough apart, there will be enough energy stored in the  strong field to create two additional quarks that will immediately glom on to the two you were trying to separate in the first place, hence, no independent unbound quarks. In 1977, however, Larue, Fairbank[1], and Hebard reported that they had found evidence indicating that free quarks did in fact exist[2].  Their experiment involved suspending a 1/4 mm superconducting niobium sphere in a magnetic field gradient[7] and causing it to oscillate in a vertical direction.  The researchers measured the effects reversing the polarity of ...

A few weeks ago I wrote several background posts on low energy nuclear reactions, (LENR).  The vote is still out on whether or not LENR is conclusively showing results.  There's another type of bench top fusion device that is working though and it's based on a crystal.  In April of 2005, three researchers from UCLA reported in Nature the results of an experiment where they fused pairs of deuterium atoms to create helium three and a free neutron with an energy of approximately 2.55 MeV[1] (picture 1).  Their experiment was more of a benchtop particle accelerator than a benchtop fusion reactor.  Utilizing the natural properties of lithium tantalate crystals, they were able to ionize deuterium atoms and then accelerate them to energies of 115 keV.  The accelerated deuterons impacted a molybdenum target coated with an Erbium/Deuterium compound.  At the energies created, the deuterons were able to fuse wit...

As I started into work this morning, I had an email announcing a symposium next Monday on symmetry groups and physics.  From the meeting announcement It is often stated that the set of symmetry operators that leave a Hamiltonian invariant forms a group. I noticed that the presenter was Dr. Ed Brown, from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and immediately remembered... well, it's the tail end of finals week here... remembered.... that I was supposed to remember somebody from that school.  A quick search through my stored articles over on Google Drive pulled up only one article that mentioned Rensselaer.  Strangely that article didn't mention Rensselaer at all, but was titled "Symmetry Groups in Physics"[1]. Sweet!  I now have my background reading material for next weeks symposium!  Rather be lucky than smart! It turned out that the author of the paper immediately following McVoy's was from Rensselaer.  So, I still didn't know what author from...

OK, so let's say you're assigned the problem of determining the mean value, (the expectation value), for n, (the number state), in a harmonic oscillator with a coherent state.  You go back to your favorite coherent state reference by Nieto and Carruthers[1] and get the probability for finding your coherent oscillator in the nth level almost immediately, (picture 1), You're looking for the expectation value for n though, so you need to multiply the probabilty by n and sum the whole mess over all possible values of n, (zero to infinity).  Here's what you get, (excuse my sloppiness in picture 2).  Also, the favored notation for coherent states around here happens to be lambda instead of alpha. So, that looks like a mess. How do you make it more tractable and get down to a single value?  Enter our genius quantum mechanics professor.  He points out that if you just factorize and relabel things a bit, you wind up with (picture 3) Cool! D...

+Jonah Miller  wrote about back of the envelope calculations today and it inspired me to finally write about the oft-quoted by fringe scientists work of Bryce DeWitt and the surprisingly less quoted work of Robert L. Forward. The link between Forward's work and Jonah's article is that Forward wrote an excellent pair of articles entitled "General Relativity for the Experimentalist" for the Proceedings of the IRE[1], (the precursor to the IEEE), and "Guidelines to Antigravity" for the American Journal of Physics[2].  In these two articles, Forward encouraged scientists and engineers to do back of the napkin general relativity by using a method of linearizing Einstein's field equations in in the weak field flat space limit so that they could be treated in the same manner as Maxwell's EM equations. So, where does Bryce DeWitt fit into the equation?  In 1966 he wrote an article about using superconductors to to detect gravitomagnetic fields...

In all my finals studying I almost forgot! They Did It!  They Did It!  They Did It! It was announced yesterday at the New Yorker Hotel in Manhattan, NY that the Tesla Science Center organization purchased Wardenclyffe and will be turning it into a science museum!!!  The press conference can be viewed below! The crowdsourcing campaign started by  +Matthew Inman  put their fundraising over the top and the lab has been purchased!  Over 33,000 people contributed to the fundraiser.  In addition to a number of other folks that worked on the project, the  +American Physical Society 's Physical Review B editor served on the board of the Tesla Science Center as the Secretary.  As I've mentioned before,  +Dashiell Hammutt  and I were lucky enough to make ham radio QSOs viaspecial event station W3T from the Wardenclyffe property to help raise awareness.   +Diana Eng  and a team of ham radio operators transmitted on the same da...

Wow!  Here's the short version of what's going on.  My quantum II final was a bit rough because I didn't know how to decouple a pair of coupled harmonic oscillators.  However, I found an excellent article on decoupling in my second favorite journal the American Journal of Physics.  I wanted to capture a few notes here on the process and on one of the math operations left out of the original article, but hashing out the level of background to provide has taken awhile.  I decided to go with the terser representation of the subject.  It may be extremely sketchy since I'm more than a bit scattered studying for finals.  Basically, these are my notes, and I hope they're helpful :)  Any ideas, comments, corrections, or suggestions, as always, are more than welcome! For more detail and an excellent article on how to decouple coupled oscillators see [1]. OK, here goes. What does 'decoupling harmonic oscillators' mean and what is it ...