I mean, we basically owe almost everything in our modern electricity-based society to him. It’s hard to think of any other physicist who discovered so many critical laws and also was an inventor. He’s responsible for the electric motor, electromagnetic induction, electrolysis, diamagnetism, electric and magnetic fields, the relationship between magnetism and light, and more. What’s even more astonishing is that he did all this with no formal education and despite worsening memory problems from an unknown disease.

If there’s another historical physicist who showed such brilliance as both a theoretician and experimentalist, I’m unaware of him/her. If anyone deserved to be knighted, he did. He should’ve been eligible as a British citizen, no? Sir Isaac Newton was knighted in the previous century for his contribution to physics (he was certainly no slouch either, obviously), so why not Faraday?

Actions clearly happen to the particles of light- such as hitting water and slowing it down, so surely it must experience those, and if so, it must experience time in order for those events to happen?

Hello all!
Currently working on my uni project, and I’ve come to a realisation that I’m missing a big gap in knowledge.

I feel like I don’t REALLY understand how people solve hamiltonians written in terms of creation/annihilation operators. Like sure, there’s that trick with the harmonic oscillator which is great, but my project deals with MUCH more complicated systems than that, and I have absolutely no idea where to start. I also know for systems with translational invariance you can Fourier transform and obtain a simpler Bloch Hamiltonian, but again I’m dealing with more complicated systems.

So with differential equations I know what to look for, I know how they’re solved and what the solutions look like. But with creation operators I sort of just stare at it blankly.
What’s the strategy to solve these? Do you just build the matrix and feed it into a piece of code? Or am I missing a trick here? Do I look for symmetries to reduce the problem? When I google it I feel like I’m not truly understanding what’s going on, so please reply like I’m an idiot.

If particles like electrons and quarks have no volume, then how can they have mass? Is it just that they do have volume, its just very, very small, or do they actually lack any physical volume?

Edit for follow up question: let's say we were able to gather 1 kg of electrons in a small enough space to put on a scale. The scale would register a weight, but there wouldn't actually be anything physical on the scale? Is that correct and if so how tf?

I'm an electrical engineer and my career in both academia and industry thus far has mainly revolved around theoretical electromagnetics and radio-frequency systems. I'm looking at partial discharge phenomena on a research project and would like to delve into some of the physics surrounding corona effects. If you have a good textbook recommendation that is both friendly and rigorous, let me know.

I know about the Gömböc and that is sort of related to what I’m asking. How might I determine the longest amount of time something can wobble around in a stable environment before coming to rest / falling over? Let’s say the parameters are any real or imagined object of any size on a flat, level surface on Earth.

Is it okay to ask what if questions where one current rule of physics is violated (such as no communication theorem) but wanting to obey others? Or only questions about current standard understanding of physics?

I know a very little bit about python and c++ but can’t use them that much

I want to be a physicist and want to know what to learn
(Coding perspective)

And where do I learn them?

It could be a dumb question, but I just don't get it how to define it with highly accurately.

Any tips?

OK, this is a desperate attempt to find an answer about a really small moment in a Brian Green panel discussion.

Basically, here’s what I remember. About a year ago I was watching a panel on YouTube that Brianne Greene was hosting and he had several different physics and astronomer types on stage. They were a couple women and one of the women worked on the James Web project in someway, but I don’t think it was a James Web panel. During this live panel with several people on stage, she said that she just got a text from someone on the project that says they discovered something. She couldn’t talk about it on the stage and said news about it would come out in a couple months.

I can’t find the video. I don’t know the name of the person, but I’m really curious about what that discovery was.

i’m fairly certain it was a world science foundation video. I’m fairly certain it was Brian Greene hosting. All the participants were there live on stage. It wasn’t done via Zoom or anything.

does this ring a bell to anyone? It was such a small moment in a much bigger conversation and again I saw it a year ago and it popped into my head today. Do you remember this moment who said it? What was the discovery?

Good luck

Ok so I am sorry if this comes out as more of a shower thought but I wanted to ask while it was fresh on my mind. We know that the universe appears to be expanding at a steadily increasing pace overall. The leading theory is dark energy. Is it possible it is actually just time dilation. The earth is moving at a constant speeds though in different directions. We know the milky way is moving through space at roughly 627 km/s.

So my question is this: is it possible that the expansion is actually slowing down; however, due to time dilation from out relative speed we simply perceive it as speeding up as it is now moving through time at a faster rate than we are due to its speed dropping. Basically similar to how a person in a rocket traveling at near lightspeed would perceive the earth moving through time at a faster rate than themselves, making it "speed up". Are we possibly seeing the same thing here just with whatever makes up the underlying fabric that we are sitting on stretching slower.

Again sorry if this is kind of shower thoughts I just thought of it(admittedly with a cold and some medicine running through me). I don't really have any formal physics background to answer myself as I haven't even taken a basic physics course in college yet.

I am currently a college freshman. Today I was talking to my physics professor about what I am planning to do. Basically double major in math and something like data science, cs, and physics, to learn how to do modelling. Also I told him I wanted to do the 3+2 program to get a bs in electrical engineering and concentrate in signal processing.

He told me what I am really looking for is quantum mechanics and he will put me in contact with a professor who knows that and do research based on that.

Now I wonder what are quantum mechanics?

When constant power is being supplied P=VI So, V∝1/I But according to Ohm's Law V∝I.
(I’m only in Class 10, so please explain it in simple terms)

If humans had access to all the energy in the observable universe, could we solve a lot of unsolved physics problems?

Like we can use microwaves to heat stuff. So is there any kind of radiation that can be used to freeze stuff instead of heating them up?

It's like particles seem always decay into something like neutrinos, antineutrinos, electrons, positrons, or some kind of force carrying particle depending on what the particle is. at the same time the more energy that particle receives the more photons get emitted

Hi,

This problem has stumped me while learning mechanics over the years. Maybe someone here has a solution:

Consider a massless pulley with a massless rope over top, with a coefficient of friction between the two sufficiently large to never reach the maximum. connected to two masses (we’ll say the two begin from rest and the right is bigger). Looking at a differential element of the rope yields dT-df_s=(0)a, so dT=df_s.

Here is where the problems begin. There are a few possibilities:

First, considering the torque on the pulley: τ=R ∫ dT =R(T_right-T_left)=(0)α. This produces common result that the tensions on both side are equal.

However, looking at T_left-T_right = ∫ df_s, and the fact df_s is everywhere right pointing, this seems to imply T_left-T_right≠0 unless df_s were everywhere 0.

Thus we have an apparent contradiction. What is the resolution? Behind this it leads to an equally pressing question: how does the Atwood machine actually get "spun" by a the rope? That is, if the friction is indeed zero, then the pulley, initially at rest, doesn’t get spun as no net force acts on it, contracting the very nature of the atwoood machine.

Thank you!

I read that black holes only have three properties , But if the massive star that created it was circling its galaxy’s center of gravity, wouldn’t the resulting black hole continue that orbital velocity also?

Where does the light go when I turn off the lights in my room?

When did it become universally agreed upon that it is mostly physics that predetermines free will? Popular science YouTubers like Kyle Hill have elaborated upon it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2GCVsYc6hc , but I want to know more about the consensus of the scientific community. It seems to be a rather frightening concept when we really get down to it.

Hi everyone! I’m a design student (not a physicist, so please bear with me) working on a university research project about the concept of “non-places” and “non-space”. Most of what I’ve found comes from philosophy, architecture and anthropology, and I’d like to understand how physics approaches the same ideas.

These are the questions I’m stuck on:

1. Does space exist on its own, even if there were no matter in it, or is space just a way of describing the relations between objects (the old Newton vs Leibniz debate)?
2. Is “empty space” really empty? I’ve seen mentions of the quantum vacuum and the Casimir effect but I don’t understand them.
3. Some physicists suggest space might not be fundamental but “emergent”. What does that mean in simple terms?

If you can point me to accessible books, articles or lectures (I don’t have a strong math background), I’d be really grateful. And if my questions are badly phrased or based on wrong assumptions, please tell me, that’s useful too!

Thanks in advance!