Seemingly trivial things that intrigue you
Comments
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Photons have zero rest mass. Otherwise, they couldn't move at, ahem, the speed of light. I should have been more explicit.
I'm surprised though at the bosons vs. fermions comment, though. These particles have different statistics after all, and I believe chemists do take Stat Mech at uni. Very different low-temperature behaviour, too. Then again, I'm not a chemist.
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I’m enjoying people trying to explain in simple terms something given as an example of something not easy to explain in simple terms.
The above may be fact, or fiction, I may be serious, I may be jesting.
I am not sure. You have no chance.Veronese68 wrote:PB is the most sensible person on here.0 -
It's not really a surprise that this stuff is difficult to articulate and gets bogged down in semantics.
Words that we use for simple objects - tree - have taken a few thousand years to arrive at their present form and still struggle at the boundaries of definition - is it a tall shrub or a small tree?
If a phenomenon was discovered just a few decades ago at a barely observable scale, then almost by definition we won't have the words to adequately describe it yet.
1985 Mercian King of Mercia - work in progress (Hah! Who am I kidding?)
Pinnacle Monzonite
Part of the anti-growth coalition0 -
Point of information, m'lud. A palm tree is not a tree.
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It's rather over a century than "just a few decades" for quantum mechanics, and I disagree the problem is semantics. We have no problem with "laptop", or "internet", even though most of us don't really know how these work. The problem is that it is rather weird, it goes against basic day to day intuition and, despite our best efforts, it works pretty darn well.
I'm sure you've heard of the uncertainty principle. At some point, a working hypothesis was that uncertainty, or indetermination, was only a consequence of us not being able to access enough information, or not having enough instrumental precision but that, deep inside, the world was deterministic. This hypothesis was named "hidden variables". However, John Bell somehow came with a nice set of tests that could allow us to distinguish between "hidden variables" and true indetermination. The necessary checks only became feasible about 30 years ago. Indetermination won.
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I think Nouns are easier. It's the verbs and adjectives, which were invented to describe a world with no understanding of atoms (a neologism meaning literally un-cuttable), that struggle.
1985 Mercian King of Mercia - work in progress (Hah! Who am I kidding?)
Pinnacle Monzonite
Part of the anti-growth coalition0 -
And since I'm at it, let's do Schrodinger's cat but properly quantum. Of course, the cat can be dead or alive. Let's introduce another variable. It could have its eyes open, or shut. Now, my rule is that when you open the box, you can only check for dead/alive, eyes open/shut. Not both at once.
If the cat is fully quantum:
* we open the box to check dead/alive. Assume it's dead. Close the box.
* Next we check for its eyes. Open the box. Assume eyes are closed. Close the box again.
* If we now check for dead/alive, we're back to 50% alive.
Sad thing is, I'm not joking. This was tested with magnetic atoms, and is one of the founding experiments of quantum mechanics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stern%E2%80%93Gerlach_experiment
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Mmm, I did take stat mech but this was nearly 30 years ago. I wasn't great at thermodynamics or stat mech, really. Quantum, I could do.
Obviously we cover the exclusion principle, to explain spin and magnetism and wotnot. Potentially we glossed over it when it came to the stat mech we did, in that it wasn't used. Where chemistry ends and physics begins is photons, protons, neutrons and electrons.
We don't do neutrinos or quarks (or didn't on my course) other than in passing. And we don't do any other bosons. So somewhere along the line we may have been told light was a boson and this has a spin 1 as do other bosons, but after that was all dealing with photons.
The stat mechs was treated as a development of thermodynamics, which for a chemist is pretty much balls bouncing around in a box, and what happens when you open the door to another box. It is plausible it never came up. Also plausible it did and I didn't understand it. Also plausible I have forgotten. Or that the distinction between relativistic mass and mass escaped me. We certainly did not study relativity.
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I'm intrigued how all (in my experience) chemistry students become patent attorneys. I have a friend who studied chemical engineering but his career was in the intellectual property world. FA doubles my exposure, 100% fit the criterion. 🤔
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This is the sort of thing that does physics bods no favours:
Spin should not be conceptualized as involving the rotation of a particle's internal mass, as ordinary use of the word may suggest.
Why use a word with a clearly understood everyday use to mean something else entirely? This is not going to aid understanding.
1985 Mercian King of Mercia - work in progress (Hah! Who am I kidding?)
Pinnacle Monzonite
Part of the anti-growth coalition0 -
If you've got that far in trying to understand quantum mechanics, I think a few quirky names are the least of your problems.
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I think we can theorise that excellence in quantum physics does not overlap with the art of creating neologisms. Or that quantum physicists should learn more ancient Greek.
1985 Mercian King of Mercia - work in progress (Hah! Who am I kidding?)
Pinnacle Monzonite
Part of the anti-growth coalition0 -
This is a very good question, albeit chemical engineers aren't chemists.
But there IS an overrepresentation. I put it down to two things; (1) chemistry is a subject that includes an unusually broad range of skills, from essay writing, to complex spatial 3D visualisations and a bit of physics and maths. (2) a lot of jobs as actual chemists are poorly paid.
So, you need a broad appreciation of how stuff works, and you need to be able to write. Same in my job.
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As I said, when you're scratching your head trying to make sense of something that doesn't make sense, specific words such as spin really aren't the problem.
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Well spin is a form of angular momentum. And you use the same term to describe rotation of both 2 and 3 dimensional objects, so applying it to the precession of a wave doesn't seem unreasonable.
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In this case, not really.
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High on technical conception and understanding, particularly of actual things, high on attention to detail. If they really loved maths they’d have done physics and ended up in finance or something.
I know a few Oxford uni PhD chemists and two of them went into IT programming, the other into editing academic publishing.
My world is absolutely loaded with history grads.
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Hate to disappoint Loon...
"I spent most of my money on birds, booze and fast cars: the rest of it I just squandered." [George Best]0 -
Nah, taxdodgers don't count. Literally.
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If you really loved maths, wouldnt you study maths?
Not sure i'm the best judge. I really loved physics but not great at maths so I studied materials science and ended up in civil engineering.
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(further, when the theories were being developed people DID think it was a "spin", related to electrons deflecting from actually spinning magnets and such. This was later shown to be inaccurate but the name for the property had stuck - maybe it sounds better in the original German)
We're in danger of confusing passion with incompetence
- @ddraver0 -
Checked a few languages in Wikipedia. French, German, Italian and Russian all call it "spin", but of course those languages no longer have the confusion with "internal rotation". I wouldn't be surprised if pretty much all other languages adopt the equivalent pronounciation. Basque definitely does.
Also, hillariously, all elementary particles (like electrons or photons, but not protons) are point particles as far as we know. Where they get their bloody spin, I don't know.
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What do you mean by point particles?
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I mean that, by performing the equivalent of snooker (with photons, other electrons, whatever), you never "hit the target". These particles are smaller than any length scale we can probe, thus "point particles".
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I do think that all the technical chat spoils the beauty that god does play dice.
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Most people who are religious base their belief on things that can be relatively easily debunked. One might argue that the more you know about the universe the more incredible it is, and the more likely it is to have been created.
I don't believe that, but I do think some folk are really missing out.
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Well, the thing is that there is a finite possibility of every particle in the universe being anywhere in the universe. So any electron can be anywhere, but probably isn't.
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Are you of the view that the more you know about science, the less likely you are to be religious?
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