In this post I respond to Sabine' Hossenfelder's description of the beam splitter paradox. Sabine (and everyone else) assumes you can shoot photons at the beam splitter, one photon at a time. You can't. There is no pea shooter for photons. All the mind-blowing paradoxes flow from the mistaken assumption that we have a little gun that lets us point and shoot photons at will. Here is my video…
Haven't posted for like 10 years, and I thought I'd try to sign in....somehow Blogger still remembers me??? Let's see if this works....
Normal 0 false false false EN-CA X-NONE X-NONE I read the article on Wikipedia about prime number distribution and I was surprised to find that the inverse logarithimc function was a very recent (late-nineteenth century) innovation, and that the proof was very deep. I have my own derivation which seems fairly simple, and I wonder if it is correct; and if it is, whether it has been previously…
I wrote an article several years ago titled " There Are No Peashooters For Photons ". The link will take you to the where the article is posted. In the article, I take apart the various arguments which claim to debunk the wave theory of light in favor of the particle theory. You know the arguments: the black-body spectrum, the photo-electric effect, the Compton effect and and so forth. None of…
Jacek (that's YAH-tsek, but you can call him Jack) is a friend of mine who takes part in a Thursday evening rehearsal session downtown that I lead at a program called ArtBeat. I think this is a phenomenal version of Crazy, the Patsy Cline signature song. (Not everyone knows that Willie Nelson wrote it.) I helped a little with the arrangement on this, but despite our best efforts the two patch…
Today is the 100th anniversary of the death of Yiddish writer I. L. Peretz. They say that a hundred thousand people thronged the streets of Warsaw for his funeral. Peretz was, in his best moments, a genius without parallel in the Yiddish world. I've had a personal role in trying to keep Peretz's work alive. It's brilliant work and it's actually important if you care at all about who you are and…
Yesterday I calculated the difference between the two ground states of the double well (the infinte well with a finite barrier in the middle.) The two states were of course the symmetric and the antisymmetric cases, with the antisymmetric having a slightly higher energy: I picked a wavelength of 44 angstroms (7 angstroms = 1 radian) for the sine wave, and a decay length of 2 angstroms for the…
I did some interesting physics yesterday so I thought I should write it up. The question was about quantum tunneling. It came from my friend's 3rd year Physical Electronics course in Electrical Engineering. You had a MosFET with a silicon dioxide insulating layer between the gate and the channel. They gave you the the barrier potential in the insulator, and told you to assume an electron with a…
It's almost five years since I posted my original article on Quantum Siphoning and I think it's time for a second look. The idea is to explain the collapse of the wave function by means of normal time evolution. Specifically, how does the very weak "wave function" of the light from a distant star induce the reduction of silver bromide ("collapse of the wavefunction") on a photographic plate? The…
When I was a grad student twenty-some years ago, my profs knew me as a guy who liked to come up with his own way of analyzing things. My thesis advisor was in Electrical Power, and everything there is done by "modelling". You have a motor or a transformer, and there is a "model" which represents its internal parameters like "core losses" or "magnetizing inductance". You do some external…
Normal 0 false false false EN-CA X-NONE X-NONE We had an interesting discussion going about Galois Theory over the last little while, so I'm a bit loath to change direction in mid-stream, but I'm still working on getting all my Jewish Post articles up on the internet. So here's another one, this time about Yiddish spelling. --------------------------------------------------------------- My regular…
The other day, following my introductory post on Arnold's proof of the fifth degree, one V. I. Kennedy posted a link to this remarkable lecture by a prof at the University of Toronto: http://drorbn.net/dbnvp/AKT-140314.php I didn't get a chance to look at the link until yesterday, because I was away. I wish Mr. Kennedy had given a little more information when he posted, because it turns out I was…
I just came across the strangest thing. This Israeli guy put up a youtube video about how you can prove the fifth-degree equation is unsolvable, based on the ideas of a Russian mathematician named V. I. Arnold. I haven't worked it all out yet, but it starts off with the strangest idea. You take an equation, and then plot out the roots in the complex plane. Then you also plot out the coefficients…
The other day I started doing the Doppler shift as a relativity problem. It starts off looking a lot like the Doppler shift for ordinary sound in air. I had Alice sending a series of sound/light pulses to a train travelling at 4/5 the speed of sound/light; and I had Bob on the back of the train with a mirror reflecting the sound/light back to Alice. It's not too hard to calculate that if Alices…
It's been quite a while since I've posted any new physics, but I had a visit on the weekend from an old physics buddy from univeristy days. Richard is teaching at Waterloo these days, and relativity is his thing. I've mentioned once or twice that it's not really my territory, but last year I thought I did a pretty nice series on how to do those first-year compound velocity problems with pictures.…
Normal 0 false false false EN-CA X-NONE X-NONE This is one of my favorite Jewish Post articles ever. * * * * * * Last year I mentioned the legend whereby the Eskimos supposedly have dozens of words for “snow”. Whether or not this is strictly true, it illustrates the tendency of a language to develop in areas which are important to the culture of its speakers. In this regard, one has to wonder if…
Normal 0 false false false EN-CA X-NONE X-NONE A few weeks ago I wrote about the word öffentlechkeit , which I claimed was a mistranslation of the American concept of “the public”. Yes, as an adjective öffentlech means “open” in the sense of “public”. And –keit changes an adjective to a noun. But surely the noun which results from adding –keit to öffentlech should have more to do with the…
From my Jewish Post series: * * * * * * Normal 0 false false false EN-CA X-NONE X-NONE As I get older, I find I have less patience for reading fiction. I don’t feel entirely comfortable knowing that my emotions are being manipulated with made-up stuff. Oh, I still enjoy a good read, if perhaps not quite as much any more. But I haven’t forgotten the feeling of heart-pounding, cold-sweating…
From my Jewish Post series: * * * * * * Normal 0 false false false EN-CA X-NONE X-NONE A few weeks ago I wrote an article comparing the quality of Yiddish in two leading newspapers…the Allgemeiner Journal, and the Vorwärts (also known as the “Forverts”). The latter paper recently shut down its print version, but still maintains a vigorous internet presence. I was at the downtown library today,…
Normal 0 false false false EN-CA X-NONE X-NONE I’ve been to Israel twice. My cousin lives in Maale Adumim, and I stayed with her for a few days. I remember one time she got a call from a friend: apparently, there were a couple of Arabs wandering around the neighborhood. Adina called her kids indoors and phoned some other friends to warn them. Fortunately, nothing bad happened. I was reminded of…
From my Jewish Post series: * * * * * Normal 0 false false false EN-CA X-NONE X-NONE A Broken Pot: kheres ha-nishbar For as long as I can remember, there has been a hype over the revival of Yiddish. Yiddish programs are being touted in universities all over North America and as far away as Tokyo, Japan. Naturally, “conversational Yiddish” is all the rage, as though the goal is to be able ask a…
Normal 0 false false false EN-CA X-NONE X-NONE This is the third and final installment of the story I started telling earlier this week . Actually, I'm repeating the story here from the beginning, so if you want to skip ahead to the conclusion, just scroll down to the boldface portion . Otherwise, here is the story in full... * * * * * * * * My sister and her husband were visiting from out of town…
Normal 0 false false false EN-CA X-NONE X-NONE As Peter finished telling the story, our breakfast was arriving. “I guess we’ve all experienced our little coincidences,” I offered, “but that one surely takes the cake”. “I’m not so sure.” My father had spoken up. “I think I have a better one.” When we left off yesterday, I was telling you about an unusual breakfast conversation in the Pancake House…
Normal 0 false false false EN-CA X-NONE X-NONE I'm still running low on physics these days, so here's another article from my Jewish Post series. This is a long and intricate story with an unusual ending, and it's longer than most of my articles. So I've broken it up into three parts, which I'll post over the next three days. Here's the first installment. * * * * * * * Breakfast At The Pancake…
Normal 0 false false false EN-CA X-NONE X-NONE From my Jewish Post series: this one got published last fall. I think it's a really good article. * * * * * * * * You’d see him around campus, sometimes striding purposefully into the faculty building, sometimes just standing there in the student lounge, but always alone. He had those thick coke-bottle eyeglasses and a penchant for long black…