Are questions related to practical stuff like windows ok? I was told that double glazed windows vs suitably thick regular glass don't make much difference from the pov of sound insulation. Is that a suitable question?
Moderators @Qmechanic and @dmckee marked it as a duplicate, but it is not so (see How is angular momentum measured in experiments/in practice? ). Linked questions are restricted to fundamental particles, whereas angular momentum is a concept applicable to any system. I now can’t post an answer ab...
@FaheemMitha That might be okay here. There is a pure physics issue of reflection vs. transmission as waves traverse boundaries between media with different impedances, and possibly also of attenuation lengths.
user54412
For instance, telescope construction worries very much about having glass-air-glass segments, because light bounces around in there. It's necessary to have glass-coating-air-coating-glass in most cases.
but I wouldn't recommend this particular program to a physics student, per se. For me, it made sense because I didn't discover physics until after I got into uni
Weird, just as you began talking about me, I was getting server not found for physics.SE and chat.SE, but no other SE site. Clearing the cache didn't help, but it suddenly started working again
@LIUFA They "move forward in time" because you can only remember things in that direction. Nothing really says "things move in that direction in time", you can always invert the trajectory.
If you imagine your whole life as a world line, it all exists in spacetime. No moment is more real than any other moment. Your reading this now is really just the memory that the you from 15 seconds from now is recalling. And they're thinking back saying "I exist now and then and 10 seconds from now too. It's just my memories that make me think there's an arrow of time"
@Jim: I lose track of the modern terminology. Personally I've always thought we were the normal ones and it's the rest of the human race that has the problem :-)
As for tips...I don't know, I never had to interview for living with someone. Be yourself, I guess? (And be prepared for stupid weed jokes when people find out you're Dutch ;) )
Really? I had come under the impression that it's harder for non-fluent German speakers (my German is ~B2 level and thus pretty good, but certainly not fluent)
@Danu Perhaps my circle of acquaintances is not representative, but that's my personal impression. I'm not sure what the strange Bavarians in Munich think about that, though
Beware of weird arrangements though. I recall the immortal tale of one of my friends who interviewed at a WG only to find out the shower was practically in the middle of the kitchen, and see-through at that :D
In fact, my close friend who will be going to Zurich to join the ETH Physics MSc. program had an even stranger encounter
a house with four people, three girls and a guy, who insisted on living naked. As part of your application, one had to send full body shots - naked of course!
That's a famous joke in Holland: A mail man arrives at the door and puts the paper through the door. He also has a package and rings the doorbell, so it can be signed.
The woman who lives there was just in the shower, so she quickly runs out towards the door - to peek and see who's there. In the meanwhile, the mailman is losing his patience, and he decides to shout through the mail slot. When he opens it up, he is surprised for a second, but then asks: Hey, curly head, are your parents home??
Now that I think about it, all the stuff about bicycles and camping there is what Germans associate with the Dutch. Perhaps Australians can't tell us apart...
By no means not a complete answer, more a criticism of @luksen’s one. It is posted here because the text is too long to fit in the comment field.
First of all, the spin is not a well-defined concept for composite particles. More precisely, whether the spin of a particle is defined depends on how...
Of course, the question he answered is about elementary particles, not composites :/
So let him pick nits. Sounds like nobody was really wrong, and it seems to make him happy. If you think the correct meaning can be inferred from the context of your post, then don't worry about it. This is one of those no-win situations that has to be accepted
You can't avoid simplifying; sometimes it's necessary. And whenever you do, there's always going to be that special someone that will rush to point out that what you said is technically not entirely correct because you simplified
@Danu I'm reading through several papers about linear approximations in inhomogeneous inflation. Would you consider that fun or are you looking for something else?
I'm doing only single-field right now and am writing a paper that provides a quantitative analysis of the linear approximation for perturbations in the scalar field
it's actually quite enlightening and showing that the approximation is usable at amplitudes much larger than usually used
Also, @KyleKanos I dropped my economics courses after second semester because it truly bores me to tears - honestly I was just putting up with it to that point because there was a girl... ;)
(1) does the teaching part (and specifically the grading) take up that much time? (2) fair enough considering comparison to economics (3) what's the college bubble? is it an american thing?
The labs I currently run, I'd say I spend as much time grading as I do making sure the kids are doing their work
As per 3, that's a long-winded thing
But I'll try
At the university I go to, it costs about $3,000 per student to attend
But the University, a state college, is required to take in certain financially-disadvantaged students (i.e., the poor ones)
In order to let these students in for free, the University has to increase the costs for the other $n$ students that are not getting this free education
Another set of students are given University-granted scholarships; these students also go for free but at the cost of the other $m$ students how have to pay more.
All tolled, the students who actually have to pay are shelling out about $12,000 per year to attend
At some point, these students who have to pay are going to realize that there are jobs out there that don't require a BS/BA degree which would save them on the order of $40k
When those students stop going, schools will have to jack up costs for those that stay, which will only accelerate the rate at which students stop attending
Add into this the fact that the football team at Northwestern University successfully petitioned for Unionization, and the whole economic structure for Academia is royally f@!#ed in the next decade or so
is that typically subsidised by government? e.g. here in Canada, tuition for an international student can easily reach ~30000USD/yr, but canadians in the same program pay less than a third of that, with the canadian government putting in the difference (out of people's taxes presumably)
there are some differences - from what I gather in some parts of Europe your masters ends up being more like an extension of undergraduate studies than a separate degree (e.g. UK you do undergrad+MSc in 5 years at a single institution)
In Holland, everybody pays 1700-1900 euros a year, and a student living at home gets ~100 a month standard, while someone living somehwere else gets ~260 a month standard