@rob I'm impressed. Partly that your kid is starting to understand what makes questions interesting, but mostly that you managed to set forth the case for him. Well done.
Yo. Anybody emotionally prepared to listen to me talk to myself?
So, I'm getting confused about how polarized E&M interacts with a detector. Polarization add up incoherently on the detector right? But I'm confused what happens if we can actually detect the field's phase (idk, a maser). So, can the Ux part of the field interact with the Uy part of the field? Supposedly not, but what is the physical reason?
For a wavefunction:
$$\Psi(\textbf{x}) = e^{ikz} + \dfrac{f(\theta)}{r}e^{ikr}$$
Where $z = r\cos(\theta)$.
The probability current $J$ is then given by:
$$J(\textbf{x}) = J_1(\textbf{x}) + J_2(\textbf{x}) + J_{12}(\textbf{x})$$
Where $J_1$ is the current due to the first term(plane wave) an...
One would only get the bigger picture if one have the elements of understanding
Anonymous
I simply said that for grad-level/research-level stuff and undergrad-level/high-school-level stuff to co-exist, the bar for the latter needs to be high.
Leave it, I got the bigger picture, its we, who have to do that in order to make this better place.
Anonymous
8:41 AM
@AjayMishra We don't need precise definitions where common sense suffices. This is a community driven by humans who can make judgements (such as the level of a question) based on their experience and knowledge.
Quantum circuits to implement full CI for open shell molecules. The circuit has constant depth independent of the number of spin states present in the molecules
Random thought: Since energy and entropy are interrelated, I wonder if there is an interpretation of what energy is in terms of the number of microstates a system can have, or even the number of trajectories that converge to some given point in phase space
So something is of higher energy if there are less trajectories that can satisfy a given constraint
I have been reading the book "The Black Hole War," by L.Susskind, which states:
Temperature is the increase of a system's energy when an entropy bit is added.
Until now I was thinking that, on the contrary, it is the entropy that is increased when energy is added. No matter how you define e...
The simplistic undergrad explanation aside, I've never really understood what energy really is. I've been told that it's something when converted from one kind of something to another kind, or does some "work", as defined by us, but what is that something?
Moreover, if the total amount of energy...
Oh sorry I read that as Zee's ones, I've looked in some of the non-Zee ones and wasn't impressed tbh
They just seemed like any other book, I guess that's the point though?
Zee's nutshell books compared to the other nutshell books are like Zee's story about Witten as his TA
"I had the enormous good fortune of having Ed Witten as my teaching assistant and grader. Ed produced lucidly written solutions to the homework problems I assigned, to the extent that the next year I went to the chairman to ask “What is wrong with the TA I have this year? He is not half as good as the guy last year!”"
Ahh I've enjoyed the bit of the GR one I've been through and wondered if the non-Zee ones would be similar. I should probably do the sensible thing and just get through the mountain of books I already have though