@SiddharthKuchimanchi It is extremely rare that some author decides to avoid the standard treatment of using spherical lens and goes for something else at all. It is not obvious that you would not ask the same question if the author used spherical lens instead.
Usually a person takes "becomes able to understand the general framework and its core ideas" as the definition of "having learnt". Like, nobody should have to reproduce Delaunay's 20+ years of work on the lunar 3-body problem just to say that they understand Newtonian mechanics (and it is impractical; his perturbation method converges too slowly). Similarly, people tend to stop at understanding EFE and how solving that gives Schwarzchild metric, and one or two simple applications.
One also cannot make sense of a person who is asking basic E&M questions, GR, stat therm, and then suddenly be pivoting to a deep QFT question, and then back. The account behaviour is just strange, to say the least.
@VincentThacker I am also quite suspicious of this user's behaviour. I do think that there is someone underneath, but there are likely undisclosed AI use, lack of understanding of the topics they are asking about, and tremendous lack of effort in the questions being asked, e.g. in the lack of effort on searching. Someone who LOVES the subject (as is written in the profile) would not have produced such work.
@ACuriousMind What about alternatives to Wigner, e.g. Huisimi's ? Although, of course, Wiki quickly points out that Huisimi fails to represent mutually exclusive states and is thus also difficult to interpret as a probability density.
And even Eddington's claim of verification of Einstein's predictions is quite disputed, because they said that his equipment should not have been sensitive enough to see it, just barely enough.
as long as they don't make it as depressing as Nolan made Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer had so many fun stories; the depression is just such a bad portrayal.
As a general thing, I have insisted on eliminating Flemings two hand rules from the physics curriculum because students will get quite confused about them.
My British prof used the screw rule, and it was very weird seeing him trying to open a bottle cap in lecture. Around these parts we use the right hand grip rule, and that is invariably nice on the hands.
But surely there are some work in the known literature that covers dissipation in analytical mechanics frameworks that Goldstein should have known, so the wording is really incomprehensible
@ACuriousMind yes, but somehow the Q term is treated in Goldstein with this weird assertion that a natural way to deal with dissipation does not exist in Hamiltonian methods
@ACuriousMind The impression miao miao got from Goldstein is that it is trying to assert that you can add dissipative terms $Q$ to the Lagrangian but not to Hamiltonian systems, and thus that Hamiltonians have difficulty dealing with dissipation in general. This must be wrong in some way, but at least it is a highly avoided subject.
@ACuriousMind It is customary in analytical mechanics restricted to linear dissipation terms is to impose the linear exponential decay into both the positions and momenta so that then the system and its phase space ostensibly turns back into the non-dissipative form, and then we can simply use the standard methods for them. @User198
@PM2Ring Just a few days ago there was a guy who was normally in the MatterModelling.SE and quite nice to newbies there, very arrogantly dissing higher order mathematics in the History of Science and Maths.SE. Extremely disappointing. Carlson's work is very elegant; somewhat incomprehensible when looking at things from the classical methods PoV, but obviously very elegant even so.
@JohnRennie just to nitpick the flow of history; the Wiki page included history and the dates are clearly that Fermat's principle came first and Huygens's principle came later. So it can only be Huygens that showed the equivalence, not Fermat.
miao miao was stuck trying to fix the experiment that, as is usual, decided to misbehave right before we want to show the experiment to students. Stuck as the presentation already started, and so after fixing it, miao miao had to stand in a corner and try to hide
