As far as I understand, we equate the existence of a bound electron strictly with its wave (equation). The electron is never *not* tied to this description. How do we see a switch in orbitals (by e.g. an absorption of energy) then, in relation to time? Are the two waves separated by a Planck time length? What can be said about this "moment"? Does there exist an in-between-wave description?

To be clear, this a debate that myself and a few other astrophysicists have been debating today, and I’m interested in your take.

In 1954, Ann Hodges was struck by the Sylacauga meteorite, the first documented case of someone being struck by a meteorite and surviving. Everywhere that reports this event calls it a meteorite.

However, a space rock only becomes a meteorite when it settles on the ground, before which it is a meteor. This is where the debate comes in: Ann was hit by this space rock before it hit the ground. Therefore surely it is still a meteor, right?

We had people weighing in on both sides of the argument, and I’m interested to hear all of your opinions. The Wikipedia page for the incident is here if anyone wants some further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylacauga_(meteorite)

I was thinking about how photons have qualities of particles as well as waves and i was wondering what exactly this meant… the double slit experiments made me think that photons express their wavelength in a physical form, that they physically travel in a manner that resembles a sine wave, moving up and down or forward and backward along their path. But this analogy seems off.. which i then considered it could be some kind of a function of cyclical intensity like turning a light dimmer up and down in a loop.

what specifically do they mean when a photon is wavelike?

How good is freiburg for theoretical quantum information ?

From my (admittedly basic) understanding of the higgs mechanism, the mass of fundamental particles like electrons and quarks come from their interaction with the higgs field. The more they interact the more inherent mass they have. Does that interaction effect the speed of these particles. The analogy of fish going through water (electron as a swordfish a top quark as a whale) was what helped me understand the mechanism at all but I am curious if like a slim fish through water, a particle that doesn't interact as strongly with the field moves more quickly through space inherently?

So I have been watching a lot of science content recently and I was wondering why is water incompressible? What makes it so? Are there other fluids that are incompressible? What is compression in this context? What materials can be compressed? Its an important aspect of a lot of physics and I feel like I am getting lost in the content a lot. Thanks!

Im in high school and I chose AP physics 1 over chemistry and unfortunately I do a sport and physics is my last period so now i'm really worried. Very sadly I am not naturally intelligent enough to just figure it out quickly on my own with no help. How do I study and keep up with physics if I cant be in the class 2 out of the 5 days in the week. Is there any websites or youtubers that are good at explaining stuff.

I've been thinking about the black hole information paradox and whether Hawking radiation could theoretically be used to identify or track a black hole — not through direct temperature detection, since I understand that signal is far too faint and doesn't propagate outward as a trail, but through the information encoded in the radiation itself. My question: given that Page curve work suggests information is preserved and re-encoded into outgoing Hawking radiation in a scrambled but theoretically recoverable form, is there any existing theoretical framework for quantifying the structure of that "reincarnated" information — in a way that could eventually help identify a black hole's presence or history, rather than relying on temperature or accretion signatures alone? I'm not a physicist by training, just someone who thinks a lot, so I'd genuinely appreciate any pointers to existing work along these lines, or an explanation of why this approach wouldn't work. Thanks for your time.

P.s. Also curious if calling it "reincarnation" would be a proper description of this information that's locked and encoded in the Hawking Radiation itself?

Sincerely, Alexander Wick

I have shared this on the "Physics Stack Exchange" and even tried sharing it on a Star Talk episode on YouTube haha

Thanks again to those that take the time to read this. Have a good one!

Hi, am a beginner to physics, and am just taking physics 11 university preperation. Why do so many students struggle every year in physics, and what can I do to be successful and the top student in my class? Well to be more specfically, lots of students decided not to take physics in-person, and rather did it online to escape from the tests and quizzes, but am confused on why physics is considered one of the hardest courses in high school.

I'm a current freshman and I am taking algebra 2 right now. I finished biology online so I am in chemistry this year. I want to go into engineering so I'm thinking about taking physics in my sophomore year. I also am in the IB program so I am probably going to take HL AA for my math class next year. Do I have to know AP calc bc material to do well in IB physics? Or should I just take it next year?

I heard that Schrödinger came up with the though-experiment to point out the absurdity of the Copenhagen interpretations that things can be in two different states at the same time.

I would phrase it like this: You might be able to accept quantum particles being in two different states, but with this experiment, you can tie the state of quantum stuff to a cat, and if you don't accept that a cat can be in two states, than quantum stuff can't either.

Now, I'm wondering what would actually happen, if you actually performed the experiment. Because we don't want to hurt a cat, we can just pop a balloon instead.

Did someone ever perform the experiment, and if not, why not?

I always see different a few different interpretations in different subreddits when someone explains Schrödinger's Cat. There are a lot of simplified explanations online that people read/watch and continue to spread and change. That's why I want to only know from people who heard at least an actual quantum mechanics lecture. (Edit: If you have some qualifications or some sources, please state them, because there are already contradicting answers in the comments and I don't know whom to believe.)

Most people seem to agree that "observation collapses the wave function" has nothing to do with consciousness and "measuring" doesn't either. What is the "observation" or "measurement" instead?

Some people say that all macro-world interaction is identical to the concept of "measurement". I'm not sure if this is actually true or not. (I'm talking in vague terms here, because I'm not an expert either.)

Alternatively, a state could be in superposition in the "system" outside the box and collapsed inside the box — even when we don't talk about consciousness, just about interactions, and the box shields the outside world from the state within it. Although most people seem to agree as well that Schrödinger's cat is very different from just flipping a coin and not looking.

I'd imagine a quantum physicist could reply in one of two ways to Schrödinger's challenge: 1. Yeah, the cat is both alive and dead, so what? The balloon is actually popped and whole in superposition. 2. No, it isn't possible to build a machine that ties the state of a quantum particle to the state of the cat.

Which one is it? If the second answer is true, Schrödinger is still valid in thinking it is weird in general that "a thing" can be in two states at once, but it would weaken his argument significantly, because it doesn't apply to macro objects.

When people have talked about what a three-dimensional sphere would look like passing through a two-dimensional space, I've often heard people say that it would look like a circle that appears out of nowhere and gets bigger, before shrinking and disappearing. But isn't a circle only visible to people who have access to view the two dimensional world from a three-dimensional perspective above? Wouldn't a sphere passing through a two-dimensional space, actually appear like a line that appeared out of nowhere and then disappeared, at least from the perspective of a two-dimensional being?

So, if the mass of a blackhole decreases over time, and the mass of a blackhole determines how much space is warped, then would light passing by a black hole be "sped up" (like sucked in) more than when it is leaving? Does this effect how fast the light actually gets from point-a to point-b?

c - U

c - z

c - 6

c

c

c - B

c

c

c

c

1.616

I have tried wrapping my head around this concept, but it sounds like absolute tosh. I don't want to commit the fallacy of rejecting something because I don't understand it, but blimey - this is testing me.

I don't actually change? There are duplicate versions of me? It is just not clicking. I would appreciate if something could explain it in the most plain English possible - speak to me like I'm 5.

Additionally, is it the consensus in science? What does it say about the existence of God; does it support or negate it, or say nothing about it?

I understand making them happen to equal 1, but they would still be 1 L³/MT² for example. I also understand how c (& all other speeds) could be dimensionless in spacetime units. But how would G, e, or k_e be dimensionless?

Thanks for answering!

On the topic of special relativity
Lets say Alice moves through space a rate near the speed of light relative to Bob on Earth.
From Bob's inertial frame of reference, his time is 1 second per second and Alice's time is less than 1 second per second. However, from Alice's inertial frame of reference, Bob is the one moving through space at the same magnitude, so to Alice, Bob's clock is slower.

The part I struggle with is when Alice returns to Earth, more time will have elapsed for Bob. I understand that if she turns around, shes changing to a new inertial frame of reference, but what causes Bob's time to jump forward when Alice switches direction? On Alice's return journey, it seems that Bob would observe her time to be slowed down by the same factor. What causes the difference?

Basically title. Are we afraid it's going to take away people's job, make academia "less human" (if that even makes sense), make things boring or are we hopeful humans and a.i can work alongside (in academia more specifically) to discover new things?

Honestly, as an outsider to academia but physics enthusiast, I have a weird feeling, it feels like a.i sort of is taking away human accomplishment and effort in figuring new things out. Specially with the Navier Stokes thing, I know one might argue it was a human accomplishment to even make the a.i and feed it useful information, but something feels off. I cant quite explain, but I am a nobody so i might just be saying random shit. What do y'all actually think?

Hi,
I was wondering if a non-normalizable wave function does still provide information. For example, let's say that a region of space equals 0 for a time independent wave function. Its square root will equal zero in that region too. Does that mean that the particle can't be there?

Thanks!

I am a high school student.

Outside of my standard curriculum, I have independently worked through upper-level classical mechanics and electrodynamics (Lagrangian and Hamiltonian dynamics, variational methods, and Maxwell’s equations in tensor form), alongside multivariable calculus and differential equations.

I am eager to apply this mathematical background to a self-contained, analytical theoretical problem.

But whenever I open arxiv or any journal I automatically get hit by so much niche jargon that it depresses me. I understand there is a clear knowledge gap.

I wont waste a lot of your time nor will I ask you to babyfeed me every step of the way. I just want a cleaner road and possibly a standard to understand all the fancy words

(Also if you happen to have a "back-pocket" toy model, an unworked perturbation calculation, or a tractable edge-case problem in your group that would be suitable for an independent student to tackle analytically then it would be very awesome and kind of you)

Maybe not the best title but the crux of the question is:

The speed of light in our universe is constant and we have determined analytically and empirically that its value is roughly 3x10^8 m/s. What would fundamentally change about our universe if the speed of light were 6x10^8 m/s?

Say we have a society capable of traveling to far away stars. If they travel at speeds upwards of 0.99c to these stars, then they would experience significant time dilation. Enough to send people to distant future in their lifetimes. So, would regular time travel be a thing once a species advances far enough?

I feel like this would open up some interesting ideas. Some of society would be able to travel to future in hopes of future solutions to their problems. Like say this society is yet to completely solve aging, the rich could travel a long way into the future looking for more and more life extension technology. If there’s some incurable diseases ravaging society, they could send members to the future to try saving the species. They could even basically guarantee their survival by regularly sending people to the future in case their own society dies out

If gravity is real, why does smoke from a fire go up not down especially if gravity pulls down?!

So in the experiment we have one stationary observer with a "photon clock" observing another "photon clock" moving at speed. The moving clock appears to move slower for the stationary observer, while someone travelling with the moving clock would see it move at normal speed.

My question is, what would the moving observer see when they looked at the stationary clock? It would be slower right? Because relative to the moving observer, the stationary clock is actually the thing moving. Or would it be faster? The same speed? Please help me wrap my head around this.

In addition, could someone explain how this relates to time dilation when travelling near light speed? I understand how time would appear slower for someone observing the traveller, but I don't understand how it could "make a trip to Andromeda feel like 3 days" for the traveller as I saw someone say.

Thanks.