Posts by HDE 226868
There's not really a fundamental interpretation of the Lagrangian because the Lagrangian that describes the dynamics of a system isn't unique - more than one Lagrangian can yield the correct equati...
Semi-holonomic constraints look something like the following: $$f(\mathbf{q},t)=\sum_{i=1}^nf_i(\mathbf{q},t)\dot{q}_i+f_0(\mathbf{q},t)=0$$ with the requirement that $f(\mathbf{q},t)$ be integra...
I was introduced to a somewhat novel derivation of the ideal gas law that starts by thinking about the number of microstates of an ideal gas, $\Omega$. Say we have a gas with a single particle in a...
The Rayleigh-Jeans law does a good job of describing the spectral radiance of a black body at low frequencies: $$B_{\nu}(T)=\frac{2kT\nu^2}{c^2}$$ with $T$ the temperature and $\nu$ the frequency...
There are perhaps two questions here. The first is whether the planet is intrinsically dark, i.e. it reflects only a small fraction of the light that reaches it from the Sun and emits only a small ...
