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# Activity for Derek Elkins‭

Type On... Excerpt Status Date
Comment Post #286662 This is a question about opthamology, biology, childhood development, and/or medicine, not physics.
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3 months ago
Edit Post #285649 Initial revision 9 months ago
Answer A: How are the assumptions behind two ways of deriving the Rayleigh-Jeans law related?
One way this can be explained is from the perspective of numerically approximating an integral. From this perspective, the concordance of "continuous" and "low frequency" has to do with the low frequency regime being where the approximation of the "continuous" integral is valid/best. If you wanted...
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9 months ago
Comment Post #285373 Just because you get the correct result doesn't mean that your derivation is correct. At the time of writing the question you seemed uncertain as to how/why we could go from $\int_V \rho_f d\tau$ to $\oint_S \sigma_f da$. The way I read your concern(admittedly with a lot of guessing on my part to fil...
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9 months ago
Edit Post #285373 Post edited:
Improve formatting of implications
9 months ago
Suggested Edit Post #285373 Suggested edit:
Improve formatting of implications
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helpful 9 months ago
Comment Post #285373 Where are you getting the $\sigma da = \rho d\tau$ equation? As you allude to, $da$ is referring to an area element and $d\tau$ to a volume element, so it's not clear what it means to equate these expressions.
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9 months ago
Edit Post #285238 Post edited:
10 months ago
Edit Post #285238 Initial revision 10 months ago
Answer A: How can the kinetic energy equation be intuitively understood?
Your analysis seems pretty good. To take an equivalent but more traditional example, imagine we throw a ball upwards. Ignoring air resistance and approximating the gravitational force as constant, the ball will accelerate downward with constant acceleration. If the initial (upwards) velocity is $v0$ ...
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10 months ago
Comment Post #285233 The OP knows what the difference between kinetic energy and momentum is. The question is how to intuitively understand why kinetic energy grows quadratically with velocity. Momentum was only brought up for contrast. (Also, kinetic energy is *not* conserved in most scenarios; total energy is.)
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10 months ago
Comment Post #284761 It doesn't make sense to say the "Laplace operator represents waves" any more than it would make sense to say the second partial derivative of time does. You could say that the *solutions* to that differential equations] models waves, but this isn't a property of the operator. (Admittedly, there is a...
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11 months ago
Edit Post #284671 Post edited:
11 months ago
Edit Post #284671 Post edited:
Point out the reparameterization motivation of the discussion in the middle. Some other changes.
11 months ago
Edit Post #284671 Initial revision 12 months ago
Answer A: What is "order" and "disorder" in entropy?
"Disorder" and "order" don't mean anything with regards to entropy. This is a common "science popularization" level description of entropy that is "not even wrong" in that, as you've seen, these terms are not defined, and especially not defined in terms of usual physical models. Now one could defi...
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12 months ago
Comment Post #284073 You have a definition of the Poisson bracket, so there's nothing that can be expressed with this notion of Poisson bracket that can't be expressed without by simply using its definition. Besides that, what answer are you expecting that [the Wikipedia page for Poisson bracket](https://en.wikipedia.org...
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about 1 year ago
Comment Post #283954 The Lagrangian doesn't minimizes the action. The Lagrangian is the integrand of the integral defining the action. The action is a function of trajectories. The trajectories that make the action stationary (not necessarily minimal) are the physically realizable trajectories. The Lagrangian isn't a tra...
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about 1 year ago
Edit Post #280620 Initial revision over 1 year ago
Answer A: How do constraints work in Lagrangian systems?
As apparently seems par for this book, the theorem statement you're paraphrasing involves vaguely defined or completely undefined terms. For example, it talks about "admissible (smooth) paths" but this is the first use of the term "admissible" in the text.^[The notation $f'q$ is bizarre. The authors ...
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over 1 year ago
Edit Post #280558 Initial revision over 1 year ago
Answer A: How does probability conservation work in Dirac's original formulation of relativistic QM?
I recommend https://www.mat.univie.ac.at/neum/physfaq/topics/position.html which, while a bit hard to read, is more comprehensive and written by someone more authoritative than me. My research didn't start there, but I covered several of the same sources before finding it. The tl;dr is the "naive"...
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over 1 year ago