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Questions related from John A. Macken
If momentum could be transferred faster than the speed of light, then a mass could be accelerated without an opposite momentum (energy) being transferred to a local mass. This would be a violation...
06 October 2023 7,725 32 View
Einstein is generally credited with eliminating the need for the aether. However, as documented in the book “Einstein and the Ether”, from 1916 until his death he believed in the aether in some...
15 September 2017 5,967 51 View
The interferometer mirrors used to detect gravitational waves are usually described as moving when a gravitational wave passes. This is an easy to understand explanation, but is it correct? Moving...
18 April 2016 4,536 27 View
The commonly held explanation is that the electromagnetic force is transferred by virtual photons. Are the static electric and magnetic fields produced by an electron also the result of virtual...
31 March 2016 4,885 18 View
I am writing a paper for a conference titled: The Nature of Light: What are Photons? It would be very helpful to obtain an idea about how this group of scientists visualize a photon propagating in...
06 July 2015 3,330 96 View
Some physicists believe that gravity is not a real force like the electromagnetic or the strong force because an inertial frame of reference eliminates the effects of gravity. However, it can be...
13 May 2015 7,318 95 View
Neutrino flavor oscillations are often described as involving a mass/energy change. The flavor oscillation is also described as the result of a superposition of mass eigenstates which propagate at...
20 February 2015 5,392 17 View
The “spin” of an electron or other fundamental particle is often described as “intrinsic angular momentum”. This terminology is required because a point particle or Planck length vibrating string...
17 December 2014 4,344 4 View
We frequently speak of an object having gained gravitational potential energy when work is done in lifting a mass from a lower elevation to a higher elevation. However, what exactly has physically...
13 November 2014 830 59 View
The biggest discrepancy in all of physics is the approximately 10120 difference between the energy density of the universe obtained from general relativity (GR) compared to the energy density of...
06 November 2014 3,518 92 View
An electron is usually assumed to be either a point particle or a Planck length vibrating string which is virtually a point particle. While these models work well for some mathematical analysis,...
28 October 2014 1,443 4 View
In cosmology, the rest frame for the cosmic microwave background (CMB) appears to be a preferred frame of reference. For example, galaxies tend to have an average speed of zero relative to their...
14 October 2014 670 67 View
The Strong Equivalence Principle of Gravitation states that the effects of acceleration are indistinguishable from those of gravitation. This is valid only if the geometrical interpretation of...
01 January 1970 9,784 26 View
The constant speed of light is just the most obvious example of the covariance of all the physical laws. The physical laws do not change even when gravity produces different rates of time or...
01 January 1970 4,081 52 View
The fundamental physical constants, ħ, c and G, appear to be the same everywhere in the observable universe. Observers in different gravitational potentials or with different relative velocity,...
01 January 1970 470 99 View
The standard model has 17 named fundamental particles and each of these particles are derived from a corresponding field. Do you visualize these fields as additions to the properties of the vacuum...
01 January 1970 423 27 View
This question is ultimately about an electron’s structure. It is a common belief that an electron is a point particle. This view requires that we ignore the mass/energy in an electron’s electric...
01 January 1970 9,551 6 View
The fallacy of the aether was that its only function was to propagate light waves. This question goes much further and probes whether space (the vacuum) is an elastic medium that propagates waves...
01 January 1970 1,545 96 View
Quantum field theory has a named field for each particle. There is an electron field, a muon field, a Higgs field, etc. To these particle fields the four force fields are added: gravity,...
01 January 1970 6,200 29 View
The Hubble radius is defined as the distance from our location where particles (galaxies) are receding from us at the speed of light. Our “Hubble radius” is currently about 13.8 billion light...
01 January 1970 6,736 19 View
If an electron and a positron interact, they release over a million eV of energy. If this energy is in the form of photons confined in a reflecting box, this energy density generates pressure on...
01 January 1970 709 22 View
If I elevate a mass in a gravitational field, I have given the mass gravitational potential energy. This gravitational potential energy is usually presumed to be stored in the gravitational field...
01 January 1970 3,450 8 View
An event in 4 dimensional spacetime is designated by coordinates x, y, z and t. Spacetime physically has the three spatial coordinates (x, y and z). Does spacetime also have a physical property...
01 January 1970 2,450 43 View
Gravity is often considered a pseudo-force that is associated with the geometric curvature of spacetime. The electromagnetic force is considered a gauge force transferred by virtual photon...
01 January 1970 9,947 9 View
Collision experiments imply that an electron must be smaller than 10-18 m. The equation for the energy in an electric field external to radius r produced by charge e is: Eext = αħc/2r. (where α is...
01 January 1970 9,361 5 View
Does anyone besides me think that the 17 overlapping fields of quantum field theory seem like a chaotic concept that cannot be the foundation of the universe? Every time we discover a new...
01 January 1970 8,186 3 View
The three spatial dimensions (x, y and z) of spacetime can be physically demonstrated. However, what about the time dimension? Mathematically, time is a fundamental part of spacetime. ds2 = c2dt2...
01 January 1970 1,311 4 View
