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Questions related from John A. Macken
About 380,000 years after the Big Bang, the black body radiation that filled the universe was at a temperature of about 3,000 degrees K. Today, these same photons are at a black body temperature...
09 September 2016 6,641 54 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...
04 April 2016 2,002 30 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...
03 March 2016 5,263 20 View
Richard Feynman said, "If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics.” Is the problem that the human intellect is incapable of understanding some aspects of...
02 February 2016 9,166 84 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...
07 July 2015 4,116 97 View
I think that physicists are too quick to claim that “the laws of physics break down” when they cannot explain something. For example, any discussion that involves the concept of a singularity is...
05 May 2015 9,504 5 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...
05 May 2015 1,579 98 View
John Archibald Wheeler said: “Empty space is not empty.” However, there are many different models of the energy content of the vacuum. One extreme position is that the only energy density present...
03 March 2015 2,411 51 View
The electromagnetic force is modeled as being transferred by virtual photons. These are messenger particles which must be able to create a force at a distance of either attraction or repulsion....
03 March 2015 5,886 41 View
A muon has about 207 times more energy than an electron. It seems that there must be some difference between these two particles that produces this difference. The standard model says that...
03 March 2015 3,201 47 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...
02 February 2015 5,046 18 View
The existence of gravitons is currently being debated. The standard model is a quantum field theory. Forces are transferred by the exchange of gauge bosons such as virtual photons and gluons. In...
01 January 2015 8,316 6 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...
12 December 2014 8,726 4 View
Richard Feynman once said, "If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics." Therefore, the question being proposed is whether quantum mechanics (QM) is...
11 November 2014 2,528 7 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...
11 November 2014 3,992 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...
11 November 2014 4,081 79 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...
10 October 2014 6,705 68 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,...
10 October 2014 533 36 View
It is not sufficient to merely explain that muons are more massive than electrons because they interact more strongly with the Higgs field. For example, an electron with energy of 0.511 MeV must...
08 August 2014 1,038 18 View
