Saturday, November 13th, 2010
If you’re standing outside and a plane passes overhead, it sounds like it’s coming from a bit further back than it looks like it’s coming from. This is because light travels practically instantaneously (c = 299,792,458 m/s = 670,616,629 mph, so you’re 0.00004 light-seconds from a plane 12000m in the air) while sound takes a [...]
Wednesday, November 10th, 2010
On my last test, I had trouble with a couple questions because I wasn’t totally clueful about how angular momentum works in atoms. I should fix this. Orbital angular momentum should come naturally: Our standard way of understanding electron states in atoms is with orbitals, which are chosen to have well-defined angular momentum quantum number [...]