HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: jac@ds8.scri.fsu.edu (Jim Carr)
Newsgroups: sci.physics
Subject: Re: LaTeX submission to Phys. Rev. ?
Date: 30 Aug 92 04:26:50 GMT
Reply-To: jac@ds8.scri.fsu.edu (Jim Carr)
Distribution: na
Organization: SCRI, Florida State University

In article <dedmunds.714954817@sfu.ca> dedmunds@selkirk.sfu.ca (Darran Edmundson) writes:
>Are there reduced page charges for electronically submitted articles?
>I would think that the typing is the lion's share of the production
>process.

At present, only Phys. Rev. C will waive all page charges for a compuscript 
article.  This is not because there are no costs, but as an experiment to 
attract foreign authors and encourage use of this system. 

(A similar experiment is also going on in Phys. Rev. D where all pages 
charges have been dropped for all papers.  See explanation in APSNews, 
but the key point seems to be that the cost of such an experiment in 
these smaller journals makes it practical without major increases in 
library subscription charges.) 

It is not true that typing is a big part of the cost.  I thought so too, 
but I asked the editor and was disabused of this notion.  The keyboarding 
is done on some tropical island by persons with the skill to do exactly 
what the editor marking on the copy with all those colored pencils.  TeX 
files require more highly skilled (and paid) persons to make the required 
editorial changes in the file.  Until a major economny of scale comes 
into play, the production costs are quite similar.

Now if you write your paper well, so few or no editorial changes are 
needed at production time, you can help hold down those costs!  I think 
part of the experiment at PRC and PRD is to see if more widespread use 
will result in such changes and help control costs. 

--
J. A. Carr                                    |  "The New Frontier of which I  
jac@gw.scri.fsu.edu                           |  speak is not a set of promises
Florida State University  B-186               |  -- it is a set of challenges."
Supercomputer Computations Research Institute |   John F. Kennedy (15 July 60)
Newsgroups: sci.physics
From: firth@sei.cmu.edu (Robert Firth)
Subject: Re: Report on Philosophies of Physicists
Organization: Software Engineering Institute
Date: Fri, 4 Sep 1992 12:03:49 GMT

In article <2726@news.cerf.net> mitsu@nic.cerf.net (Mitsuharu Hadeishi) writes:

>Although the basic concepts seem rather
>simple and "obvious", I have found that when attempting
>to discuss them with people who have not done any serious
>work in philosophy (Western or Eastern), I cannot seem to make
>myself understood clearly.

"Whatever can be said, can be said clearly"

I respectfully suggest you try harder.  One way to start might be to
read some of those philosophers. and follow their example.  I don't
think David Hume, for example, had any difficulty making himself
understood.  Nor did many other great philosophers, such as Bishop
Berkeley, John Locke, Rene Descartes, or, in our own day, Bertrand
Russell.  Nor is clarity of thought and expression exclusively a
Western vice: Nagasena's exposition of his philosophy, in the
Questions of King Menander, is a model example of lucidity.

You might also adopt a less condescending attitude towards your
audience.  Socrates was polite even to the slave, you may recall.
Xref: sparky sci.physics:13769 sci.skeptic:15338
From: miller@FS1.cam.nist.gov (Bruce R. Miller)
Newsgroups: sci.physics,sci.skeptic
Subject: Re: The dangers in microwaved food...
Date: 28 Aug 92 22:31:07 GMT
Distribution: na
Organization: NIST - Computing and Applied Mathematics Laboratory


In article <28AUG199213171677@reg.triumf.ca>, FRED W. BACH writes:
>    Dear sci.physics types,
> ...   a notable series of experiments done on young mammals and other
>     animals who were fed cobalt-60 irradiated food.  The young developed
>  ...
>      Has anyone repeated these tests with *microwaved* food instead
>      of gamma-irradiated food???

Well, perhaps not, but they have been repeated with solar-irradiated
food.
Is that good enough?

x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
x
From: ric@hpspdla.spd.HP.COM (Ric Peregrino)
Newsgroups: sci.physics
Subject: Re: My son would like to know about photons...
Date: 27 Aug 92 00:48:31 GMT
Organization: HP Stanford Park - Palo Alto, CA


>The simple answer would be "No."

I vaguely remember from nonlinear optics that this may be possible. Certainly
it is possible to combine two photons to make one photon, energy and momentum
being conserved (eg. second harmonic generation). I don't see why you can't 
run this in reverse to get two photons for one (frequency division).

>[A photon] cannot be split anymore than ... a quark can be split.

What about beta decay? This doesn't "split" a quark, but it does transform
one quark into another with the release of an electron and it's antineutrino
(I think?). So in some sense the original quark was broken into constituents.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ric Peregrino     c/o Hewlett Packard Co.        I represent only myself
ric@spd.hp.com    1501 Page Mill Rd. Bldg. 5M    Buy low, sell high
415-857-7526      Palo Alto, CA 94304            Do DC photons exist?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Richard.Mathews@West.Sun.COM (Richard M. Mathews)
Newsgroups: sci.physics
Subject: Re: E=mc2?
Date: 3 Sep 1992 11:33:39 -0700
Organization: Sunsoft Inc., Los Angeles, CA.
NNTP-Posting-Host: smaug.West.Sun.COM

raicu@netcom.com (Eugen Raicu) writes:

>I don't see any fundamental differences between nuclei and bed springs.
>Correct me if I am wrong about this.

I see a difference.  In bed springs, all of the constituent parts are
the same.  Only binding energy changes.  In nuclear reactions, it is
in general the case that the numbers of up and down quarks change.
Because you have converted ups to downs or downs to ups, the energy
change cannot be quite associated purely with binding energy (on the
other hand, because of the confined nature of quarks, it is also not
really practical to quantify how much of the energy comes from binding
energy and how much comes from changing the fundamental constituents,
not to mention that in the swarm of virtual particles it is hard to say
which are the fundamental constituents).

    Richard M. Mathews			 Freedom for Lithuania
Richard.Mathews@West.Sun.COM		        Laisve!
From: dabbott@augean.eleceng.adelaide.edu.AU (Derek Abbott)
Newsgroups: sci.physics
Subject: Re: FTL Microwave Signal
Date: 26 Aug 92 02:16:49 GMT
Organization: Electrical and Electronic Eng., University of Adelaide

In article <20AUG199213365493@elroy.uh.edu> elee969@elroy.uh.edu (Brown, William J.) writes:
>In the December 1991 issue of 'IEEE Microwave Guided Wave Letters', two
>researchers apparently claim to have measured a pulsed microwave signal in
>a waveguide that was travelling faster than light.  Has anybody heard anything
>about this? The reference is,
>
>G.C. Giakos and T.K. Ishii, "Rapid pulsed microwave propagation",
>IEEE Microwave Guided Wave Lett., vol. 1, pp. 374-375, Dec. 1991.
>
>
>
>William Brown
>Applied Electromagnetics Group
>Univ. of Houston


Yes.

See the responses in the May 92 edition and the response to the response
from the Authors.

They were heavily criticised, but they defended themselves very well.
The debate is quite lively and entertaining.

None of the critics asked the obvious question which is: how do the
authors propose to transfer any useful information on a single leading
wavefront?? Surely you can only transfer one bit of data at FTL, which isn't
too useful.

If the answer is to use lots of leading wavefronts in series
then surely you loose the FTL advantage as each wave package
has to "wait" for the one before it to disperse.

So I could not understand how the authors were proposing to
transfer useful data at FTL rates.

Does anyone have a clue?
Newsgroups: sci.physics
From: hank@well.sf.ca.us (Hank Roberts)
Subject: Re: The dangers in microwaved food...
Organization: Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link
Date: Wed, 26 Aug 1992 00:41:15 GMT


Welcome back to college, and for those of you here for the first semester,
welcome.

...acccording to two American chemists, Helen Yeo and Takayuki
Shibamoto of the University of California, microwave irradiation
does not provide the right conditions for the chemical reactions
which help a full flavour to develop.

CITE: Trends in Food Science and Technology; Dec. 1991, p. 329

Desirable flavours:              Undesirable flavours:

   _N    Thiazole                 _N      Oxyazole
 //  \\  meaty                  //  \\    Fishy
   \ /   like popcorn            \  /     like green vegs.
    S                              O

   _      Furan                    _      Thiophen
 //  \\   sweet                  //  \\   onions
  \  /    like caramel            \  /    sulfurous, burnt, rubber
    O     nutty/buttery             S

  //  \   sweet                 //  \\    pungent
  |   ||  nutty                  \  /     like boiled corn
  \\  /   roasted                  N      like hay
From: mppu3@syma.sussex.ac.uk (Conor McMenamin)
Newsgroups: sci.physics
Subject: Re: FTL
Date: 18 Aug 92 08:50:10 GMT
Organization: University of Sussex

Nir.Oren@f54.n7101.z5.fidonet.org (Nir Oren) writes:
: Using the uncertanty principle, is it possible to travel faster than 
: the speed of light: A particles exact speed can't be mesured 
: ks>|for an exact period of time, therefore, could one not exceed 
: the speed of light, if he were then to slow down below it for an 
: equal ( or slightly greater) amount of time?
: Chow
: Nir
: --  

	Some people don't know when to leave it. I'm one. How's about
this. The uncertainty principle states that there is a degree of
uncertainty in position and velocity such that the product of the two
uncertainties is greater than or equal to something with a h in it and
probably some 2 pi's and stuff. (Less chance of being flamed if I keep
it vague). If something is going at speeds near c, where is it? Try
pointing at it. Therefore delta x is BIG. And delta v is correspondingly
small.
	But the basic result is, if you're dealing with things in terms
of the uncertainty principle, you're never going to observe it, so why
does it matter?

	Conor
From: mso@ukc.ac.uk (Michael S. Ody)
Newsgroups: sci.physics
Subject: Source of Feynman quote wanted
Date: 26 Aug 92 15:23:58 GMT
Organization: Physics Lab, The University, Canterbury, Kent, UK

I have a vague recollection of a certain Feynman quote and I'm trying
to track down its origin.

RP was apparently perusing the work of a student when he noticed a factor 
of 4*pi was missing.  The student couldn't understand why Feynman was 
pointing out what the student considered to be such a trivial thing.
Feynman replied, somewhat indignantly, that

   ''if you can't get the 4*pi's in the right place then you
     don't know nothing!''

Now, this quote might be from the BBC TV programme about RP called 'The 
Pleasure of Finding Things Out' but, of course, I could be wrong.

Does anyone know for certain where the above quote comes from?

Michael.

--
Michael S. Ody,
The Physics Laboratory,
University of Kent at Canterbury,
CT2 7NZ,  United Kingdom.
From: aephraim@physics.Berkeley.EDU (Aephraim M. Steinberg)
Newsgroups: sci.physics
Subject: Re: My son would like to know about photons...
Date: 4 Sep 1992 21:06:53 GMT
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
NNTP-Posting-Host: physics.berkeley.edu

In article <10567@sun13.scri.fsu.edu> jac@ds8.scri.fsu.edu (Jim Carr) writes:
>In article <1992Sep1.133516.28886@tpl68k0.tplrd.tpl.oz.au> keithh@tplrd.tpl.oz.au (Keith Harwood) writes:
>>
>>half length photons coming out have almost the same colour as the
>>ones going in, they are just slightly paler. (Translation into 
>>physics: the photons coming out have the same centre wavelength,
>>but the line is broader.)
>
> Now it sounds like you are talking about an ensemble of photons, 
> not a single photon, since the "line width" is not a property of 
> a single photon.  A single photon has a well-defined energy/color. 
>

I'm afraid this is not true in general.  After all, you can measure the
time of arrival of a single photon, and if it came from a pulsed laser
(or a nonlinear crystal of the sort you guys have been discussing in this
thread, for that matter), you may know what you'll find to within tens
of femtoseconds, which implies a finite bandwidth by Fourier's or Heisenberg's
theorem/relation.  Light of a "single color" is a meaningless statement
in practice, since it requires an unterminated wavetrain, and a PHOTON
of a "single color" is meaningless in QM since it would not be a normalizable
state, any more than an electron plane wave in an infinite universe.
(It would be meaningful inside an infinitely reflecting cavity, before
I get flamed.)

Furthermore, Bell's inequalities show that pairs of photons coming out
of these "splitters" can not really be thought of as having either definite
positions or definite energies until they are detected; they only have
the correlations.

When people say that a single photon has a well-defined frequency, they
probably mean that the standard, neat way of dealing with QED involves
quantizing "modes" of the radiation field, one for each k-vector (well,
actually 2, I guess), and a creation operator creates a photon with a
given k-vector.  In this sort of terminology, one simply wouldn't talk
about a single photon from a laser, but a superposition of several different
photons.  (Really a superposition of several different states, each of
which had photon number of 1, but in different modes.)

As is no doubt clear from that paragraph, these sorts of semantics tend
not to add much to the discussion.  Most people I know will simply talk
about the linewidth of a single photon if they want to :-).


-- 
Aephraim M. Steinberg                    | "WHY must I treat the measuring
UCB Physics                              | device classically??  What will
aephraim@physics.berkeley.edu            | happen to me if I don't??"
                                         |       -- Eugene Wigner
From: johan@blade.stack.urc.tue.nl (Johan Wevers)
Newsgroups: sci.physics
Subject: Re: Axiom of Physics
Date: 28 Aug 92 08:05:36 GMT
Organization: MCGV Stack, Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands.

crb7q@kelvin.seas.Virginia.EDU (Cameron Randale Bass) writes:

> I see no problem with the process of assuming the conservation laws to 
> imply the symmetries.  The fact that conservation laws can
> be derived from symmetries certainly does not mean that the
> signposts cannot be placed elsewhere with similar consequences.

> 'Which is more fundamental' seems like an exercise in semantics
> sometimes.

I have never seen the derivation of a symmetry from a law of conservation,
but maybe this is possible (Anyone on the net who knows ?). I thought that
symmetry rules were more fundamental.

But in that case, the question is irrelevant: there is one fundamental
principle, and there can be a choise which one. Just as one is free to
chose the coordinate system in which he/she wants to describe nature.

>                                 dale bass

******************************************************************** 
* J.C.A. Wevers                *         u\  _\       /e+        2 * 
* johan@blade.stack.urc.tue.nl *     1 |   \ u \  X  /         |   * 
******************************** P = - |    >   >---<     + ...|   * 
*     The only nature of       *     N |   /   /     \         |   * 
*     reality is physics       *         u/   /d     u\            *
********************************************************************
From: jac@ds8.scri.fsu.edu (Jim Carr)
Newsgroups: sci.physics
Subject: Re: My son would like to know about photons...
Date: 30 Aug 92 03:32:38 GMT
Reply-To: jac@ds8.scri.fsu.edu (Jim Carr)
Organization: SCRI, Florida State University

In article <1992Aug26.142916.533@csc.canterbury.ac.nz> phys169@csc.canterbury.ac.nz writes:
>I have a question on behalf of my 9-year old son...

Great!  I hope he has more.  Having followed the thread, I want to 
reinforce Scott Chase's answer as the best response to the question:

>If you can split atoms, can you split photons?

That is, an atom is made up of identifiable constituent parts: protons, 
neutrons, and electrons.  These constituents can be rearranged in 
various ways, one of which is the splitting (fission) of an atom that, 
under appropriate conditions, releases energy because the constituents 
are more tightly bound in the final configuration. 

In this sense, you cannot split a photon since it has no constituent 
parts; a photon is an elementary particle.  

This is the simplest answer to the simple question, in the spirit of 
your "no MeV, no quarks" caveat at the end of your request.  There are 
deeper issues, of course, some of which have been touched on in 
various replies.  These can be summarized as referring to a followup 
question, "can a photon interact with other particles to leave you with 
additional photons?".  To this, the answer is yes, and it can even 
leave you with additional particles if the energy of the photon (now 
we need MeV) is high enough.  Most of the ensuing discussion seems 
to be on thist point, and was pretty accurate. 

Now if you want to get into quarks, there is the very interesting 
question of whether you can split a proton.  Since the proton is 
made of constituents (quarks), the answer is a qualified "yes". 
Qualified, since the rules for building particles from quarks are 
more complicated than the rules for assembling atomic nuclei from 
protons and neutrons.  One has to create a quark-antiquark pair 
for a split (say proton into neutron and pi+) to occur, but in 
the sense that we use Feynman diagrams to describe such a process, 
it is just a rearrangement of the constituent quarks. 

--
J. A. Carr                                    |  "The New Frontier of which I  
jac@gw.scri.fsu.edu                           |  speak is not a set of promises
Florida State University  B-186               |  -- it is a set of challenges."
Supercomputer Computations Research Institute |   John F. Kennedy (15 July 60)
From: 910436a@darwin.ntu.edu.au
Newsgroups: sci.physics
Subject: Fiz. Tverd. Tela ? 
Date: 3 Sep 92 14:10:42 +0900

I am urgently seeking a paper written by Guseinov N M and Seid-Rzaeva
in the Fiz. Tverd. Tela, 31 , 32 in 1989. The paper looks at how the 
Frohlich model predicts the correct results for the energy shift and for
mass corrections of polarons in both 3D and 2D crystal systems. 
The problem is I've not heard this particular journal and would be 
grateful if someone who have access to this journal in their library 
could post a copy to my address below. I know this involves so much 
inconvience on the sender's part..but I would be so very grateful if only 
the paper gets here.

	Thanking in advance.]


Ms Thilagam
Physics Department
Science Faculty
Northern territory University
P.O. Box 40146
NT 0811 , Australia


Newsgroups: sci.physics
From: rmrin@cbnewsk.cb.att.com (r.m.rickert)
Subject: Re: The dangers in microwaved food...
Organization: AT&T
Date: Wed, 26 Aug 1992 17:59:59 GMT

In article <1992Aug23.010348.12676@EE.Stanford.EDU> siegman@EE.Stanford.EDU (Anthony E. Siegman) writes:
>>|> Or eggs.  Unless the membrane is pierced they can build up a lot of
>>|> internal pressure.  The same probably applies to any food with a
>>|> reasonably impervious layer on the outside.  The quick heating of a
>>|> microwave oven can turn it into a potential bomb which can explode 
>>|> when some poor soul cuts it or pokes it with a fork.
>
>I thought to avoid this by putting the egg into a big pyrex measuring
>bowl full of water, hopefully leading to boiled egg, shielded by the
>water.  Wrong!  After a minute or so of heating, ka-wumpf!!!, egg and
>water all over the inside of the microwave (didn't break the bowl
>however).

I recently bought (for a buck on closeout at a gourmet cooking store)
a little gadget that has an egg-end size depression with a very small pin
mounted in the center.  You put the egg in the depression, push, and the pin
puts a you-know-what hole in the end of the egg.  I've only tried it with
boiling water so far (not the zapper) but it keeps the eggs from cracking.
You can see little bubbles coming out of the pin hole while the egg is
cooking.

-- 

Dick Rickert  AT&T Consumer Products Laboratory


Newsgroups: sci.physics
From: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
Subject: Re: Facts and Values (was Where it came from)
Organization: SPSS Inc.
Distribution: na
Date: Wed, 26 Aug 1992 15:46:46 GMT

In article <25731@dog.ee.lbl.gov> sichase@csa3.lbl.gov writes:
>In article <1992Aug25.143041.10878@watson.ibm.com>, platt@watson.ibm.com (Daniel E. Platt) writes...
>
>>are direct inheritors of the Pythagoreans.  If you take a trip back
>>1 century, many physicists felt physics was all worked out.  There were
>>a few points floating around, such as PE effect, and some anomalous
>>results involving E/M, such as atomic spectra, but they really thought
>>they were done (the attitudes seemed to reflect Victorian smugness).
>>Then we had a 'revolution.'  
>
>I'm not a historian, but I will take issue with this statement anyway.
>Just because one stupid patent officer thought that invention was 
>over doesn't mean that "many physicists felt physics was all worked out."
>It's very hard for me to imagine any reasonable scientist making this
>claim at the turn of the century.  
>
>Can you provide some evidence to support this contention?  How about
>a well known physicist who made a statement even slightly resembling
>a claim that all that was left was the details?  I don't know of any.

Lord Kelvin at one point described physics as a collection of self-consistent
facts of which the "most important" had already been discovered.  He noted
only "two small dark clouds" on the horizon: the results of the Michelson-
Morley experiment, and the failure of classical physics to explain the
blackbody radiation curve.

Coupled to the hubris in this statement is a remarkable insight, pointing
to the very phenomena whose study would lead to relativity and QM.

The exact quote can be found in _Quanta_, by Andrade e Silva and Lochak.
Newsgroups: sci.physics
From: lafave@ial4.jsc.nasa.gov (Dr. Norman J. LaFave)
Subject: Re: Misner et al.
Organization: Lockheed Engineering & Sciences Co.
Date: Tue, 1 Sep 1992 17:33:41 GMT

As a student of Wheeler's, I may be a bit biased but I love the book.
I admit that criticism of it on the basis of prose are valid. I used
to drive myself crazy trying to read some of Wheeler's papers when he
would get "artsy" in his descriptions (this usually resulted in a trip to
his office for a lengthy Q&A). However, I think the strength of the book
is on three fronts:

1.) Wheeler's diagrams are the best I have ever seen in reducing a concept
to its basics. Often when the text fails to give understanding, the diagrams
do the job.

2.) The modern notation, which drives some people crazy, has a definite
purpose: to break people of the habit of thinking that relativity calculations
depend on the choice of the coordinate frames. Furthermore, the more condensed
form of the notation is alot easier to deal with when doing a long calculation,
once you know how to use it.

3.) The last chapters on new frontiers were inspiring to many of us. I
believe that an update of these chapters are in order to include some
of the latest frontier ideas.

If the book has one major flaw, it is the description of the "sandwich"
version of the initial value formulation for geometrodynamics. Dr. James
York has proven that the description is inconsistent with the constraint
equation solution.

Dr. Norman J. LaFave