Natural Science Forum / Physics / Research / November 2004

I'm looking for some tips on designing a cryostat to be used
with a Helium storage dewar. It's going to be used for transport
measurements. I have a basic idea of what I'm going to do but would
like to hear from others that have done this before. The first version

How many Great Attractors are there in the universe such as the one
that is
pulling (pushing?)the Local Group of galaxies towards Centaurus?
Given that the universe is considered to be homogeneous on a large

I'm trying to find out more about where the operators in quantum mechanics
come from.  From what I see, the justification for using them is that using
them with the wave function, which is already known, gives you the
expectation value for that operator, i.e., <E> = Integral[ ...

Does anyone happen to have the electronic (scanned, pdf etc) versions
of the following papers or know a library in Boston area that might
have it?
W.W. Mullins,"Flattening of a Nearly Plane Solid Surface due to

what is the current best estimate of the upper limit on the photon's
mass using experimental observation? I've read 4.0 x 10^(-51) kg and am
wondering what it might be according to others; jackson talks about the
separation between classical and quantum electrodynamics in this

I'm looking for a book that is just about QED. I have dual batchelor's
degrees in Physics and Mathematics, and have read QED by Feynman, and
would like to know more.
Ideally, I would like to learn about things like bremsstrahlung, pair

I've got a little problem that I'd appreciate some help on. I'm trying
to demonstrate that the equations of motion produced by the ADM
Hamiltonian are the same as those produced by the Lagrangian for GR.
Specifically, I take the Lagrangian for GR to be

Hi, I've been honing this idea for about 3 or 4 months, and now I'd like
to bring it here and discuss it. I'll start out by stating that I am not
a professional physicist; I have been studying physics on an amateur
basis for most of my life, so most of my knowledge is from various

Does dark energy exist or is the part of the universe we inhabit
deccelerating
faster than more distant parts of the universe, giving the illusion of
a  universe being accelerated by a negative pressure? Can a

In a foreword to Dr. Mendel Sachs' book "Einstein vs. Bohr", Joseph
Agassi wrote that the skills that made one a great student often didn't
seem to translate into making a great research physicist. Assuming this
to be true, what do working physicists and those in the physics

Folks,
I've just completed a mission expressly taken up in 1977, when asked
by the NSTS interview board (India) if I could be as good in QM as
(apparently, at that time) in GR. Unfortunately, yours truly was

Please excuse the possible ignorance of my question.
This question is based off of the idea that(as seen in the Guinness
Book of world Records 2000) That a group of scientists in 1996 made
microwaves travel 4.7 times faster than the speed of light.  Seeing

I have to do a project called "the senior exit project" all seniors are
required to do it in order to graduate, so to get to the point...
I was thinking of a project based on time travel, sort of, more like
seeing into the past. Assuming we were to have worm hole travel, or

Question.
There are some who claim that DE as a scalar field resolves the "
missing mass " problem, but as the DE force is repulsive how could that
account for galactic cohesion which is attractive?

1. When string theory talks about gravity, is it _always_ just the
"weak-field" approximation (that is talked about in qft books - at
least Kaku's and Zee's - when they cover gravity) g = n + h ?
2. What does it mean that string theory is non-local (or is it just