Natural Science Forum / Physics / Research / June 2006

Why does everybody assume that the gravitational field must be
quantized in some sense? Why not simply derive a spacetime independent
version of the Schrodinger equation, and derive an indeterministic
gravitational field based on the indeterminism of other quantum fields?

How would the universe be different if there were only one grade of
lepton?
And how would our daily lives be different if muons had not been
discovered?

Hello, s.p.r.
I have  worked out curves for speed as a function of slope with various
headwinds and tailwinds for a "standard" bicycle. I haven't posted them
anywhere.

I filmed a peculiar "ghost" in an aquarium cloud chamber that my 17 yo son
built.
The movie is http://www.jwmooney.com/cloud1tcmooney.mpg It is 5.4 Mb
The first few times I viewed it, I thought the glow was a reflection of my

A future gun physics question.
Simply stated, what is the maximum practical speed of a bullet in air at
(roughly) sea level? Ignore the acceleration mechanism.
I assume that it is the point at which the bullet melts and deforms due

   As I understand history, before general relativity Einstein tried
and failed to find a Lorenz invariant description of gravitational
forces that would reduce suitably to Newtonian gravity in appropriate
cases (in retrospect it seems obvious why such a description cannot

Suppose we have a closed quantum mechanical system which evolves (in
the Heisenberg picture) such that all the required canonical
commutation relations (e.g., [p(t),q(t)]=i\hbar ) are satisfied for all
t >=0. Is the associated evolution necessarily unitary (we don't know

Birkhoff's theorem says that any vacuum solution of Einstein's equations
must be static, and asymptotically flat.
One of the consequences of Birkhoff's theorem is that the gravitational
field inside any spherical shell of matter is zero, even if the shell is

How would you answer this:
What good are the Maurer-Cartan equations for a Lie group (other than just
sitting there being true)?

Has the use of x-rays for telecommuncations ever been considered? I
imagine that x-ray photons would have more bandwidth than
visible-spectrum photons. Other than bandwidth, are there any
advantages to using x-rays instead of light. One major disadvantage, is

18-JUN-2006
In the context of a Lornetz boost in the x,x' dimension, and in
dimensionless terms where the velocity of light is given as c = 1, I've
found for parameter 0 < v < 1, a solution that uniquely satisfies the

I wrote:

[snip]

About 30 years ago, terrestrial GW detectors were only sensitive enough
to observe "hammer blow" radiation of indeterminate origin.
I would like to know; have modern detectors:
A) Established whether such "hammer blow" radiation is terrestrial

I am an adjunct instructor at St. John's reading my texts again in
hopes of pasing a qualifier so I may continue to persue a PhD in
Quantum Gravity. I started about 2 months ago and realized that I can't
learn physics in a vacuum. Afterall, there is only so far you can go

John Baez and others have discussed on this newsgroup the fact that
Einstein's equation can be nicely encapsulated in the relationship
between the second time derivative of the volume of a small cloud of
initially co-moving, free-falling test particles and the energy-momentum