This page is a mess: it will probably remain so for some time. I'll be hanging things I write about þeoretical physics off it, except for the things separately classified as General Relativity or Quantum Mechanics.
temperaturemeaningful for a system of only one particle – and initial ruminations on thermodynamics.
Back in May 1996 I was thinking about the nature of harmonic oscillations on high-dimensional smooth manifolds: treating the manifold as a drum-skin and looking for what finite-energy patterns of oscillation arise. Given that the Universe is understood as a smooth manifold having high (but probably differing) curvatures in all but four dimensions, my aim was to see what kinds of oscillations would be stable. Whether this (entirely classical) analysis would be of any use is, of course, a matter of speculation. However, it should teach anyone investigating it plenty about the machinery of describing action on a smooth manifold, yield insights into the meaning of Einstein's field equations for gravity (which relate curvature to mass density) and provide a start-point from which to look into quantising such systems. By August 1997 I was more pre-occupied with building a mathematical toolset. More recently (2008), I've been too busy working to give much time to my research, but I've been reading some of the text-books I should have read as a student.
Avogadro's number tells us that there are .9963 × power(2, 79) molecules in a mole of stuff. If the stuff is an ideal gas under standard conditions, this takes up 22 and a bit litres of space, giving each a tiny volume, equal to that of a cube with 2 nanometre sides. Such a side is about 40 times the Bohr radius but in Planck lengths it's 5 times the 25th power of 10.
Divide the speed of light by a year and you get an accelleration: 9.5 metres
per second, only slightly less than Earth standard gravity. By my quick
calculations, that's the surface
gravity one would experience at an
altitude of 67 miles, above the Earth as it is; or on the surface of a similar
planet whose radius is 124 miles shorter.
The inverse of the fine structure constant, 137.04, is respectably well approximated by:
Some people get quite misty-eyed about such coincidences. Scientists expect them.
There's plenty of physics out there on the Web – after all, it was the physicists who got the Web going – so here are a few links to places to get started, followed by links of general interest:
Written by Eddy.