User:Reversedragon/sci1

antiparticle 20-21 opposite directions across some field?

balance of nature 30 a mature forest contains aging trees and grows slowly

black holes 45-47 basically unconnected to universe 45 teeny black holes 10^-33 cm 47

black-body radiation 48-49 can a perfectly absorbing body store infinite energy?? 48 nope - atoms can't absorb or emit all wavelengths, causing some to leak out 49

quantum leap 51 discrete change in orbitals

boltzmann constant 54 statistical mechanics; (1/2)mv^2 = kT point this to the search for 137 oh yeah boltzmann gave up and died by suicide 54

brewster's law 58 light takes the shape of electro-magnetic fields; polarization is the way the electric field points

brownian motion 59 showed there really are countable atoms

degeneracy pressure of electrons 69 stops white dwarfs from collapsing if they are below Chandrasekhar limit

Cherenkov radiation 77 when you outrun light inside glass you create a light boom

chronology protection conjecture 78 anthropic principle for time "if time is a dimension--" it might not be though, quantum fields can be interpreted as dimensions, but on that dimension activity moves stochastically Giratina is one of the only accurate portrayals in fiction of "extra dimensions", because it is a fanciful portrayal of quantum fields having two directions that separate the domain of matter from antimatter, and the Distortion World is intended to be separated from the regular world by its characteristics. if it were perfectly accurate it would destroy trainers the moment they walk in, of course, but a creature made of antimatter is not actually that weird if it was somehow surrounded by antimatter hadrons, skies, and platforms

competitive exclusion principle 85 differential resource utilization 121 natural resources are slotted; extirpation appears to depend on the question of successfully finding a slot competitive exclusion of species, due to amount or slotting, doesn't occur because they form niches this is not necessarily an ironclad physical law but the pattern keeps recurring

complementarity principle 86-87 beam of electrons behaves as a wave, cannon of electrons behaves as a particle /sometimes/

complex adaptive systems 88 complex system: system with many interacting agents, can be as basic as a pile of sand complex adaptive system: system in which agents can take in stimulus and respond "emergent properties ... don't appear gradually" - I'm not sure that's true for all complex systems, because of things like neutron decay where the first small change has to occur before the big one ever does. I think this is clearer if you study non-adaptive systems before the properly adaptive ones

compound motion 89-91 motion vectors can be broken down 89 this is a cool one, because it shows how everyday movement may resemble quantum field dimensions. really things are connected, but sometimes it works out just fine to mathematically separate each aspect because every direction is a process

Compton effect 92 photon-electron interactions take energy and angle from incoming photons at once an x-ray beam going through a crystal is a Feynman diagram

correspondence principle 98 quantum equations do properly predict larger scales, just a bit inefficiently versus coarse-grained classical equations this principle is so damning for any argument we can't predict complex adaptive systems. atoms are complex systems. quarks are complex systems. nobody finds it impossible to predict hadrons.

open / closed universe 199-101 dark energy: material cause of expanding universe pushing against gravity 100 two thirds of the energy in the universe is dark energy dark energy was thought to be described by the cosmological constant, but that is not clear any more some hypothesize that dark energy can be properly termed a force - the quintessence hypothesis

determinism 116 planets move Mercury; emergence is hard

deterministic chaos 118

diffraction 122

dispersion 123