Month: June 2017

What is mass?

What is mass?

TL;DR – Inertial mass tells us how many states are there within a given range of velocity. More massive bodies are harder to accelerate because they have to go through more states to reach the same change in velocity. In this post I want to look a bit more closely at the concept of mass. …

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Classical mechanics in one post

Classical mechanics in one post

TL;DR – Classical mechanics describes a divergence-free flow of states. The Hamiltonian is the time component of its vector potential. The Lagrangian is the scalar product between the flow and the vector potential. For the longest time I didn’t know what the Lagrangian was and why its integral is minimized along trajectories. A couple of …

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Proving a negative and the reindeer in your house

Proving a negative and the reindeer in your house

TL;DR – We cannot always validate all answers to a scientific question with the same process. For some yes/no questions, only one side can be actually experimentally verified. Some people write me things like “Is it true that absent of evidence is not evidence of absence?” “Is it true that there my be a China …

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