AxTng1 on 23/3/2008 at 06:33
Seems like Hedy Lamarr let herself go.
Koki on 23/3/2008 at 08:56
Odd, I remember Girl Genius being pay for view before...
demagogue on 23/3/2008 at 09:06
As I understand it, a phonon is a wave moving through a material that sort of behaves like a "thing" in itself, hence "sound-particle". The simplest example is the vibration of a tuning fork. They used it to describe electricity (waves of electrons) travelling through a material.
The coolest thing I read about it is that it comes up again in particle physics, and turns out to be maybe one of the most important ideas in fundamental physics and the last piece to complete the Standard Model -- the Higgs particle.
Apparently the Higgs is what creates matter. For everything. In the whole universe. All particles are originally massless, but when they pass through the Higgs field, they get bogged down in an analogous way electricity does travelling through stuff (like a celebrity passing through a crowd, was the visual metaphor I read; the more popular the celebrity, the more the crowd groups around it and slows it down), and voila, it acts like it has inertia and mass. At least, that's what I think I read. It sounded all very epic to me.
D'Juhn Keep on 23/3/2008 at 20:31
Quote Posted by catbarf
Meh, I have a healthy appreciation for good webcomics. Girl Genius is one of the better ones out there.
lol
TF on 23/3/2008 at 22:40
Quote Posted by D'Juhn Keep
lol
ZylonBane on 24/3/2008 at 00:20
And thus, the point is succinctly made that Girl Genius fans are those who can communicate in the form of complete sentences.
Starrfall on 24/3/2008 at 00:54
Did you see the one where they tested the myth of whether or not girls fart? They put a microphone in her undies for serious.
jtr7 on 24/3/2008 at 01:17
I went to YouTube, typed "Mythbusters" in the search box, and the fart vid was at the top of the list.:o
:sly:
Bathcat on 24/3/2008 at 04:33
Quote Posted by demagogue
As I understand it, a phonon is a wave moving through a material that sort of behaves like a "thing" in itself, hence "sound-particle". The simplest example is the vibration of a tuning fork. They used it to describe electricity (waves of electrons) travelling through a material.
The coolest thing I read about it is that it comes up again in particle physics, and turns out to be maybe one of the most important ideas in fundamental physics and the last piece to complete the Standard Model -- the Higgs particle.
Apparently the Higgs is what creates matter. For everything. In the whole universe. All particles are originally massless, but when they pass through the Higgs field, they get bogged down in an analogous way electricity does travelling through stuff (like a celebrity passing through a crowd, was the visual metaphor I read; the more popular the celebrity, the more the crowd groups around it and slows it down), and voila, it acts like it has inertia and mass. At least, that's what I think I read. It sounded all very epic to me.
Phonons are quantized vibrations of the crystal lattice. Your standard statistical mechanics class will introduce them in the context of the Einstein and Debye models of specific heat.
As for Higgs, that's more interesting: I haven't taken QFT yet, but a month ago I did a statistical field theory problem on the Higgs mechanism in superconductors (i.e. the Meissner effect); it went something like: fluctuations in the magnetic vector potential couple to the superconductor order parameter and add an extra term to the magnetic vector potential Lorentzian, adding mass (and removing the Goldstone mode.) So I think gauge field fluctuations in superconductors are analogous to the spontaneous electroweak vacuum symmetry breaking in particle theory, although I know next to nothing about the Standard Model right now.
EDIT: (
http://www.lassp.cornell.edu/sethna/OrderParameters/ElementaryExcitations.html) This is a very good page that conceptually introduces both phonons and the Higgs mechanism
