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Course: Breakthrough Junior Challenge > Unit 1
Lesson 3: 2015 Challenge — Physics- Special theory of relativity - 2015 Challenge Winner!
- A visualization of special relativity
- Chromatic aberration
- Orbital mechanics
- What is light?
- Special and general relativity
- The science of fireworks
- Quantum tunneling
- Antimatter
- Special Relativity
- What Einstein missed: The EPR paradox
- Virtual particles and gravity
- Interstellar and Hawking radiation
- All about superconductors
- Entropy and the direction of time
- Magnetism, light and the magneto optic Kerr effect
- The theory of everything
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Virtual particles and gravity
By Sean Hackett
I stumbled upon the concept of "virtual particles", something that is not real that can affect something that is real. It is a truly wacky idea, but I started to notice that it matches with many of the things we know about gravity: It travels at the speed of light, it passes through all objects, it can arise anywhere in the smallest areas, and it increases as energy increases in a single spot. It was at this point that I came up with the idea that gravity, like the electromagnetic force, could be mediated by virtual photons.
I stumbled upon the concept of "virtual particles", something that is not real that can affect something that is real. It is a truly wacky idea, but I started to notice that it matches with many of the things we know about gravity: It travels at the speed of light, it passes through all objects, it can arise anywhere in the smallest areas, and it increases as energy increases in a single spot. It was at this point that I came up with the idea that gravity, like the electromagnetic force, could be mediated by virtual photons.
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Actually,black holes don't seem to evaporate at all ,even not the one's that were born in the beginning of the universe.Can it be because there is always way much more mass falling into a black hole than the mass that is being consumed as energy?(0 votes)
There is much more energy falling into black holes, even totally isolated, than they are currently evaporating, due to the cosmic background radiation.
This could be wrong if there are small black holes ("small" meaning lighter than a small planet !), but we don't know if they can exist. They would be emitting more energy by this "evaporation" process than they would receive from the cosmic background radiation.(1 vote)
- In the double slit experiment, an electron on entering the slits appears anywhere on the screen, can we view this as if it simply is created at the slit and annihilated immediately, and then it's simply recreated at the screen? In the meanwhile it doesn't exist, as the quantum field wasn't excited so much for showing an electron. This way we can see, there are waves of fluctuations and particles as excitation, thus solving wave particle-duality as well. This probably how quantum tunneling also works. So electrons pass through walls because they simply die and recreate on the other side! the quantum fluctuations is everywhere in and out of the wall!
Is this interpretation correct?(0 votes) 
Why isn't E directly proportional to M, instead of E=M?(0 votes)
Energy is a property of matter, meaning the same type or amounts of matter can have different amounts of energy, like heat. This means energy cannot be directly proportional to matter.(0 votes)