Superconductor resistance is zero to the limit of accuracy of any measurement anyone has made. In a similar vein, the radius of an electron is 'zero': That is to say, if it has a nonzero radius, nobody has been able to measure it. In the case of electrons I happen to know the upper bound, namely 10^-18 meters; if the radius was larger than that, we would have seen it. For superconductors I don't know the experimental upper limit on the resistance, but at any rate it's tiny. Additionally, I think there are some theoretical reasons, ie from the QM description of what's going on, to believe it is genuinely zero; but I won't swear to that without looking it up first.
About electromagnetic Tipler cylinders, I should have said "the way that". As far as I know, electromagnetism does not bend space.
Thank you for the limits explanation, that cleared things up.
About electromagnetic Tipler cylinders, I should have said "the way that". As far as I know, electromagnetism does not bend space.
OK, but if so then do you know the explanation for why:
1) charged black holes are studied separately, and those solutions seem to look different than non-charged black holes?
2) what does it mean that a photon has zero rest mass but non-zero mass “while moving”? I’ve seen calculations that show light beams attracting each other in some cases (IIRC paralle...
In response to falenas108's "Ask an X" thread. I have a PhD in experimental particle physics; I'm currently working as a postdoc at the University of Cincinnati. Ask me anything, as the saying goes.
This is an experiment. There's nothing I like better than talking about what I do; but I usually find that even quite well-informed people don't know enough to ask questions sufficiently specific that I can answer any better than the next guy. What goes through most people's heads when they hear "particle physics" is, judging by experience, string theory. Well, I dunno nuffin' about string theory - at least not any more than the average layman who has read Brian Greene's book. (Admittedly, neither do string theorists.) I'm equally ignorant about quantum gravity, dark energy, quantum computing, and the Higgs boson - in other words, the big theory stuff that shows up in popular-science articles. For that sort of thing you want a theorist, and not just any theorist at that, but one who works specifically on that problem. On the other hand I'm reasonably well informed about production, decay, and mixing of the charm quark and charmed mesons, but who has heard of that? (Well, now you have.) I know a little about CP violation, a bit about detectors, something about reconstructing and simulating events, a fair amount about how we extract signal from background, and quite a lot about fitting distributions in multiple dimensions.