Happy Rads! (Part 2 of 2)

[6_bleen_7]

[Continued from this post.]

It occurred to me many times, while listening to the Geiger counter chattering away beside me, to wonder just how fast the beta particles were traveling once their parent nuclei had spat them out. And I looked all over for the answer, but nobody, it seems, was willing to part with such information. The maximum decay

Comments

[jedibl]

OK, it's late, so I'm not thinking too clearly. I think you have arrived at correct conclusions, but your formulation is technically faulty

[6_bleen_7]

Thanks-I was hoping you'd check my work, so to speak. By "4-vector," do you mean a vector of length 4? I don't remember that from my college physics class, but we barely scratched the surface of relativity. I was a freshman at the time, which will give you an idea of how advanced the class was. (On the other hand, it was Oberlin, so we probably did more than the average first-semester class does. And I'm happy to have remembered so much of it after 24 years!)

Yes, your formulation seems to be equivalent to mine. Sounds like I had the right idea, but I'm using the terms mass and energy improperly.

Thanks also for the recommendation! Taylor and Wheeler sounds exactly like what I am interested in. I'll put it on my Amazon wish list and see if anyone feels generous this Christmas. : )

[jedibl]

A four-vector is a four-dimensional vector. The components of the energy-momentum 4-vector are (Energy, x-momentum, y-momentum, and z-momentum). The key difference between a 4-D spacetime vector and a traditional 3-D vector is that to find the magnitude (squared), you square the first component and then subtract the squares of the other three components. (Rather than just adding the squares of all components as you would in traditional Euclidean geometry.)

[6_bleen_7]

That's pretty strange-even stranger than quaternions. I think I see how the magnitude is equal to the mass, however.