Member: RobertPiccioni

Hi Robert,

Thank you so much for participating in the Member Giveaway program. Apologies for taking so long to review your book, but I thought it was great. I posted the review both here on LibraryThing and on my book blog.

Cheers, and Happy Reading!

posted by PhoenixTerran at 12:41 pm (EST) on Aug 17, 2009

Hi-

Received your book in the early reviewer program. Thank you for the personal note-starting your book today. :)

posted by leperdbunny at 10:41 pm (EST) on Jun 16, 2009

Yes, feel free to use my real name and I will visit Amazon soon and leave the same message. I really appreciated the book. As a non-scientist who reads a lot of popular science I sometimes find myself having to research terms or concepts in order to more fully understand an authors point or point of view. In reading your book I found myself thinking, I wish I had understood that better when I read xyz... Thanks again for the opportunity to read your book.

Don Moore
Baton Rouge, La.

posted by Dmoorela at 9:40 am (EST) on Jun 8, 2009

Every heart that has beat strongly
and cheerfully has left a hopeful
impulse behind it in the world,
and bettered the tradition of mankind.

- Robert Louis Stevenson

posted by theoldman at 8:10 am (EST) on Apr 24, 2009

I see "clock" and "time" referenced in your response, so I have an exercise. Make four separate entities on a sheet of paper (one at each corner) going clockwise from the top left corner. Write: "space", "time", "clock", and "meter stick". Draw a box at the center of the page and write the word "homogeneous" inside the box. Near each entity: list the properties of the entity. If a property relies on homogeneity, then draw a line from the property to the box. Connect the four entities, drawing as many lines as necessary to establish a connection. If the basis of the connection is the homogeneous property, then draw the connective line through the box. Be prepared to justify the properties and the connections. The question will be, "how do we know?" Experimental evidence is best.

Here is the mathematic problem statement, I did not define it well previously: A test oscillator of mass [m] is executing simple harmonic motion under the influence of gravitational attraction of mass [M]. Its total energy (the Lagrangian) is expressed as the difference between the kinetic and potential energies) L = (px^2+py^2+pz^2)/2m - (gamma)mM/(r-R cos alpha)^2 where the momentum of the test mass is temporarily decomposed in Cartesian coordinates [px], [py], and [pz]; [M] is the mass responsible for the restoring force (the stellar object); [gamma] is the gravitational constant; [r] is the radial distance from the stellar center of mass (a point at a fixed distance) where an oscillating test mass (a pendulum) can be mounted; [R] is the distance between the mounting point and the oscillating test mass, and; [alpha] is the instantaneous displacement angle of the oscillating test mass. It's a bit messy because the kinetic portion is Cartesian and the potential is in spherical coordinates. After an operator equation is set up the Laplacian operator in Cartesian coordinates can be replaced by its spherical polar coordinate form. Upon conversion to spherical we get a lot of terms for which only an equation editor would do justice so I won't even go there. Assuming that mass M is variable, and its associated differential operator is := -i(hbar) partial /with respect to M (the other differential operators follow the classic quantum mechanics convention), operating on each term with the wave function (PSI) yields Schrodinger's equation for the system. The objective is to obtain the solution to Schrodinger's equation, where the gravitational mass is an action variable. Since the potential does depend on time and is nonconservative (a black hole is accreting mass and an ordinary stellar object is radiating both mass and energy) the time-independent solutions to the Schrödinger equation cannot be utilized. This is a better description of the mathematical problem I am suggesting. I apologize. The diagram for the simple harmonic oscillator would be helpful, I have such a diagram at hand, but it will not paste here.

posted by temporalmechanic at 11:56 pm (EST) on Jan 22, 2009