my brother and I are working on a story in which a being's atoms vibrate back and forth so rapidly that it appears invisible, like a plucked guitar string or a plane's propellor.  Is that theoretically possible?   Thanks for any help!
122545
In many anime, comics, movies, etc, we see a lot of super human beings moving and fighting at such high speeds that a regular human being cannot see that they are fighting or moving pass by.  In particular, in the first battle between Goku and Piccolo, those two are able to fight in a confined environment (when Piccolo first appears in the comics, stage fight, if I remembered correctly), and regular audiences are unable to see them when they battle.   Is it physically possible for a "human" (human size object) to move in a confined environment (let's say, $20~\text{m} \times 20~\text{m} \times 10~\text{m}$ ) so fast that a normal person would be unable to see it? If it is possible, how fast must this "person" be?  Assume that this "human" cannot move faster than, or even close to the speed of light.  Some clarifications:  First, please ignore the strength/physicality of the object, and consider it an object that can can move "freely" in this confined space without causing any "side effects" (such as heat, sounds, etc)  Second, please take in note that the object is moving in a confined, rather small 3D space as mentioned in the question, and the observer would be always able to see the entire space.   And last, a blurred image would be considered as "able to see".
14926
let's suppose that I cast a Silent image of a wall on an airship. Let's suppose that I don't move it with concentration.  Does the image of the wall move with the airship or it will progressively go far?
100770
When no one was wearing the invisibility cloak, how could they find it? Wouldn't it be invisible? I read through  and it explained its history, strengths and weaknesses, but didn't really answer my question.
48047
See below gif image taken from .    Or see  about 30 sec in.    Is this a real effect?  Why does it seem to turn periodically? Can it be explained by classical mechanics alone? Is there a simple equation that models this behaviour?
9422
When you energise a taut string, the following resonant modes of vibration occur:    Plotting on the frequency domain, you can see their corresponding frequencies:    But what is the underlying physical principle? Why does this happen?  Is there any way of explaining it that could be understood by a smart 15 year old?  EDIT: I'm going to give my best attempt so far. Here goes:   We can start with sympathetic resonance. Sounding a particular frequency, a pure sinewave.  And noticing the string resonates sympathetically at the frequency of each harmonic. Say this is explained and understood. Now imagine that plucking a string is equivalent to a burst of white noise, which contains frequencies all the way through the spectrum. This could be approached backwards, by starting with random frequencies and noticing that resultant wave produced looks like white noise.   If the above is scientifically correct, then it restricts the domain of the question.  I would really like to be able to understand it scientifically and also be able to explain it intuitively.  PS Images from
59509
recently i was watching a  on quantum computing where the narrators describes that quantum entanglement information travels faster than light!  Is it really possible for anything to move faster than light? Or are the narrators just wrong?  Regards,
26971
For example, is it possible to drink a flying potion and cast greater invisibility spell on myself (both spells would require concentration), so I can fly around invisible?
68703
I've always hit two big stumbling blocks in conceiving of the proof or disproof of  as being even valid idea, let alone an answerable question... I feel I must be misunderstanding some very fundamental things.   Quantum mechanics is deterministic, ignoring the bit where we take our complex number and fudge it into a probability. We use computers to make calculations to provide the predictions of quantum mechanics - how is this not itself a hidden variable theory?   From what I understand the famous Bell theorem and work around it doesn't disprove hidden variable theories, just one specific flavour of them, and even then I am not convinced. I feel like I must be missing something again, because this result seems to me in no way profound... although it certainly fits into the picture of the EPR 'paradox' and is a good demonstration of the validity of QM.  I guess the crux of my problem is that this 'area' really addresses wave function collapse and the problems it causes, but I don't see the need for some collapse mechanism to begin with... again I feel like I am missing something really fundamental.  Apologies if this is a bad question. I have had a look around and there are similar questions, but I don't feel that either of my points are addressed...
121487
Why can't we see ? The thing which makes everything visible is itself invisible. Why is it so?
61414
I'm just a layman with no real science background  (a) I'm not really sure what a shadow is. Some people are saying that it's the absence of something (a photon?) and therefore it is not subject to laws of physics. But I know when I'm in a shadow and when in sunlight... that's "information", and I thought that information flow can't break the speed of light limit.  (b) Some others use the laser pointer/flicking wrist example to talk about laser dots moving faster than light speed. But that can't be right, can it? The photons from the laser point have to travel from A to B and (after wrist flick) from A to C ... but the photons are all moving at the speed of light - there's no law-breaking in moving the laser dot from point B to point C because the photons are moving either from A to B or A to C ... the distance from B to C is not material (is it?).  (c) Also, can a shadow be thought of as a gap in a photon flow? E.g. if I interrupt a beam of single photons then can I think of it as e.g. PPPSSSPPPSSSPPPSSSPPP, etc where P = photons and S(shadow) = no photon &amp;, if so, the "SSS" is effectively travelling at the speed of light ... no faster.
56669
So I've been reading a bit and watching some videos about the double slit experiment, and therefore the wave particle duality; I've also read this "implies" that a particle can be in two places at the same time. Can you clarify this, and how could that be possible?
58234
Apologies if this has been asked before (I did check and I believe it wasn't). I have a question about the  of photons (or other particles). Depending on what and how we measure the photon turns out to be either a wave or a particle. Recently I saw some web page (and I can't remember where) that maybe neither is true. Both the wave perception and the particle perception are just that: perceptions, strengthened by our perhaps limited ability to observe. What if the reality of the photon is something else, something "on top" of our two perceptions?? Could someone direct me to a site that could tell me more about it (or maybe debunk the whole idea?)?
8016
I have very little background in physics, so I apologize if this question is painfully naive.  Consider the following thought experiment: an observer is in a closed room whose walls, floor, and ceiling are made entirely of mirrors, with a single light source in the middle of the room. When the light is on, the observer can see many copies of his reflection all over the place.  Suddenly, the light source turns itself off. Intuitively, I would expect the observer to "instantly" see darkness. However, I can't figure out why that is the case under the "particle" interpretation of light. There are obviously lots of photons already in the room from before. Furthermore, we know that they don't get "consumed" when they hit a wall, because otherwise the observer wouldn't see so many reflections of himself. Basically, when the light goes off, what happens to the photons already in the room?  I suspect the answer goes something like this: the photons in the room lose a little bit of energy every time they bounce off a mirror, but it's so minuscule that we can still see more reflections than our eye can resolve anyway. When the light goes off, however, it takes them a very small fraction of a second to bounce around the room enough times to diffuse completely, which our eye cannot detect.  Is that about right? If we had a theoretical "perfect reflector", would the light remain trapped in the room forever? If we had instruments that could measure such things very finely, would it take (slightly) longer for the light to go out in a room made of mirrors as opposed to a room made of, say, black cloth?
33031
Could any form of matter teleportation every really happen?  If so, what form would it take? Some science-fiction talks about literally sending the atoms from one location to another; others talk of creating a duplicate and destroying the original.  Question originally added .  Update: there are a couple of comments asking me to specify what I mean by teleportation. I'm talking about stuff of Star Trek - taking an object or person and transporting them almost instantly across great distances (thousands of KMs) by:   breaking them up at the atomic (or smaller) level transporting those atomic components (or the information, "recipe" to recreate) and (re-)assembling at the new location.
60095
I was wondering how far in imaging physics had gotten. Do we hold the technology to actually take a picture of, say, an alpha particle, or even a single atom?  I realise we aren't talking about camera pictures, so what kind of imaging techniques have taken images/is most likely to be the technique to take an image of a single atom?
32911
Reading about photons I hear different explanations like "elementary particle", "probability cloud", "energy quanta" and so forth. Since probably no one has ever seen a photon (if "seen" it supposedly - and rather conveniently - ceases to exist) but many experiments seem to verify its properties (or are they maybe adjusted to fit the experiment). I thus can't help wondering if the "photon" is then just a physical/mathematical tool with inexplicable properties (like zero mass - but affected by gravity fields - and constant speed c in space) invented to explain some otherwise unexplainable phenomem and to supplement the elementary particles and their interactions. In short: Are they real or imaginary!  Does anybody know? Or maybe the answer is "blowing in the wind" because to most physicist it probably just does'nt matter as long as it works (as the alternative healers say). Sorry if I seem a little sarcastic here and there.
51030
There is no "action at a distance" in nature. Attraction of a piece of iron by a magnet, attraction between distant electric charges of opposite sign, have to be mediated by something. The  are proposed as an explanation.  If they have an observable effect, it seems like they must exist. If so, why do we call them virtual? It can't be that they have short lifetimes, as there are short-lived particles (resonances) that we don't call "virtual."  On the other hand, some people say that the so-called virtual particles only exist on paper, or that they are just a technique to help us handle our equations.  So what is the meaning of the word "virtual" here? Do these particles really exist, or not?