How do amorphous objects emit blackbody/thermal radiation when such objects don't have optical phonons?
By conservation of energy, the solid is left in a lower energy state following emission of a photon.  Clearly absorption and emission balance at thermal equilibrium, however, thermodynamic equilibrium is a statement of the mean behaviour of the system, not a statement that the internal energy is constant on arbitrarily short timescales.  The energy has to come from somewhere during emission, and go somewhere during absorption.  Energy in a solid can be stored as kinetic and potential energy of electrons and nuclei, either individually or in collective modes such as phonons and plasmons.  In thermal equilibrium energy will be stored more or less in various forms depending on the temperature and material.  However, even if most of the thermal energy in a particular solid at temperature $T$ is stored in the form of phonons, it could be that phonons primarily interact with light indirectly via electrons, e.g. a phonon excites an electron in a phonon-electron interaction, which can interact with light via the EM field.  Given that light is an EM field, it makes sense to me that it is emitted and absorbed by charged particles.  The electron-photon interaction is probably dominant for visible and ultraviolet light, given that metals are opaque, while semiconductors and insulators are transparent to (visible and UV) light with energy lower than their bandgap. However, once you get into energies in the IR and below, or X-rays and above, other mechanisms apparently take over.  For example, on the high-energy end of the spectrum I've heard that gamma rays can interact directly with nuclear degrees of freedom, which is reasonable considering that gamma rays are emitted during a lot of nuclear reactions.  A review of  might give clues to important light-matter interactions over a broad range of wavelengths.  Whether all of the these processes are involved in blackbody emission is a somewhat different question.  What physical processes mediate energy transfer during blackbody emission, and in which energy ranges are the various processes dominant?
When are you supposed to use escape instead of encodeURI / encodeURIComponent? When encoding a query string to be sent to a web server - when do you use escape() and when do you use encodeURI() or encodeURIComponent():  Use escape:  escape("% +&amp;=");   OR  use encodeURI() / encodeURIComponent()  encodeURI("http://www.google.com?var1=value1&amp;var2=value2");  encodeURIComponent("var1=value1&amp;var2=value2"); Does Blender support any form of collaborative editing? A square matrix $n \times n$ is an invertible matrix iff the rank of the matrix is $n$. Closing as "off topic" has just gotten painful I know that useability and friendliness are given priority in the features implemented on StackExchange, but after using the new close-as-off-topic flow for the first time I would have to say I'm somewhat underwhelmed.  Why do we not have a simple It's off topic type reason? And why do I have to write half a book chapter as my custom close reason, especially when I can go back and edit the automatically posted comment so that it's way shorter?   This question complaint is prompted by  here on Meta. It's off topic, plain and simple. We now have a bunch of people wanting to close it, all potentially writing their own custom close reasons, it's just messy suboptimal. Regardless of how nice and friendly you want to be to the user, this particular question shouldn't need an explanation.    Does the off topic flow have to stay this way? Can we allow higher rep users to close as off topic without having to specify a (really long) custom reason, maybe have some canned reasons like we used to?  Edit: just to be clear, there are still three canned close reasons, but none of them were applicable to this example. The second one is closest, but does not appear to seek input... is quite different to It's a question, but doesn't belong here in any way, shape, or form. Writing in bash while it is working When you are performing time consuming operations in bash like installing new software, is it possible to write text that will appear at the prompt when the operation has finished.  E.g   Imagine running:  apt-get install eclipse-platform   Then it will use quite a while to finish while you see the installation log, meanwhile I want to create new folders (workspaces) which Eclipse later will use.  Is this possible without opening a new terminal (or tab)? Connected set in $\mathbb{S}^1$ Let $A$ be a connected set in $\mathbb{S}^1$. Show that $A^c$ is also connected.  My idea: suppose $A^c$ is not connected. Then, there exist $U,V \subset \mathbb{S}^1$ open and disjoint such that $U \cup V =A^c  $. Therefore $\mathbb{S}^1 = A \cup U \cup V$. If I had that $A\cup U$ was open I could arrive at  contradiction, since $\mathbb{S}^1$ is connected, but I can't say that... Blog Overflow database error , which is linked from site-specific blogs, says  Error establishing a database connection  I believe this is an error. Question involving discriminant of quadratic congruence in elementary number theory. I have an app to deploy in production that uses 'honor system' security. That is, all users connect to the DB using a SQL user/passwd credential and the app manages permissions itself. The latter part doesn't bother me as much as the fact that the connection object contains embedded credentials and can be copied around freely. I'm try to find some way to limit connections to a more limited set of clients. I can create firewall rules to limit by IP, of course. Is there any way to 'prequalify' SQL logins either by Machine account or domain membership? Prove that formula is not tautology. Show Kripke's model proving that the following formula isn't tautology in intuitionistic logic. $ \neg ( p \wedge q ) \implies (\neg p \vee \neg q) $  Please help/hint me ;) How do I create a custom ringtone for my iPhone? How can I delete my printer from Ubuntu? Using 12.04 my printer a canon ip2600 will not print.   SystemSettings/printers shows it as installed, connected to local host, enabled, accepting jobs, shared and allowing printing for everyone. Yet it does not print.   I have tried to remove it but get a request for user name and password which I enter (I only have one password) but the password is listed as incorrect.   I need a sudo command which I can use to delete the printer so I can attempt to re-install it. As it is the printer is useless and I can not even uninstall it. How do you refer to a hyponym that is the same word as the hypernym? 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Where the drink is called 'soda', if you ask for a 'coke', you'll still sometimes have the choice among Coca-Cola, Pepsi, etc. "Can I have a Coke?" the response might be "Is Pepsi OK?". "Sure, Pepsi, Coke, whatever." You don't use 'cola', you just ask for the particular kind and hope the listener will help differentiate.   Given these multiple strategies for disambiguating, what do you do say to get a 'Coke' in the southern US? are there any other examples of a hypernym being the same as the hyponym, and so creating a disambiguation problem? List selectors for Objective-C object I have an object, and I want to list all the selectors to which it responds. It feels like this should be perfectly possible, but I'm having trouble finding the APIs. How do I export the code documentation in C# / VisualStudio 2008? I have always made a point of writing nice code comments for classes and methods with the C# xml syntax. I always expected to easily be able to export them later on.  Today I actually have to do so, but am having trouble finding out how. Is there something I'm missing? I want to go Menu->Build->Build Code Documentation, but there is no option to do that, there. Proof that if $p\equiv3\,\left(\mbox{mod 4}\right)$ then $p$ can't be written as a sum of two squares I'd appreciate your help showing that if $p\equiv3\,\left(\mbox{mod 4}\right)$   then p can't be written as a sum of two squares.  Thanks! Medium with refractive index less than unity? find the measure of $AMC$ if $M$ is the midpoint of $BC$ then find the measure of $AMC$.    I tried to use the angles to find $AMC$ but I don't know how to use that $M$ is the midpoint of $BC$. Determine the size of a C++ array programmatically? This question was inspired by a similar question:   My question is a little different:  Is there any way to determine the size of a C++ array programmatically?  And if not, why?  Every function I've seen that takes an array also requires an integer parameter to give it the size.  But as the linked question pointed out, delete[] must know the size of the memory to be deallocated.  Consider this C++ code:  int* arr = new int[256]; printf("Size of arr: %d\n", sizeof(arr));   This prints "Size of arr: 4", which is just the size of the pointer.  It would be nice to have some function which prints 256, but I don't think one exists in C++.  (Again, part of the question is why it doesn't exist.)  Clarification: I know that if I declared the array on the stack instead of the heap (i.e. "int arr[256];") that the sizeof operator would return 1024 (array length * sizeof(int)). What is the optimal order of post-processing steps?