Question
This property of the Minkowski metric defines whether vectors inside or outside the light cone have negative length. For 10 points each:
[10m] Name this property of the metric tensor, which depending on the field of physics you are doing and the coast of the United States where you learned physics, is either “minus plus plus plus” or “plus minus minus minus.”
ANSWER: metric signature
[10h] The East Coast, or “minus plus plus plus” convention, has the benefit that this transformation takes the Minkowski metric to a Euclidean metric in four dimensions. This transformation maps the heat equation to the Schrödinger equation.
ANSWER: Wick rotation
[10e] The East Coast convention also requires an additional factor of negative 1 in the anti-commutation relations for this physicist’s namesake gamma matrices. This British physicist formulated a relativistically consistent version of Schrödinger’s equation.
ANSWER: Paul Dirac [or Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac; accept Dirac matrices or Dirac equation]
<Physics>
Summary
| 2024 ACF Regionals @ Berkeley | 01/27/2024 | Y | 3 | 16.67 | 100% | 67% | 0% |
| 2024 ACF Regionals @ Cornell | 01/27/2024 | Y | 3 | 6.67 | 67% | 0% | 0% |
| 2024 ACF Regionals @ JMU | 01/27/2024 | Y | 10 | 6.00 | 30% | 20% | 10% |
| 2024 ACF Regionals @ Minnesota | 01/27/2024 | Y | 2 | 20.00 | 100% | 50% | 50% |
| 2024 ACF Regionals @ Ohio State | 01/27/2024 | Y | 3 | 3.33 | 33% | 0% | 0% |
| 2024 ACF Regionals @ Rutgers | 01/27/2024 | Y | 5 | 14.00 | 80% | 40% | 20% |
| 2024 ACF Regionals @ Imperial | 01/27/2024 | Y | 8 | 15.00 | 88% | 38% | 25% |
| 2024 ACF Regionals @ Vanderbilt | 01/27/2024 | Y | 5 | 4.00 | 40% | 0% | 0% |
| 2024 ACF Regionals @ MIT | 01/27/2024 | Y | 3 | 0.00 | 0% | 0% | 0% |
Data
| Iowa State | Minnesota C | 10 | 10 | 10 | 30 |
| Arizona State | Minnesota B | 0 | 0 | 10 | 10 |