Recent content by Heatherfield

Hi there, The book “Foundations of Astrophysics” by Ryden and Peterson states that one measures azimuth in the horizontal coordinate system eastwards starting on the northernmost point of the horizon circle. Thus, east becomes 90 degrees, et cetera. Wikipedia and other sites back this up...

Thanks. This bothers me though, because the textbook completely ignores relativity of simultaneity at this point. Not even a single mention. It merely creates the lorenz transformation for time dillation from the postulates of SR, then uses that to deduce time slowing down for moving observers...

I've studied SR previously and, after a lot of work, grew to understand it. Now I have to re-work through it using a different textbook and can't figure out the deal with time dillation. I derived the equation T = T0γ With relative ease. In this equation, T0 is measured by a person at rest...

I made the problem up myself, so there might very well not be a rational answer that I like! Homework Statement A point-particle is released at height h0 is released into a parabola. The position of the particle is given by (x, y) and the acceleration due to gravity is g. All forms of friction...

Hi, I'm currently reading Calc III by Marsden & Weinstein. One of the examples shows a plane being drawn through three points. While I understand their solutiom, I'm very curious as to why my solutiom doesn't work. 1. Homework Statement Write the equatiom for a plane through A = (1, 1, 1), B...

I had the impression that the program only gave randomn numbers and no input prompt? Or do I need to drastically refine my fine-reading skills?

Yeah I get that concept, and I understand how experimental evidence leads us to believe in the wave-particle duality. But how could one take that 'law' (that particles can be interpreted as wavefunctions) and describe how a particle may interfere with itself? How would you, for example, write...

What happens if you comment out everything apart from the essentials (main function, includes, et cetera) and the requests for input (cout and cin)?

What I'm generally looking for is some more fundamental principles than just the observation made during the experiment (like when most people learn SR, they start with the postulates and work out the rest from thought experiment). Some people in this thread...

This isn't my question, but I'm curious nonetheless - what could cause g++ to compile something with such obvious errors?

I don't have a computer or a compiler right now, but what happens when you use a block of comments (/* */) to make the compiler ignore everything from "srand(time(0))" and "endl;". Does it ask for input then? You can use this strategy to find out which line of code is doing something you don't...

Hiya, Another me trying to grasp some physical experiment. I'm working myself through a Dutch popular science book "Snaartheorie" (String Theory) by 'our' professor Marcel Vonk: it's meant to give the reader a maths-less impression of the theories behind string theory. Vonk starts with an...

Thanks for the tip! Could you clarify 'division' just in case though?

Hey, I'm one of those people who's been trying to learn Physics for ages before finishing high school (writing it down like this really makes me sound like some hopeless nerd with nothing better to do..) but never got around to doing it because my calculus knowledge sucks so much. :-) My...

I follow a high school Physics course which is the very opposite of rigorous: special relativity was put somewhere halfway the first year of the curriculum and we've been studying electricity twice now without ever really explaining definitions: things like potential differences were magical...