Agreed! I like to point out to people that science has made more progress in the last 500 years than philosophy has.
Thank you for taking the time to offer such a thorough reply. You've answered my questions and expanded my thinking a bit.
I meant to imply that in my question. If the parameters make it impossible for stars to form, or even if they make it impossible for atoms to form, those are just the forms that we know from our own universe. If the universe had different parameters, then would it not take forms that are outside...
Thank you Garth. Very clear. If I can shift to the anthropic view for a moment, I have a question that I've never seen posed or answered. The anthropic arguments seem to center around the idea that the simplest building blocks of our universe have to exist, in order for life to exist. But "life"...
I'm not a physicist of any description so my concepts are unavoidably vague. But on this subject, isn't that true for everyone? I see a difference between rejecting a concept because it's untestable, and ignoring it because it's untestable. There's as little evidence (zero) to support the...
My lay understanding must be even poorer than I thought. I've understood Einstein's explanation to mean that what we experience as gravity is a form of inertia. And that the reason gravitational mass and inertial mass are the same, is that gravity and inertia are both instances of the same...
Well. my sister lost an infant girl to a congenital heart problem, and my daughter had a friend whose baby son had to have a hemispherectomy.
Big things like that are the exception, but I expect that small and undiagnosed misdevelopments are the norm. Just as boulders on the beach are less...
As for this comment, that would be true if the rate of electron flow didn't change. For that to be the case, the voltage would have to be lowered.
Your heater is connected to a given voltage. When you reduce the resistance, that voltage will cause a greater flow of current, and that is what...
I don't think it's counter-intuitive at all. If you picture it correctly, it should become obvious. Maybe Barclay is either unfamiliar with series vs parallel circuits, or is trying to deal with them mathematically instead of in "hands-on" easily visualized terms.
In the case of the heater and...
I have a second hand fridge that's an estimated 21 yrs old. (You can search the manufacturing date range of appliances using the model and serial numbers) Although I do plan to replace it before it fails. The coils do eventually erode from the inside.
I remember that article and similar ones. It does make sense that the perception of beauty is based on normalness. That small deviations from normal appearance, even if they're not consciously noticeable, detract from attractiveness. This (supposedly) works to reduce the likelihood of genetic...
Hi, I'm a retired Canadian whose interest in physics is part of a larger interest in everything. Except televised sports and pop culture stars. I seem to be reasonably competent at dealing with concepts but getting the right answers in mathematics has always been a struggle.
To me, the sciences...
I'm not a physicist, just another interested person (but older) who's struggled with the same questions. Here's what works for me:
- You're not too young to understand. Or to put in another way, nobody understands these things in the same intuitive way we understand the path of a baseball. If...
I've never done a quantitative measurement. It would be necessary to use the identical load (except for exchanging the plastic ware with a similar surface of non-plastic), same water temperature and same ambient R.H. Humidity obviously varies with kitchen activity, outside conditions, and...
I'm puzzled by a phenomenon that my daughter pointed out to me. If you have no plastic ware in the dishwasher, your glass and ceramic dishes will dry faster. Slow evaporation from plastic is easy to understand; the water beads up and presents a smaller surface area.
What I'm not clear on is why...