Recent content by 2ltben

You mean pulsars?

The uncertainty is the standard deviation. Subtract each value from the mean, square that result, add them together, divide by n-1 (9 in this case), and take the square root of that. It's generally represented by a plus-or-minus sign, but that doesn't mean that the average falls between the...

My university has released their book list for the courses this Spring and I'd figured I'd check against people who know the topics about what books I should actually use to understand the material. My Physics department is usually pretty decent with their book choices, but I've yet to come...

My academic advisor is a physicist with brothers who are doctors of theology, medicine, and chemistry, and one who drives trucks. The smartest one is the truck driver, he's making the most.

We call that the Keisler Curve at my university. A few semesters back someone in Cal 1 got a 60 on a test by handing in a blank sheet of paper.

I have a background in classical physics from Mechanics and E&M and know a bit of Stat Mech (that course is next year), what would be the best text for an introduction to quantum mechanics?

As you climb the hill, the potential energy is going to increase, meaning the kinetic energy will decrease. Gassing uphill just means you're adding more energy to the system, meaning you will have a larger kinetic energy at the top of the hill than hitting the hill with a constant velocity. The...

If anything, it's the freshman year courses that are boring and dry. However, a Physics major is one of the hardest science degrees to go after. It's very mathematically intensive and pretty damn non-trivial, but you actually feel like you're doing legitimate science and not just reading things...

The only real way to learn how to write a good proof is through experience. Keep practicing and working your way through material. Do what every other math major has to do: buy Rudin and work your way through it. When you come to a Theorem, prove it yourself. If you can't, read a line of the...

Do the homework and all of the unassigned problems you have the answers to. All of them, up to the point where it becomes busy work and you stop actually learning new concepts. Also, faculty has office hours for a reason. Use them. Lower division students usually don't unless it's right before a...

A Calculus-based general physics course is about halfway between a real Physics class and high school Physics. It's basically setting up general problems and learning how to solve them with basic calculus so that students won't be bogged down in computational material when it comes to the deep...

I'm a Cal2/Physics 1 Undergrad and, largely due to Asimov and the show Numbers, have an interest in Applied Mathematics as a whole. My two areas of particular interest are Fuzzy Logic and Game Theory, but the only resources I can find are either undetailed or complex and technical above my...

If you don't know the lengths of the routes Dijkstra's algorithm becomes more or less inert. If you remove the scalar values from the edges of a group, the edges become equidistant and it becomes a matter of finding a route where no vertice is visited twice.

My problem was with the sign change I guess. I refused to touch my graphing calculator and didn't think to graph the function by hand.

Stupid of me to forget the function. v(t) = 4-t^2