Recent content by Alec Dacyczyn

It's current orbital velocity is 7.67km/s. Surely, 6m/s is a 2-3 orders of magnitude too low.

What is the practical feasibility of changing the International Space Station's orbital inclination to match the orbit of the Moon? Major future missions beyond the Earth-Moon system (ie: space colonization) will likely require in-orbit assembly of components from multiple launches. And...

Blast wave through... natural-gas/air, or hydrogen/oxygen, or some other mixture in the pipe? I think it's unlikely that the conflagration within the pipe would ever propagate faster than the 9.1km/s high-explosive detonation. A highly pressurized H2O2 mixture might burn at rather impressive...

I assume you mean, "On which side would electrical contacts to the foil have lower resistance?" The conductivity is through the bulk of the material (ignoring high-frequency skin effects, etc). You would get better contact to the shiny side. The shiny side is shiny because it is smooth. The...

And manufactures often produce technical design guides which to explain practical details to people designing systems using their products (these are where I learned half of what I know about practical EE :smile:). I googled around a bit and stumbled upon this: OPTOTRONIC Power Supplies...

Holy mackerel. 4000 watts directly off the mains? No, you shouldn't drive them directly off the mains. I remind you that LEDs are constant-voltage-drop devices (roughly speaking). And that voltage drop decreases with rising temperature, due to heating during operation. This is why LEDs are...

I think he's suggesting making the sticking-out-device small enough that it would be buffeted by only one air molecule at a time. Of course, the stick would also have its own thermal vibration. Sometimes the encounters would transfer energy to the stick; and sometimes the stick would whack a...

Yes, there is a very brief spontaneous movement of charge. Where the p-type and n-type material meet some of the free electrons on the n-type side will jump across and combine with the hole on the p-type side. They do this because full electron shells have lower potential energy (same reason why...

Adding a boost of energy won't make them go faster. Added energy will simply make them louder. The speed of sound (or shock wave) is a fixed property of the medium. The only way to increase it is to compress the air to make the speed-of-sound in that section of air slightly faster than it...

It would not collapse instantly. It could collapse very quickly, but not faster than the speed of light. It's very complicated, but the short answer is that electromagnetic effects are mediated by photons (light, radio, etc). These may be real or "virtual", but they all move at the speed of...

Clarification: When I referred to the "controller" I meant the control-electronics with the power supply that are responsible for receiving a signal from the remote-controller (hand-held thing) and switching the current to the LED on or off. A transformer is a lump of iron with lots of wire...

Not enough information. At bare minimum you would to provide the lengths of the five sections. From there you may be able to draw on the available engineering data for the fluid and types of pipe, plug the data for each section into the Hagen–Poiseuille equation to get the effective resistances...

That is a peculiar set of symptoms. I very much doubt it has anything to do with electromagnetic fluctuations in the environment setting up currents in the transformer winding. That would require, like... huge magnetic fields... Think poltergeist-effects with pots and pans flying around. Nope...

It means that someone is good at physics and bad at English. :smile: I think the author means, "..for a single photon.." The "dot" refers to where the wave function collapses and triggers the detector (photo film, photoelectric sensor array, or simply the spot on a screen where it reflects from...

The forces responsible for surface tension and similar phenomenon are small compared to the interactions between the electrical current and it's own magnetic field, if the current between the electrodes is non-trivial. if you have two parallel wires and you run current through both in the same...