Recent content by Andrew Mason

Could the Learjet 60 have experienced a tail stall due to icing? Losing the downward push on the tail could certainly put the plane into an immediate nose-dive. According to what I have been able to find, the Learjet 60 uses electrical heating on the horizontal stabilizer leading edge for...

That makes more sense. The audio was silenced for the final few seconds on the Youtube clip so I was going by the transcription on the screen. See: AM

The audio recording indicates that they first descended to 35000 feet and indicated that the outside temperature was -47° Celsius. They said: "We are managing the ice but it is moderate turbulence". 20 seconds later (assuming the audio recording provides the full timeline) they reported...

What do you think of the new Sodium-Ion batteries? Na-Ion may have about 30-40% lower energy density but it seems that their price, safety, longevity, quicker charging, and low temperature performance will replace Lithium-ion (except perhaps where energy density is critically important). AM

It does not explain inertia of a fundamental particle of matter. But if one assumes that matter is made up of fundamental particles each of which are the same and each having the same inertia, as Newton did, it is easy to see why inertia would be proportional to the quantity of matter (mass)...

So long as a theory does not conflict with what is accurately observed by careful measurement/experiment, the theory is valid. But it is valid only within the limits of that non-conflict. So, Newton's laws are valid on a macroscopic scale with baryonic matter and interactions at relative speeds...

I haven't read every post, so I may be repeating an observation already mentioned. But if you switch you lose only if you first chose the car. And that happens only 1/3 of the time, on average. AM

If ##a^0\ne 1## then ##a^0\ne -e^{\pi i}## and the beauty of mathematics would be gone. AM

Hmmm. So those green craters on the pizza at the bottom of my fridge could be due to radioactivity?! I thought it was just the usual mold and other fridge grunge: AM

There are other threads that discuss the similarities and differences between thermodynamic entropy Boltzmann entropy and Clausius entropy, and Shannon entropy: https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/shannon-entropy-and-origins-of-the-universe.733843/...

The radius of Jupiter at the equator is 71,500 km and the radius of Io’s orbit is 422,000 km. The radius of Jupiter’s orbit about the Sun is 5.2 AU. So the drawing is very misleading. In order to see Io enter Jupiter’s shadow and then emerge you would have to be viewing it from the side. One...

Whether Earth is moving toward or away from Jupiter is almost immaterial in itself. The orbital period of Io is about 42.5 hours. In that time the maximum possible change in distance between Earth and Jupiter is 15 light seconds. If the Earth is moving toward Jupiter at time t, it will be...

As Berkeman has pointed out you would need to cancel the marble’s orbital speed first in order for the marble to drop vertically to the Earth surface. The orbital speed is about 3066 m/s given by ##v=\sqrt{\frac{GM}{r}}## where r=42,164 km. So it has to lose a lot of velocity make it drop...

If the thermodynamic work done by the gas changes the polarization of the gas molecules, that would be taken into account in the change in electrical energy of the capacitor. Polarization energy would have to change the degrees of freedom or heat capacity of the gas molecules since ##\Delta...

How can you determine the gas polarization energy if you aren’t given any information about the polar nature of the gas molecules? AM