Recent content by Bandersnatch

Io, yo mama papa so fat, his tidal gravity gave you acne!

I really enjoyed the first few episodes. The animation is excellent, and the story initially seemed grounded and human-scale. But then it completely lost me. Turned cartoonish, superhero-y, uneven in tone, and felt like it was trying too much to be hip with its - misguided in my opinion - use of...

Velocities are a distraction. That's just initial conditions. You want to focus on dynamics. The only force acting here is gravity. (image credit R.Verrault, w/modifications) The centre of mass C experiences just the right gravitational acceleration gMC to keep the rod in orbit. Due to the...

A rod would try to orient itself radially, due to tidal forces, in the same way as tidally-deformed ellipsoids of planets and moons orient themselves with their long axes radially, towards the centre of the gravitational field. If there's oscillation, it's around that position...

The point of the study is not to propose that birds can navigate via earth's magnetic field - that would be indeed trivial. Rather, the study proposes a novel mechanism for how that is achieved biologically.

Try this https://www.physicsforums.com/insights/inflationary-misconceptions-basics-cosmological-horizons/ It's not specifically about the Lineweaver and Davies paper, but introduces many of the concepts needed for reading those graphs.

Tagline: Study shows geologists rarely affected by suicide, old age.

No no, the moral is that mathematics is divorced from reality and can lead you astray. Now, physics - physics would have figured it out. You just need to, lessee, assume the horses are spherical, riding on an infinite charged plane...

There's no reason to think that. Certainly none given in the opening post. If you've just found out about methane's role in global warming - that's excellent. But it's not news to climate modelling, and the predictions for the range of temperature increase that percolate to the general...

No negativity was intended. And if there's sarcasm, it's good natured. That's fair.

These are excellent analyses. I'm wondering about applications to astronomy.

If our star produced such a deep gravity well that time dilation were significant, then you'd see all velocities speed up, at all galactic radii - instead, the inner velocities are just about right, while the outer are too high. If the argument were to use the differences in the depth of the...

I suppose the significance could manifest when you're in a spaceship and Houston tells you to rotate the craft for a retrograde burn. It might be nice to know what they're talking about. And in any case, it's the context the OP asked about.

You're thinking of 'apparent retrograde motion', on the celestial sphere. Where this thread talks about retrograde, it's in the context of directions of orbits. A different thing.

I'm not sure why you're framing this as an objection. Yes, that's what you do, and that's what makes it unambiguous. Wasn't the perceived ambiguity in picking the reference 'north' direction from which to judge the rotation the point you initially took issue with? We may be talking at cross...