Recent content by bunburryist

My wife is experiencing a bizarre texting problem that no one – ATT, Sprint, Xfinity (we changed carriers because of the problem) – has been able to solve. The problem is that there are certain people she does not receive texts from unless she is at her mother’s assisted living facility. These...

I can't remember where I heard that 6 kilometer bit. Thanks for straightening me out! Some of the higher geosynchronous satellites must do a little "bobbing up and down" (relative to the earth) as the moon goes around the earth.

My understanding is that the Earth-Moon barycenter is about 6 kilometers from the Earth's center of mass in the direction of the moon. My question - If the Sun is on the opposite side of the moon from the Earth, would that pull the Moon slightly away from the Earth, thus moving the Earth-Moon...

Thanks for the helpful responses!

I read somewhere that the equator of the sun rotates faster than the poles. Do they mean that in the sense that the equator travels faster merely because it has farther to go in each rotation (just like the Earth), or does the equator actually "go around" faster, so that a point on the equator...

I don't understand. Clumps of mass near the surface of the sun? "every day (25 Earth days)"

Since the Sun orbits the Solar Systems' Barycenter about once in every 12 Earth years, wouldn't it make sense to say the sun has a "year" - at least in a casual way? After all, although the sun has a lot more mass that the Earth, it orbits the Barycenter no less than the Earth does. We talk...

Unfortunately, I'm not a mathematician, so I don't understand all the equations. Thanks for your response.

In the allassonic effect, is it the column of water that is actually creating the sound (the surface of the water passing vibrations into the air), or is it that the water acts as a damper on the cup, and that it is the vibration of the cup, like a bell, that actually creates the sound waves...

ZZ – Thanks for your response. Let me try and make my case clearer. My question isn’t about “the nature of reality” and whether or not there’s a “real world.” I’m taking it for granted that there’s a material world with objective space, atoms and light and everything. My question, rather...

I'm interested in what we tell the ten year old.

Jesto - So you come down on the, "The science teacher shouldn't tell the ten year old that the pen he sees is made of atoms," side. Got it.

I’m often not sure what science writers mean when they use the word “observe.” I was recently re-reading Einstein’s book on relativity and it’s “observe” this and “observe” that, in a very simplistic sense. What’s “observable” to me is blue and green and red, etc., and the apparent spatial...

My son is in his Freshman year at NIU to studying engineering and said he would like a slide rule for his birthday. Is there a particular brand or model, or are there particular features that would be most relevant to his field? I know few people actually use them any more, but knowing my son...

I found this, and it helps some as well. http://physics.nmt.edu/~raymond/classes/ph13xbook/node93.html In quantum mechanics the absolute square of the wave function at any point expresses the relative probability of finding the associated particle at that point. Thus, the probability of...