Recent content by Chris1983

Are you fascinated with problem solving? Does "np-complete" get you excited? Computer science is much more than searching data sets for correlations and biases. Yes, there are scientific questions that traditional experimentation alone is unlikely to solve, and advances in computing technology...

All things with mass have gravity. Not all things have enough mass in a small enough area to collapse into a black hole under their own gravity, even in the absence of any other force. Stars have significant internal forces which overcome gravity. Light, which is perhaps the first thing people...

Picture a six-sided dice. There are only six possible values when the dice is rolled. If you want to roll a specific value, then if that number is a whole integer with a value in the range of one through 6 you might say the dice gives a random result. The universe is random. If your desired...

Only a portion of the light from the sun reaches us, but what does reach us carries most if not all of the information about the visible area of the sun. What we "lose" is the intensity, not the information.

Non-electronic sources can still result in a similar waveform as electronic waveforms. Your bridge could also be part of the path to ground for the lamp you mentioned. This would change the tone depending on soil dampness, notably it would follow the landscaping irrigation schedule. If I'm not...

No conductor is perfect (yet). The more material that current must pass through, the more resistance. External factors that increase resistance or impedance are ambient temperature, power quality issues (harmonics, reflected sine waves, phase imbalance), and other electrical conductors and...

I'm going with: A) Heat expansion causing vibrations in the hollow steel tube rails, B) Air currents doing same, C) Flowing water in contact with bridge supports below, or D) Some distant source of noise resonating in the rails.

Weight is a measurement of mass under gravity. Gravity distorts space. The individual atoms and molecules can move about in all the different ways that they do, but they always move through space which is bent by gravity. There is an anology of two people playing table tennis on a train. No...

Basically, light reflected at other angles cancels out, so it can appear to only reflect in a range around 180. Check out QED by Richard Feynman. It explains some of the behavior of light when interacting with surfaces.

Graphene is carbon atoms in a 2-D arrangement. While the atoms have thickness, they are arranged on a plane without thickness. Even if the plane is curved, it is still distinctly different from a 3-D arrangement of carbon atoms. Therefore, 2-D objects exist and have values that are not equal to...

Why wouldn't you simply measure the diameter of the tap, the diameter of the drain, and the distance from drain edge to water stream (assuming the tap pours directly into the drain)? Is there some sort of dispering screen or object causing a change in the stream? Another idea is to get a laser...

Some domesticated animals lose their extreme fear reaction to explosions. Some, such as dogs and cats, even appear to watch fireworks. On the other hand, many humans cannot tolerate fireworks, whether due to trauma or some strong instinctual reaction. "Like" and "dislike" perhaps are relative...

I'm an electrician, not a physicist. However, in terms of an electrical discharge, a lightning strike is a current flowing between two areas with differing voltage potentials. So lightning can strike from a cloud to the ground, or to another cloud with a different potential, or even to the open...