Recent content by EricL

Thank you all. Briefly: The name of the site where such discussion is occurring is metabunk.org. The proposition that the slab was being lifted was not one of the myths being busted there, but it was an earnest belief of one of the contributors to the discussion. He actually provided about a...

I don't know if anyone remembers me. I'm not a physicist but I tend to do pretty well at understanding some of the basic principles of classical physics, and that's recently created food for thought on my part.There's a message board I've found that is devoted primarily to debunking popular...

Okay, I've been away for a while. I appreciate the replies, and I have come back to report that explaining this sort of thing to the average person is far more difficult than I imagined it could be. I worked at it for a few days, and then my job got overwhelming and I didn't go online at all...

Okay, even being a person with feeble math skills compared to anyone else here, I believe I see a problem with this statement, and I think I see this very thing being accounted for mathematically in some of the other replies (but I'd have to spend a day or two learning the math before I could be...

Okay, it's only good form to post something here, so here goes. I joined the site on a whim, simply to see if I could get any ideas about how to explain a certain type of physical action that canoers and kayakers commonly experience (which virtually none of them understand), and I got some...

That's really cool. I knew about beats and the fact that establishing just the right amount of "error" among the three strings was critical, but it hadn't occurred to me that there could be a delay in production of the proper sound if the difference in frequency were too small. On that note...

Wow, this is perfect. I've actually tried to describe that situation - a car on a conveyor belt - to these folks in previous attempts at explaining the situation (a year or two ago), but was met by claims that the example is not applicable. Well, of course it is applicable, and I think...

You are probably correct about this, that is, the way some paddlers are likely to misinterpret what's happening. However, for me, being able to envision what's actually happening, even those deviations make perfect sense. This is much less of an issue on a fairly large river, in any case.

Thank you. I think the difficulty comes not from inaccurate observation, but from preconceived notions that automatically come to the forefront while paddling, and since those ideas seem to explain what's going on, that's as far as they get. Kind of like seeing that the world might as well be...

Hello everyone. I'm a new member with a question about a topic that is probably way too simple to be of interest to most of you, but I would really appreciate some help. Please excuse the fact that I don't use the proper jargon. I've only taken introductory physics (the kinds of classes that...