Recent content by Howard Nye

I see. That's extremely helpful. Would a correct description be 'turning on the switch causes current to flow BETWEEEN the source of electricity and lightbulb?' Is the following possible? There is a switch that closes a circuit. The closing of that circuit then has two effects: it closes...

Thanks again. If there is a wire connecting the source of electricity to the bulb, and I'm trying to describe what happens between (a) the switch first being switched on, and (b) the first moment at which the bulb lights, then whether I'm in an A/C or a D/C situation, is it right to say that...

Hi, Thanks very much. If I'm in a context where I just want to indicate the direction in space in which charge first begins to propagate, could I say something like 'Turning on the switch initially causes charge to flow from the wall socket in the direction of the lightbulb' or 'When charge...

Hi all, I don't know much about physics, but I understand that when you turn on a light switch, electric charge flows to the lightbulb because electrons in the wire bounce into each other (that's right, isnt' it?). Unfortunately, the electrons are negatively charged, but Ben Franklin, who...

Hi CWatters, Thank you very much! Yes, I think I meant a broken wire / open circuit, and I think I had in mind them being wired in series, e.g. by both being connected to the same battery. So if it's just a broken wire - i.e. if there was a break in the right fork of the wire but not...

Hi all, I’m deeply ignorant about how electricity works. I just wanted to confirm that the following was possible: I have a button on one end of a wire. The wire stays unified for about 3 feet, then forks into a right section and a left section, each of which is about 3 feet long, and...

Hi jbriggs444, Thanks again - very helpful as usual. Most philosophers who work on causation think that all there really is are things that, as you say, "play a role", and that all of these things are equally real causes of an effect. When we single out one thing (e.g. the action of the...

Thanks once more jbriggs444! I'm sorry for being silly and not understanding the relevant difference here between work and impulse. I'm sorry also if these questions about momentum transfer are strange; they are motivated in large part by my reading about certain philosophical theories of...

Thanks, jbriggs444, that's SUPER helpful! I take it that this means that, since thing1 only counts as transferring momentum to thing2 if thing2's momentum is different AFTER interacting with thing1 (it's irrelevant what would have happened had the things not interacted), and the train's...

Thanks very much for this, jbriggs444. I guess I'm still a bit confused about how you're supposed to think about distance in the direction of the force. If, absent the presence of the track, the train WOULD have moved in the vertical direction (namely, downwards / towards the center of the...

Thanks so much for the very helpful response, Nessdude 14. I'm just having trouble understanding: since the vertical force applied to the train from the track is needed to keep the train from digging into the ground, is it correct to say that the track transfers linear momentum to the train...

Hi there, I'm deeply ignorant about physics, but I'm curious about what conserved quantities (if any) are transferred from a section of railroad track to a train that's rolling along the track. I take it that in many situations if the track were absent, the gravitational attraction between...