Recent content by itsthemac

I very desperately need some advice from you guys. This has been eating me up inside for the last half a year. Here's the situation: I'm a computer science major with one year to go before I get my BS. I find computer science interesting, but I'm not very passionate about it. I basically...

Also, is there something to look for in particular when you're buying binoculars for stargazing?

I just wanted to thank everyone for the awesome replies so far. There's a lot of good stuff in here. So far, it seems that the general consensus is that my first step should be learning linear algebra, so I think that's where I'll start. If anyone has any more advice/suggested texts, please...

Advice needed on a "course outline" to teach myself General Relativity I want to learn it inside and out. I'm tired of settling for dumbed-down versions of GR, and thus dumbed-down versions of how we describe the very universe we live in, just due to my lack of mathematical understanding. But I...

Thank you very much for the replies. I don't quite understand why its angular size would not diminish, yet its brightness would. I'm just visualizing that sphere of a single light pulse centered around a distant galaxy (I'm imagining it as a completely spherical source of light for this thought)...

Yes, that's exactly what I'm asking. And I was also suspecting that it would appear to be somewhere between those two distances. But this doesn't mean that if you see a galaxy that looks 1.5 bly away, you're seeing it as it looked less than 1.5 billion years ago, right? You're still seeing it...

I don't get how it could be that it would look the same whether the universe were expanding or whether it were static. In an expanding universe, the light has to travel a greater distance (and thus a longer time) to reach us than it would in a static universe (btw, in the static universe the...

I'm only talking about galaxies far enough away where the only significant motion between us and them is caused by the expansion of space itself. When we look at a faraway galaxy, does it appear to be as far away to us as it was at the time it emitted the light that we're seeing? Or does it...

Woops, can't believe I forgot about that. Probably more popular than the one I mentioned.

The argument I've heard following from Special Relativity is as follows: Assume a causal influence can travel faster than c in a given reference frame, and assume it starts at Event A and is the cause of Event B a short time later (Events A and B are also at different points in space). This...

Wow, ok. This is a lot to take in for me. I guess this all just stems from the basic premise that two things that are simultaneous in one reference frame (in this case, a clock on the sun and a clock on saturn that are both in sync in the sun-saturn frame) aren't necessarily simultaneous in any...

Dumb question, but when you say same position coordinates in one frame, you mean only along one axis, right? They don't have to actually be physically at the same point, right? (otherwise I misunderstood your point before). And here's my follow-up: I saw an example that dealt with time...

Thanks! I did not expect that. Now I have a few follow-up questions. First of all, does this imply that two events are ALWAYS simultaneous in two different inertial frames, whenever they're simultaneous in one of the frames, if they occur along that perpendicular axis that you mentioned...

Simple question, but I don't know exactly where to find the answer so I'll just ask. I'm just starting out learning SR, so I apologize if this is kind of trivial. If you have two inertial reference frames, and one is in motion relative to the other, I know it's possible for two events to be...

It's frustrating when something's a common misconception and you're trying to learn about it for the first time and you keep finding answers from people with that common misconception, like I did with that yahoo answers post. So just to set the record straight for my own curiosity, if there...