Recent content by kernelpenguin

How come noone's mentioned the scientific method yet? Without it, the "mainstay" of physics would probably be God or some other supernatural entity.

Hm. What I mean is this. If there are a lot of particles in a row, going at c. Like this: oooooo Then they will be flattened individually: | | | | | | Yet, why should they get closer to one another as their shapes deform and thus contribute to the macroscopic deformation of...

I was thinking about relativity after a lecture the other day and I came across something, well, odd. Imagine an electron flying at near c. It would look like a pancake that doesn't much care for aerodynamics. How much it resembles a pancake would pop out of the Lorentz equations for its...

That's what Wikipedia said. If, for an outside observer, it takes an infinite amount of time for matter to enter a black hole, does this mean that from the point of view of an outside observer, after a black hole has formed, no new matter will enter it?

The way my physics lecturer explained it (I'm majoring in compsci so it wasn't a very technical explanation) was that the probability of having an even distribution of matter is higher than having it all gather into a clump or clumps. For example, if you have 4 indistinguishable particles of...

The laws of thermodynamics (the second one, if I'm not mistaken) basically say that if matter is in clumps, it will become equally distributed over time and not the other way around. But if we look into space, we see that matter was (probably) equally distributed in the beginning and has now...

But if a photon is created and absorbed without any time passing for it in between, would it not demonstrate that the Planck time is not the smallest unit of time possible?

1. Time seems to have a 'smallest step' -- the Planck time unit. 2. A photon travels at c. 3. When you get closer to c, time dilates causing your passage in time to get slower compared to the rest frame. And now... If a photon is emitted at point A and absorbed at point B, then from the...

On the UserFriendly forums I saw a message a few days ago from two people that had lost some weight. It went something like: "If you've noticed that the Earth is spinning faster, it's because X and Y have lost N pounds!" Okay, logically, an object should start spinning faster if it sheds some...

I'm trying to prove something small with set theory and since I'm new to it, I've run into a problem. I can't understand what the following means exactly and how to proceed further. Or where the mistake is, if there is one. I think there is, because it seems... freaky...

Suppose you were in a craft traveling at 0.5c towards an alien planet. That alien planet has been sending out TV broadcasts for the past hundred years. Those broadcasts are moving towards your craft at c. Will those broadcasts play at twice the speed? Is this what is meant by 'time...

How about it? A crypto forum, anyone? Possibly under maths.

Companions the creator seeks, not corpses, not herds and believers. Fellow creators the creator seeks--those who write new values on new tablets. Companions the creator seeks, and fellow harvesters; for everything about him is ripe for the harvest. Friedrich Nietzsche "Thus Spoke...

This probably shouldn't be under philosophy, but what the hell. A dirty weapon is an area denial weapon. It is used to make an area uninhabitable by delivering a payload of radioactive or toxic goo, which is harmful to life. It is feared that terrorists might use dirty weapons in major...

I came across a theory that said it's possible to create miniature black holes in particle accelerators. And that these would disappear quickly because they are so small. I thought for a singularity to form, there would have to be plenty of mass in one place. How do the velocities of the...