Recent content by kurtlesker

http://departments.colgate.edu/physics/research/Photon/root/ajpbs02.pdf this paper might help you...it doesn't talk about half silvered mirror, but talks about beam splitters...

that's because the cannon ball force is instantaneous instead of constant. Once the cannon ball loses contact with the cannon there is no force. might be easier to think in terms of momentum conservation. to actually spring compression distance as a function of time is kind of difficult...

just use a voltmeter (or a multimeter in voltmeter mode) directly on the two electrodes of your cell. This will give you open circuit voltage. if you you have more than one resister, then you can find out how much voltage is dropped across either resistor by using a voltmeter across one the...

depends on whether or not that ball reaches terminal velocity by 1m. for example, if you dropped a feather from 1 m and from 100m, you probably won't sense a difference in final speed right before hitting the ground.

is temperature defined only as a thermodynamic equilibrium quantity? and if so, do you must have a gigantic heat sink attached to the system that you are interested in (i.e. be in equilibrium with a huge heat sink)? And if so, does it matter how many atoms you have in your specific system?

depends on where you push. If you push anywhere on the chair itself, the forces would balance out. If you directly push the ground, like with crutches or something else that touches the ground but does not touch the chair, then it is possible, assuming that you are strong enough.

your 4.0 is impressive. continue to take the toughest physics classes you can find, and try to maintain top grades. Try to look into doing research as your extra curricular activity. Most people do research during the summer, but if you can manage, you can do it during the school year as well...

it indeed is possible, provided that you strap yourself to the chair. you need first make sure that your arms have the strength to lift your own weight plus that of the chair (hit the gym?) then get a pair of crutches, or anything that's taller than the height from the floor to where your arms...

i believe imaginary coordinates are just convenient ways to express sinusoidal functions e^(ix)=cosx +I*sinx . There's this thing call Fourier series that says anything in the real world can be described by adding many sines and cosines together, so that's why many physicists choose to describe...

don't worry, try again after you have taken junior level courses :) in the mean time, use this summer to learn skills that you can sell in your next round of REU applications next year. I agree with previous post: learning to not worry and be patient is pretty important in science, because...

be patient, it takes many decades to get to where you want to be, and it doesn't really matter where you start or how you start, so long as you start and don't stop. when you feel like stopping, come back here and get encouragements :)

thanks for the wolfram demo link, that's pretty cool

concave means that it doesn't rise but dip?

I guess one can think of it in terms a free body diagram of forces just acting on the water as a whole. the bucket would be supplying a force radially inwards towards the center to give it centripetal force to sustain the circular motion of the water, so that the water as a whole is being...

hmm, start by looking up a news article about math that interested you and then... wait, since when was the last time i saw such an article? oh that's right, this doesn't work :)