Recent content by MattRob

So, first off, for the uninitiated, an O'Neil Cylinder is a megastructure meant to be a space colony for humanity to live in in an Earth-like "outdoor" environment free-floating in space (ie, not on the surface of any celestial body with any significant gravity). It is essentially a cylinder...

He certainly made reference to them quite a bit. I think I confused Tesla's educational challenges with Einstein's employment challenge, heh.

He did have a degree, iirc, but couldn't get into grad school. But yeah, he absolutely did have a strong knowledge of the actual relevant physics. Did he even cite Lorentz directly in his original paper? But even better than that, a degree then probably meant being closer to the front than a...

A very good question with application beyond WCOLtd's own. From my experience with faculty it looks like they generally collaborate on things so they have some small degree of peer review at least before they even send it in for actual peer review. But outside of being a professor at a...

Lots of good answers here, and thanks for every one. @BillTre I think what I said came from a misunderstanding of what someone said in a thread about twitching, where a response said it had something to do with an ion buildup. Very vague, I know, wish I could find that post again, but good to...

So, here's an interesting question. I was at the shooting range today, and I noticed that when trying to aim, and when my dad was trying to aim, there was some shaking, making it just a little bit difficult. It seems hard to have a muscle evenly acting for a few seconds - simply put, there was...

Oh, so they have less thrust at higher speed. I guess, yeah, I'd heard jet engines have more thrust at higher speeds, but I guess maybe there's a peak and it falls off again? Fantastic reply, though. I'm surprised, I did a lot of searching and didn't find that. Must've slipped by somehow...

So, I was helping someone with some science fiction stuff and got to poking into flight mechanics. So we've got a balance of lift and weight, and drag and thrust. The speed at which thrust and drag cancel determines the speed of flight. The speed of flight determines lift, and lift must cancel...

Okay, just to be clear, I'll refer to it written like this; So the LHS has the metric and derivatives of it (in the connections in the Ricci tensor), but the RHS has no metric. Granted, objects follow geodesics which are given by the connections which are functions of the metric and...

I feel like this pretty well sums up the anti-nuclear movement. Talk about how unsafe the plant is then get in a car wreck by being stupid and unsafe. Of course musicians are the real experts in the world. Who needs engineers and scientists?

So, rather than causality and time travel paradoxes and the like that are usually discussed about relativity, I'm curious about something else. On one side of the Einstein Field Equations is the Stress-Energy Tensor, along with some constant coefficients (G, c^-4, etc), which essentially...

3 sources that all support it are biased, some of which pull a tremendous amount of data and do some rigorous analysis, but the single source that opposes it with anecdote and virtually no data, is the one you consider true? Also the same one that is a strong proponent of newer "green" energy...

Well it looks like I accidentally placed the wrong link on the source link, darn. But googling around a bit, I was able to find this, though I've admittedly only skimmed through it, it seems rather comprehensive and thorough. This makes a contrary claim, though it seems orders of magnitude...

While the title may seem to overblow it, showing that negative mass exists may be just that big. After all, as I understand, the primary obstacle to the reality of the Alcubierre Drive or Krasnikov Tubes is the negative energy density requirements. This of course violates certain energy...

It's the world we live in. They "play politics" so they can get power and do some good. They compromise, knowing they're making deals with the devil, but sometimes it's necessary to compromise and not get done what you need to get done, in the name of getting anything done, as opposed to...