Recent content by Mephisto

right, but you can still talk about the kinetic energy of the constituents, whatever they may be. Is temperature defined strictly for atoms?

its not much different from asking why is there a lowest natural number, but no highest natural number? you can have infinite temperature, in principle, with infinite kinetic energy of the particles involved... if you want to get technical, it would be bounded by something proportional to...

thank you for the suggestion signerror! I implemented it using COMPLEX() in python, and got the same results, but MUCH slower. So I put it back to what it was before, handling imaginary and real separately. So that means the math is right, and its just that my timestep is too large, or the...

Check this: http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&=&q=VB+launch+EXE&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f perhaps more specifically how about http://www.msfn.org/board/lofiversion/index.php/t47491.html http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10878_11-1050075.html looks like Shell is what you need

Thank you very much for that. Surprisingly, it is really hard to find anything about this on the internet! I implemented the difference equations, and it looks like it could have worked. I don't actually know, because my solution almost always "blows up". I set up potential V=0 with a gaussian...

You know that dirty disgusting snow that accumulates on sides of roads over the winter, and then doesn't melt until well into May or something? Why is it that this snow refuses to melt? It mixes with dirt and exhaust fumes from the cars, and somehow becomes really hard and un-meltable. Does...

yes. the short answer is that intuition simply breaks down for particles traveling near speed of light, and the acceleration is not constant 9.8 anymore. You have to use different equations that correct for relativistic effects.

Marcus: thank you for that answer. I don't study astrophysics so I cannot go into that much detail. I read a lot of popular literature articles on DM though, and never is it really discussed that one potential explanation for the discrepancy is that our laws of gravity are faulty themselves. I...

From everything I have read so far, we only know of Dark matter by means of gravitational inconsistencies. My question is this: Why is it so outside of the box to suggest that our understanding of gravitation itself may be faulty? Why are we inventing mysterious particles that are distributed...

Physics is not really concerned with explanation of Why things exist. We simply try to understand it, describe it mathematically, design a model, and be able to predict future behavior. Your question is more philosophy then physics. Simple answer as far as I am aware is that we simply don't...

ooh i see. Thanks Dave. I find it so hard to believe that we can develop such a great force through our muscles, and that this is the mechanism behind it? Torque = rxF, and there is almost NO r at all. So strange. Thanks for the help!

ok I finally arrived at counterexample to the way you tell me nature handles things. At least I think. If you bend your hand to make right angle at elbow, and imagine you put it vertically against a wall, you can clearly push against that wall by applying torque around the elbow, trying to...

ok. my biggest problem with that is that if ABC are on the same line, then I cannot ever possibly create this kind of torque! Note that in this case there simply is no vertical component of force applied (if you imagine them on a horizontal line). T=r x F and clearly r and F are now on the same...

I don't understand how muscles create torque. More specifically, I am trying to model muscles inside a computer program. I have two line segments (bones) from A->B and B->C, so B is obviously the joint. I was thinking of modeling a muscle as a spring going from A to somewhere on the line BC (but...

I get mine at Digg, Slashdot, and most recently I discovered a pretty awesome physics/technology website http://www.physorg.com/