Recent content by nealh149

The plumbing analogy I've always used is as follows: 1. Wires are like pipes. 2. Voltage is water pressure. 3. Battery is a pump. 4. Resistors are like pipes with an impedance. So if you have pipe with some high water pressure (high voltage) leading up to a tiny opening to a smaller pipe, the...

The Saturday to Sunday change shouldn't be included I don't thing.

This is a question that often comes up when someone is new to Special Relativity, but it's fairly easily addressed. First consider the Rocket as the inertial frame. It has a single clock that it does all its time measurements with. Now the Earth is moving at constant v with respect to the...

Perhaps what the OP means is when you are solving for the nonhomogeneous part, that part of the solution takes the form of the forcing function.

Okay, that's true, I did assume the OP's circumference was correct.

While I was trying to covey what turin said, he said it much better.

It's actually quite simple. In thermodynamics there are two types of energy: That which can be used to do useful work (like the thermal energy of gas particles pushing a piston), and that which cannot be used to do useful work. The latter is called heat. So when there is a change in the...

LowlyPion, what do you mean when you say "the centripetal acceleration outward"? There is only one force on the bullet. Here's what I got. mv^2/r = GmM/r^2 v = sqrt(GM/r) = sqrt(1/6gr) Plugging in values I get 532 m/s.

Draw a picture. Do you know how long the bolt will fall for? Not really because you don't really know how far up the lift will move while it's falling. Sounds like your going to have to solve some simultaneous equations.

I agree Ballentine does require more mathematical maturity. However, regardless of what you do, I suggest everyone at least has a look at it at some time. I find it to be excellent.

Ballentine does better than Sukurai on this in my opinion.

Don't want to quibble, but wouldn't make more sense to say that they move at the speed of light because they are massless -- not because they are light.

I've used octave a bit over the last year or so. As far as I can tell Octave can parse all Matlab code, but Matlab cannot parse all Octave code. For example, Octave accepts both double and single quotes for strings, but Matlab only accepts single quotes. So, as far as I know, Octave is a great...

"Sorry, how is this - Why is time different while you are traveling?" Because light must travel at c.

Think about what your variables r1 and r2 mean here.