Recent content by NYNY

You can't calculate it from thermodynamic principles - it depends on the design and efficiency of the particular fridge. (How fast does the fan move the air, what's the surface area of the cooling coils, what's the temperature of the room, etc.) If this is more in the nature of a test question...

Well, yes ... but "we" doesn't include amateurs. Optical inteferometers require you to merge the light (not the images) from the two telescopes, with mind-boggling precision. It's quite amazing, really, that the professionals -- multi-million-dollar budgets notwithstanding -- can do it at all.

Not at all easy. Radio dishes have to be pretty large ... and you need some very heavy-duty computing power. (I don't think you can do optical interferometry, because the interference patterns would be much smaller than the sensor elements of a CCD. Two optical telescopes, even if many...

Actually, we might be pretty close to having the technology to send a probe, although we'd be long dead before our distant descendants got any information from it. The Kepler system is out of reach, but a nearby star might make an interesting goal. (In reality, of course, only the most...