Recent content by Nyxie

ZapperZ - Great thread! I actually feel a bit better. It's true a lot of people dream of working on crazy theories get crushed but realistically, you can have fun in an area you never expected or didn't even know existed, right?

A prof. says "Don't be a scientist." http://wuphys.wustl.edu/~katz/scientist.html This scared the daylights out of me. I want to be a scientist, confoundit! In the article, Dr. Katz of Washington University in St. Louis (a tenured physics professor) pretty much says that everyone...

If we use Baye's Theorem, say A is "we get the pancake burnt on both sides" and B is "we see a burnt side". P(A|B) is what we're looking for. P(A|B) is the conditional probability of A given that B is true. With P(B|A) = 1, P(A) = 1/2, P(B) = 3/4 P(A|B) = 2/3 P(B) = 3/4 would be...

Also notice in the above that I start by counting both pancake sides as different in the sample space (in order to get the correct probability) then count them as the same (in order to make them be the same outcome) For the probability each side of the burnt pancake contributes to its...

It totally depends on whether you count the two faces of the burnt pancake as distinct or not. If you count them as different you are right. But I counted them as the same because they both refer to the same pancake. =P And that was the question after all. The three options do not have...

Assuming that all you know is that there are 6 unrelated things (the pancake sides), 3 of which are burnt, the prob. is 1/2. If each pancake had 1 burnt side 1 unburnt side then 1/2 would be right. But each pancake individually has a different probability than the others. (Related events get...

Many professors in math/phys get MSc before grad school; I guess it has to do with the pacing you want to go at. MSc is "safer" probably or enhances your chance to get into a good grad school if you need to prove yourself because of less than desirable grades/research as an undergrad. Just my...

eri - A national lab sounds awesome! I would die to work with CERN but that sounds like a high hope. I'm not sure what NASA does but I don't want to engineer space probes or categorize stars. Do you have any details on what the jobs are like? hadsed - I'm taking a course called "Nanophysics"...

Thread title says sums up my question. I'd like to know if there are many paying jobs that focus almost exclusively if not entirely on research. I'm interested in theoretical research jobs in math or physics other than being a professor. I don't want to teach, and it has become very hard to...

OK, that explains things. But what about the astronaut and the pencil? Its inertia after being released/thrown is primarily determined by how it's thrown, right? so what else is it determined by? :confused:

Inertial reference frames aren't undergoing acceleration. Inertia: velocity doesn't change w/o outside force. Motion is measured relative to something else. So, if you're on a boat and you throw an apple in the air, it falls stright down since there wasn't a force acting on it (neglecting air...

Yeah that's right.

BTW why are people saying that we don't understand why this rotation happens??

This and an understanding of angular momentum sum it up based on textbooks/professors I know. Also, think about why this spinning doesn't happen as much when you throw something on Earth. In space where we're far from strong gravitational influences (like stronger pull of gravity on Earth's...

Hence why the poetry was missing, LOL.