Recent content by OldTee

There's a very good article on this, written by Phil Plait, I'll quote part of it here: It's really hard to blow up a planet! It's possible that the alien technology did something like cause a chain reaction which totally disintegrated the atoms, or something like that. But that's no fun...

That's really cool CeeAnne! It's amazing that we can measure the speed of light based on what we all have in our kitchen.

When I was in college we used Nilsson's 'Electric Circuits' as an introductory guide to circuit design. It's pretty comprehensive and I quite like the approach. Back then it was an earlier edition, the latest edition can be found here in Amazon.com: .

Think it's the great Galileo! http://www.colorado.edu/physics/2000/waves_particles/lightspeed_evidence.html

Negative refractive index has been demonstrated in some meta-material recently, it's still a hot topic of research though. Have a look at http://physicsweb.org/articles/news/7/10/10 and http://physics.ucsd.edu/lhmedia/ . There're a whole lot more information available by googling. Snells law...

Bandgap in semiconductor is the energy gap between the conduction and valence band. Whether a semiconductor's bandgap is direct or indirect can be determined from the E-k diagram, which is obtained by solving Bloch equation using comprehensive numerical technique. I don't think there's a rule of...

Transmitting analogue signal over optical fiber is possible but only limited to a very narrow range of application, mainly in what is called 'radio frequency over fiber'. These are short distance transmission, within a shopping complex for example, of cellular or wireless LAN signal. Apart...

Opps..apologies for being unclear. By end devices I'm actually referring to the final design of these optical signal processing chips. Just take amplifier as an example, semiconductor optical amplifier is much much larger than an electrical op-amp. And the power it takes to amplify optical...

Thanks for the responses. As for the temperature of the universe being ~3K, I'd actually managed to find a few links by googling: [PLAIN] http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mspacetemp.html [/URL] [PLAIN] http://cosserv3.fau.edu/~cis/AST2002/Lectures/C18/Trans/Trans.html [/URL] But seems like...

Hi all, there's something about temperature that I don't understand. My question is as follow: the way I visualize it, microscopically, temperature gives a measure of the kinectic energy of the surrounding particles. But macroscopically, temperature seems to be something that can be felt. For...

This is definitely an interesting and thought provoking subject. My opinion regarding optical computing is that most people, including myself, are skeptical due to two major reasons: compared to electron, the wavelength of a photon is too long, and also its energy is too high. Both place a...

There're two auxiliary equations that relate E and H to D and B via material properties. They have it in Wikipedia [PLAIN] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell's_equations [/URL]

I think one easy way of visualizing it is as follow. Take a guitar for instance, you pluck it by quickly displacing and releasing the string. Now the shape of the displaced string will have certain overlap with the fundamental vibrating mode, so some energy goes into this mode, and the same goes...

Fields and waves are different concept, but I supposed you're talking about optical field here? Then yeah, optical field from a point source, for instance, gets weaker with distance. But for field propagation in the form of plane wave, it doesn't get weaken as long as the medium is not lossy.

Fire is the first of the 4 elements! It's represented by a somethingsomething-hedron, but I'd forgotten what that somethingsomething is.