Recent content by Researcher X

Isn't there an outside chance that a big glob of material ejected from a black hole could be going 99.999999% relative to earth, and impact hard enough to break the planet up?

Little bit of a bump, but I was reading about kinetic energy impactors on Wikipedia: I always thought Tungsten had very low shatter resistance, but this claims Tungsten as being superior for surviving high speed impacts than equivalent high quality steel.

Is it possible to do something similar to making diamonds in which a material is compressed until it transitions to a stable new crystal configuration instead of "bouncing back"?

I was thinking that since the density of something is as much dependent on the molecular structure as the atomic, that there should be some leeway here.

I mean brittle in the scientific sense, but also that the material doesn't easily fracture, which is the more colloquial, non-scientific sense of "brittle". So, I'm looking for the hardest (most difficult to pierce/cut) material that also is either not brittle at all, or if it is, requires...

How hard can something be without being easily breakable?

Since that question has been answered and I don't think it's worth making another thread on density; I'll ask here. Can compounds be denser than their component elements? Could we make something stable that was denser than Osmium? Structure varies density, but perhaps the atoms in elements...

Yes, but on average it is going to be less common for someone to have sex with the gender they aren't attracted to, and if more people with the gay gene aren't reproducing than are, then the population will shrink over time. The number of homosexual people who reproduce in an already small...

Almost all cultures have been patriarchal. Cultures in general tend to have a "sissyphobia", and this could possibly stem from drives in men that would be useful during fathering; encouraging their sons to live up to masculine ideals that are not only useful for attracting women, but in learning...

Doesn't attraction necessitate a change in velocity, something impossible for light?

Does quantum mechanics also explain Zeno's paradox, in that the smallest instant of time is actually a snapshot of the arrow in two incredibly slightly different places, and the next instant of time collapses the wave function into the new position? I don't have that much knowledge of quantum...

I'm not sure what you're getting at. I'm talking about the relative strength of the forces. The electromagnetic force is already 1E+36 times stronger than gravity, but what if it was even stronger? All I can think of for starters is that molecular bonds would be stronger, so larger structures...

The idea of a "stable" universe is only stable as far as being able to support life as we know it, right? Still, even if a universe couldn't support life, it could still have very strange and active phenomena going on in it. What if the electromagnetic force was 10 trillion times stronger...

It's kind of sad that we can't synthesize materials that strong another way. Isn't there some kind of ceiling that physics puts on the strength of materials under Earth conditions?

Is it possible for a large ship, say 100 meters long at least, be sufficiently protected that the pressure exerted by any possible waves is not enough to rip the vessel apart? Would this require new structural materials such as the carbon group, because current materials would have to be too...