Recent content by roamer

Doctordick, Intuitively I have always felt time to be nothing more than a mental construct, it is a mental invention that makes explanations work (cause and effect). However this still leaves the question of what a clock is actually measuring. I keep on coming up with explanations but they all...

obibask, i have been thinking about a similar setup check out this page for some ideas http://www.redrok.com/engine.htm. I have a large sattelite dish that I will cover with polished aluminum to focus sunlight and generate heat. I still need my "boiler" and turbine/comprssor, I will select an...

I bet there are many different design strategies to make a variable pitch fan, but the one I saw was somewhat simple. Essentially the rotor could be pushed in and out about 3" axially by a hydraulic piston. The rotor was attached to "lever arms" and the "lever arms" were attached to the...

Fred I wanted to minimize the tangential component for the exact reasons Danger cited. However this issue isn't even critical in Danger's design. Danger your idea looks really good. I appreciate you posting your thoughts on it. I am thinking if that the fan blades will wear out rather...

qbert, Thanks for the answers. I know exactly what you mean about going about problems with the wrong tool, still it is at least good to know you can grind out answers in more than one way even if your first choice isn't the easiest.

Hi All, I have a differntial equation that I came up with on a little engineering problem posted here https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=129247 that I can't solve. It is d^2R/dt^2=W^2*R where R is radial position and W is angular velocity and t is time. I think it is an autonomous...

Danger, I've attached another crappy pic. Is that your idea??

Danger, Thanks for the suggestion, you might be right about over complicating, I am normally all for trial and error. The problem is I can only afford to have one rotor laser cut out (it needs to be balanced to spin at 1800rpm) so i need to know the size I want. If I fired them into a chute...

OK here is my nutty design problem. I want to make a centrifugal nut cracker to crack hazelnuts. The basic design premise is very simple when the nuts are thrown perpendicular to a surface at a desired speed the shells split very nicely into two pieces. Anyways I want to make a centrifugal...

Doctordick, Are you saying the only solutions to your differential equation are laws of physics?? This would leave the conclusion that only physics has produced or discovered internally consistent explanations, right?? I didn't review your math nor could I, but it seems that if we accept...

It is a really fascinating question to ask why nature seems to follow mathmetics, but maybe its mathematics that follows nature. Isn't it us who came up with mathematics to describe nature?

I'm an engineering student and I use logic and math every day to model and describe physical objects. Granted I'm not a great engineer, but I rarely have had a model of some component or piece of machinery I've designed match the exact physical thing. It could be that a tolerance wasn't...

Doctordick, Have you ever posted any of your ideas at PF in full, I looked but couldn't find any. I did take a look at your papers they sound very compelling, but I am not a physicist. I personally would enjoy a thread on one of your papers like Resolution of the Relativity/Quantum Mechanics...

So from my perspective this thread seems to have settled around the topic the Cambrian Explosion. Some participants believe that a purely mechanistic (Darwinian or some variation say punctuated equilibrium) theory more or less accounts for the development of the 30 or so Phyla that appeared...

Here http://www.theapologiaproject.org/Cambrian.pdf"is a paper that some people might find to be an interesting read on the Cambrian explosion. I was only able to skim the section on Testing Neo-Darwinism and Punctuated Equilibrium against the Cambrian Fossil Record. It seemed to me they made...