Recent content by robphippen

Many thanks, clearly and succinctly stated. Also thanks for the reassurance that I haven’t missed a blindingly obvious direct inference from the text.

There is a passage in this book where I don't follow the logic; In this short quotation from 'Quantum Mechanics: The Theoretical Minimum' by Leonard Susskind and Art Friedman \mathcal{A} represents the apparatus that is performing the measurement the apparatus can be oriented (in principle) in...

This is a very interesting question. When a substance is at a phase transition temperature it means that two phases are in thermal equilibrium. e.g. at boiling point: where , what this means is that the gas phase is in perfect equilibrium with the liquid phase. In molecular terms: this...

Damp poodles and vaporizing oceans... OK, very good point. In fact this just makes the whole thing rather more interesting. Of course the reason why my poodle dries out is because the air around is is not saturated with water vapor. If it was, then my poor poodle would not dry out...

You need to add two amounts of energy together. First, the amount of energy required to bring that amount of water to boiling point (which is mass x heat capacity x required change in temperature), second the amount of energy required to turn that much liquid water at boiling point to gas (ie...

Having thought it through a little more, I've realized that I was doing some muddy thinking. If all the molecules in some water are moving in the same direction, it won't affect the effective water temperature at all. To state the obvious, a glass of water in a jet plane doesn't boil a when the...

Yes, that's exactly the point. What I would rally like to know is if there is a known relationship between velocity of water and it's freezing point. Temperature is in general a measure of the (randomised) kinetic energy of water molecules. So I have wondered exactly how the non random kinetic...

Having thought a little about this, I am guessing that the additional kinetic energy in moving water means that it would freeze at a higher temperature than stationary water. Is that right?

So... 3d cinema relies on circular polarized light these days. Creating circular polarized light requires the use of a quarter-wave plate, which exploits birefringence to; (a) effectively create two rays of light linearly polarized at right angles (b) retards one of them by a quarter...