Recent content by rumborak

Thanks for the replies everybody! If I understand it correctly, kinetic energy is self-consistent provided you stay in the same frame, and that my example was flawed in the sense that I disregarded the "accelerator" which would have made the total energy stay constant when taken into account.

This confusion has lingered in the back of my mind for years now, would be good for me to finally get a grasp on this. Say I have an object currently at rest, and I use energy X to accelerate it to speed v. According to the standard formula, it now has a kinetic energy 1/2mv^2. Now I use the...

I'm doing a fun home project, and it involves water flowing through a metal pipe, where the surrounding is significantly lower temperature than the water in the pipe. The point of the exercise is to cool the water in the pipe as it flows through it. The question is, what influence does flow...

I am taking your question to mean, "can c be derived from first principles, purely on paper, not relying on measured quantities?", in which case the answer is no. It is considered a fundamental physical constant that is established empirically.

Disregarding the Big Bang event for a moment, I find that topic incredibly interesting from a standpoint of causality. At least to me, causality implies the requirement of time. So, if it is nonsensical to ask "what was before spacetime", then isn't nonsensical to ask "what casued/created...

Well ... but doesn't that usage imply the assumption that normal physics prevailed during that process, i.e. that spacetime was "intact" enough to give a notion of a "before"? It's probably a good assumption ("barring contrary evidence, assume everything stays the same"), but at the same time...

Doesn't the whole concept of describing arbitrary waveforms as a sum of sinusoids fall apart when you consider nonlinear systems? The reason you can do all these convenient acrobatics of angular frequencies etc is because sinusoids are the solution to the *linear* wave equation. The moment...

...why do people like Stephen Hawking talk about things/events "before" the Big Bang? If time (as part of spacetime) was created with this event, it also marks the point in time that had no "before", doesn't it?

I think you misunderstood my point. I wasn't saying that the emitted light has some kind of directionality to it (I agree with you, it doesn't), but instead that if you section the "sun disk" into vertical slices, the slices towards the edge of the sun are shorter and thus contribute less to the...

Keep in mind that the sun is a sphere, so you are getting almost no light from the left edge of it or the right. You can probably halve your estimate to 8m because of that.

This has probably popped into every cycling engineer's head at some point (inckuduin mine). The problem is that most energy is lost during riding by friction and wind resistance, none of which can be recouped. Because any device will add weight to the bike, thus requiring additional energy by...

What you are describing is heat conduction. However, air actually being a pretty good insulator, it could not account for the often drastic and fast changes. Nah, hot air rising is likely to be due to convection instead. Even in the atmosphere, that's how wind comes about after all.

Drakkith, I think your intuition about the pressure differential is right. In zero gravity hot air doesn't "move", it only slowly equalizes in temperature. I suspect the higher average kinetic energy gives the "hot" molecules more opportunity to escape both up and down, whereas the "cold...

For the second video I think it might also have something to do with the fact that the vessel bulges out in the middle. The centrifugal force will naturally make it go to the widest part of the vessel.

Wow, that's crazy, I was just yesterday googling exactly this, i.e. how feasible suspending an object purely by vacuum would be. One interesting thing I found was that most calculations I saw online presumed a spherical shape, and then calculating the necessary compression strength of the...