Recent content by sciencectn

Here's what I don't get though. Suppose that such a cloak did exist. Now suppose light were to enter at a spot near your right shoulder and exit out your left. For one, it would have to exit at the EXACT same direction that it entered. Any bending of the fabric would destroy the illusion...

If we represent a relation using a logical matrix (so that if (a,b) is present in the relation then the element at row a and column b in the matrix is a 1), is there any way to determine that this matrix represents a partial order using matrix operations? For example, if we have the relation...

That clarifies things a bit. But let me give an example of one such axiom believed on "faith", from Euclid's Elements: "It is possible to draw a straight line from any point to any other point." He argues that since there is no evidence in nature of a perfectly straight line, we have to...

So are we essentially taking it on faith that the universe is deterministic?

That's true. I was thinking more about faith based beliefs that can't be disproven (like with Russell's Teapot).

I had a question about axioms. Assuming I understand this correctly, axioms can neither be proven nor disproven; they are self-evident definitions that we have made to simplify math. So someone (with a strong religious motivation I might add) said that axioms are based on faith. You can't...

From Wikipedia: "Combustion generates a great deal of heat, and some of this transfers to the walls of the engine." This would also explain why your engine overheats when the RPM is in the red zone for too long, because more heat is being lost by conducting into the engine. So, here's my...

I've been trying to understand why fuel economy decreases when the engine gets into higher RPMs. That is, if you put the pedal to the metal and quickly accelerate to 40 MPH, your engine operates much less efficiently than if you slowly accelerated to 40 MPH. Here's where it seems the...

From what I've seen, most speculations of time travel seem to say that when you go back in time, everything else around you returns to an earlier state that it used to be. For example, if you stand outside your house and go back in time, the house will "un-build" itself and there will be nothing...