Recent content by sciFax

Yes, indeed. This is also one of the many facts conveniently swept under the rug by proponents of the silly Electric Universe "cosmology." Takes all sorts.

I'm wondering whether the poster means the complete separation of protons and electrons into two separate populations, each in a magnetic bottle? That could be done for small numbers of particles, but the energy required to overcome the resultant electrostatic field forces would scale...

If the page/app is to be front-end only, then a JS-based XML parser would help - I've personally never used one. Try e.g. this for starters from StackOverflow: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17604071/parse-xml-using-javascript I'm guessing in such a case that the XML file would be...

Possibly - or, as you speculated above, just describe in some detail how this would be done. That would be (a lot!) easier than actually writing a working website. In any case, it would be best to discuss this with your lecturer(s) to ascertain what exactly is required of you. After all, we have...

You're welcome - I hope it helps.

Off the top of my head, after a quick scan of the syllabus link you provided, I would say that if I had to write a site which had to interact with XML, I would do it this way: Write a front-end using HTML and JS, or use a Wysiwyg tool or framework to help in accomplishing this; Use JS/AJAX to...

Well, there are a number of ways to define what constitutes a "city" - do an online search for "smallest city" in your favourite country. But we could set a quota of, say, 1000 inhabitants as a rough guideline for "smallest (or first) city on Mars." Then we could do the sums to figure out what...

Thank you for this - it gives a nice historical perspective on the question of whether the ##H^-## anion could exist. Also interesting to note that some physics "big names" like Bethe and Chandrasekhar had also turned their attention to the anion.

Thanks for the link to the paper. It's a tad above my pay-level, but nonetheless makes interesting reading.

And there's a shoe-in for those unfamiliar with (or have forgotten, since it's so long ago!) QM - a simple phrase like "energetically unfavorable" says more than "the (e-,H-) scattering amplitude shows a pole" would, any day. A B-level question needs a B-level answer. So, one can play with the...

I'm surprised that people expect the Drake equation to be capable of actually predicting some value or other. Surely it should be understood to be simply a back-of-an-envelope didactic tool with which one might gain an appreciation of how difficult it is to predict the occurrence of life in the...

I believe the Aztecs or Mayans (not sure which) would observe Venus during the day, by making observations from within a dark cave. The small cave mouth would present just a small portion of the sky, thereby making it easier to distinguish the not-very-bright Venus against the bright blue of the...

@mathman - yes, it's frustrating. Thanks for trying though :)

Before I heard about the ##H^-## anion (a hydrogen atom with TWO electrons), I would have guessed they would not even exist. Apparently they do in fact exist in the solar atmosphere, and in sufficient numbers/abundance that they are "the dominant bound-free opacity source at visible and...

As you can probably guess, not very much. Nonetheless, I glanced through this and found it to be ... interesting. Probably a million miles away from what you were talking about.