Recent content by shrumeo

I've seen these types of analogies before, but they all rely on the presence of gravity itself, so I've never found them to be useful in actually understanding things. and this one doesn't seem right: All objects follow the path of least resistance. If you set a ball on a flat surface, the...

how could they be twins if one was born in space and the other on earth? o well, carry on... :)

Thanks for the replies. They all help. They have made my concept of this less muddy, but I guess I need to ask a follow up. So, although the two objects are stationary (wrt to each other) in space, they gravitate toward each other "because" time is passing? Can I say that? Is the...

As always I come to this message board with a stupid question in hopes of being educated. Someone brought this up and I had no answer. Gravity is an effect of warped space, is it not? The more massive an object, the more warped the space is around it. Less massive objects traveling...

Ah, ok then. Got it. So this is sort of the matrix mechanics version? Yes, this is a real eye-opener. So to try and put in into words, the definition of temperature is the inverse of the increase in entropy with respect to energy? That's it? It's funny, I looked through 3 P.Chem...

Wouldn't this be a rather small population? {No, I'm just a chemist who took the word of certain professors back in the day...} What's r? This is the first time I've seen this equation. Of course, since I am a simple chemist, I've only seen something like: S = k \{ \ln \Omega \} \...

Well DNA can be all sizes. So where do you draw the line? At what point do decide that a molecule is large enough to have its own temperature? And at what size does a molecule stop being a molecule? {I know what C70 is, thanks. And I wouldn't go around saying that it was practiaclly a...

So are you saying that a molecule can be large enough to contain so many different energy states that one could possibly measure a temperature somehow from this molecule? As in a strand of DNA or cellulose or something. It could be so long and wrapped up in itself and be of such a size as to...

I guess it would depend on how massive the particles were.

And can anyone please explain at least what the folks who wrote the papers on the fullerene matter beams meant by the term "molecular temperature."

How can you have statistics on one molecule, atom, or nucleus? What is temperature if not a thermal measurement?

At any given instant. Instantaneously. A molecule will not be in multiple energy states at the same instant. Will it? Could you then explain it to me? Well, this must be the mistake I am encountering, please elaborate... I understand how entropy works. I dig the 2nd law and stuff...

Ok, of course a single molecule can be in a particular vibrational, rotational, electronic, and rotational state. At any given instance it will be one energy state for each of these things. My understanding about temperature is that it represents an average of these things (including...

What is meant by "molecular temperature"? Hello, I got into a debate with someone about the term "molecular temperature." I said "You can't define the temperature of a single molecule. It doesn't make sense." And they said. "But look at all these papers where people use the term...

It all depends on if you are using the ionic counting system of the covalent counting system. It looks like the 2 examples are using the ionic system. Let me try to give a step by step way to tell the d-electron count on your metal. Identify your metal and locate it on the periodic...