Recent content by Stan52

The battery voltage, say 1.5 volts, is the electric field that the reaction is controlled by (and produces too). When you load the battery, the voltage will drop ever so slightly, which allows the reaction to begin proceeding. The more load you put on the battery, the lower the voltage (even...

GoldenTurtle, you are focused on the mechanical design. You need to get the idea of thermoelectric generation before trying to actually design something. The nice folks have basically told you that you would have a hard time powering a single LED off a campfire. The current state of the art with...

I'm not mathematically inclined, but I can explain it at your level. First, the resistor: basically, resistors allow electrons to flow through but the material structure forces the electrons to have many interruptions and ricochets to the flow. Like pouring pingpong balls down a mountainside...

I'm no expert, but the rotation of a planet is not affected by other planets; they are too far away to "notice." Moons orbit close enough to their parent to have their rotation affected, but the planets are too far apart. The real question is how odd rotations got started in the first place, not...

I have a point of curiosity that is related to this question. The Moon is face-locked to the Earth because any rotation energy that would exceed one turn per orbit around the Earth has been dissipated by tidal movements (right?). This is a result of its relatively close orbit for its size. The...

Barycenter Wow, that's a new thought: the Earth orbits the sun yearly, rotates on its axis daily, AND orbits a "barycenter" monthly. No wonder I get dizzy at times! Just thinking about it!:rolleyes:

??How does that work? Quote: The Sun's gravitational grip on the moon is just about twice that of the Earth's. :eek:Pardon my ignorance (I am a product of backward Alabama schools of the 60's) but wouldn't that mean the moon's orbit would be very non-circular? On the sun side, wouldn't it be...

Probably, yes. But stretching our imagination as an exercise here ---- True, that is the most likely. But some have remarked how unlikely it is for our Earth's satellite to be so large for its planet. So the question naturally should be posed, what are the calculable limits of such occurrence...

Hello out there, I didn't think this was a dumb question. Maybe it is. If the moon was the same size as Earth and orbited far enough away to not cause greater tides, both probably would have such eccentric solar orbits that it would not last long, hence would never get started. Even if Venus...

Here's a good exercise for you math whizzes (no, I don't know the answer): How stable (and what shape) would the orbit (around the Sun) of the Earth be if the moon was equal to the Earth in size and mass, but correspondingly further away so that the tidal effect would be the same as it is...