Recent content by tampora

Ahhh, so it only works when the planet is moving in the direction in which you wish to be accelerated. That makes some sense.

Ideally, imagine a ball poised high above an trampoline. When the ball is released and falls, it bounces and returns to it's original height due to the conservation of energy. Now, imagine the ball is a spacecraft and the trampoline is a planet. Instead of bouncing on the trampoline, it...

This bugs me also. I keep envisioning an Earth with a hole running through it. After falling in, I continue to fall until I reach ground-level on the opposite side. At this point, all of my kinetic energy has been converted to potential energy again before falling back into the Earth. If at...

Theoretical, Experimental, Simulation, and... end of story? I know that this question cannot be answered with any absolute authority, but I'd still like to hear some speculation. Can there be a next frontier in the tools of science? Previously, we had experiments and theory. Later...

In class, our instructor talked about a pecularity of black holes. When virtual particles come into existence for an instant at the event horizon, sometimes one is trapped by the black hole, while the other is able to escape. My question is, what determines the rate at which particles are...

In a regular household plug-in, there are 3 prongs: positive, negative, and ground. But, when doing wiring projects, many times they refer to the negative lead as the ground. Why is it that this lead is sometimes referred to as the ground, while other times, the ground is a completely separate...

You can get a calculator and start counting the errors and false assumptions contained below if you want.. but I got to ask.. If the furthest we can see is 14 billion light-years away (because it's been 14 billion years since the big bang and that's all the time light has had to travel such a...