Recent content by Tazerfish

Fair, some people are keen on accumulating for the hell of it or for power, fame or their ego. Some people want to be the winner of capitalism, to control armies of works if not armies of soldiers. Although the value of more money never drops to zero, it gets real close. Going from living on...

Are the equations supposed to look like that? They don't look balanced and I can't tell if that's intentional. Is this methane synthesis/the Sabatier reaction?

Most of my answer goes beyond what's immediately useful to the problem; nonetheless, I hope it improves your understanding of electricity and maybe you'll find it fascinating ;) You're mostly right! When you're talking about kinetic energy, you're probably thinking of a rolling ball or some...

I was pretty incredulous that there could be enough matter "in the vacuum" to slow a ship down. After all, the density of the interplanetary medium is measured in a few particles per cubic centimeter. Next you may think that nebulae are dense enough, but according to this Physics Stack exchange...

Hm. Can't the minimisation of Gibbs free energy be derived from entropy minimisation directly, without considering the internal "details" at all? Sure, the extra heat/enthalpy must be liberated somehow, and the specific entropy of your substances can't change without some sort of reactions...

I mean, what it's saying it just that the energy decays exponentially. The energy loss is proportional to the energy. That's a testable hypothesis. Pluck a string, record the sound. See how the amplitude decays. If the hypothesis is correct, then it should be exponential in time. When...

I'm glad that Ibix's equations solved your problem! :biggrin: I guess we just think quite differently about the elasticity of a collision. In my mind, the elasticity of a collision is what fraction of the initial kinetic energy, as seen from the center of mass frame of the entire system, gets...

The Wikipedia article is very insightful. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Asteroid_Redirection_Test Look at the "Course of the Impact" part. Apparently, more than 1000 tons of dusty ejecta have been displaced into space. At 2000 times the spacecraft weight, that is a lot more than I thought.

I read through the OG post again and I think I came upon a misconception. How in the world are you supposed to elastically collide at 6.6km/s ? That's friggin faster than the speed of sound in even iron! The impact is supersonic *in metal*. Take a moment to appreciate this absurdity. As you...

That's a beautiful post kuruman.! I find the axes a bit unintuitive; my brain expects them to be oriented the same way as the diagram to the left—height y on the y axis and p(y) on the x-axis, but perhaps that'd be even more confusing. Other than that though... A picture says more than 1000...

I thought we had basically solved the thread question. What in particular do you still want to know? It mostly fits with my intuition. For a more comprehensive understanding, there are simulations of it. I'm satisfied with where we're at. While I appreciate the effort to put formal equations...

For any static fluid volume that you look at, the forces balance. The pressure force between the bottom and top surface, i.e. the buoyancy, cancel out the gravitational force. If it's all the same fluid then the pressure at every height is the same. Here however, you get a different pressure...

Yeah, I recall once calculating the voltage drop across someone's feet when lightning strikes. We made a bunch of unrealistic assumptions, treating the conductivity of the ground as constant and isotropic. Then, when you force current into a point, it spreads out radially, with the current...

Interesting point about the bullets. I guess they really do hurt in a different way than being hit by a car or bike. But thankfully, unlike meteorites, they don't usually explode upon impact ^^ In regards to the direction of of scatter, you are right that it's not a very controlled process...

When I first looked at this problem, I thought it was about wave dynamics and reflections/distortions caused to a dynamic signal 😅 Ground has always been a very confusing concept for me. To now have current flowing through two different grounds is pretty antithetical to the entire idea ^^. So...