Recent content by Terdbergler

The most common illustration of entropy is the box with the partition and the two gases on either side. It took energy to separate the gases on either side of the partition, but if we remove the partition, no additional work needs to be done in order to get them to mix. We must expend more...

1. Can a magnet orbit another magnet (of opposite charge) despite the fact that their masses are insufficient to generate the orbit; i.e., their orbits are caused only by the EM force? 2. Would/could the EM attraction between them generate tidal effects on the two magnets? 3. If you had two...

Why can't EM attraction/repulsion be modeled as spatial curvature the way gravity can be? And for that matter, why can't the strong and weak nuclear forces be modeled that way either? Or can they?

Venus. Not Venice. I'm an idiot :)

Also, given the surface conditions on Venice, which element or compound COULD hypothetically pool up in liquid form on its surface in the form of lakes?

Also, I understand that one of water's virtues is its polarity; it's a great solvent. Are liquid hydrocarbons good solvents? Given that the carbon is already there in the hydrocarbons, and it's already linked up with the hydrogen, would the hydrocarbon molecules bond with the water from the...

So the fact that there is a lot of carbon inside lakes of methane, ethane and propane is a good thing, but the fact that the vast majority of that carbon is all tied up with hydrogen is a bad thing?

Water is incredible. We see lakes of hydrocarbons on Titan and they remind us of water lakes on Earth, so we postulate that an entirely difference sort of life might thrive there. But do liquid hydrocarbons really have what it takes to do all the things that water does? Here's my question...

That it's impossible to go faster than light is common knowledge. It should be obvious that I'm asking for more information than just that. Does the body reach a terminal velocity in a vacuum? Or will the acceleration itself "decelerate" but never stop? There are a number of ways this could...

Can gravitational attraction (generated by a super-massive black hole, for instance) accelerate you faster than c?

Where do we currently stand on the speed of gravitational influence? Is it c? Instantaneous? Or somewhere in between?

Even though particles A & B are entangled, you cannot collapse B's wave function by measuring A. I see that now. Thanks everyone. I'm much more interested now in this trade-off between locality and reality entailed by Bell's Theorem. Those who insist on realism forsake locality and those who...

This sounds like a purely epistemic account of entanglement; i.e., the measurement of A's spin doesn't CAUSE B to have the opposite spin, rather, it simply let's the measurer of A KNOW (or infer) what the spin of B is. But this seems to me to be very close to Einstein's take on entanglement...

Instantaneous action-at-a-distance (which is how we explain quantum entanglement) implies event-simultaneity, but we know (from SR) that an observer's "now" is dependent upon their velocity/reference frame. Imagine that we have two observers, Scott and Sean, and two entangled particles. Scott...

I realize that there are no lakes or rivers on Venus, but, given the surface temperature, pressure, etc. what substance COULD flow and pool on Venus the way water and liquid ethane flow and pool on the surfaces of Earth and Titan respectively?