Recent content by Thecla

3+5=9 subtract 3 from both sides 5=6 If 3+5=9 then 5=6 This conclusion makes sense

If you could travel infinitely fast to all the billions of galaxies in the universe at the same time would all the observers in those galaxies say : yes the observable universe is 93 billion light years?

Cosmologists say that the observable universe has a diameter of 93 billion light years. Does this mean the universe has a center?

Balancing the complete combustion of acetic acid equation to carbon dioxide and water is straightforward if you remember hydrogen is always +1, elemental oxygen is zero and combined oxygen is always -2. just balance the exchange of electrons between oxygen and carbon. But how do you balance...

It may not emit radiation, but I would not want to walk into a 10,000 Gauss field.

Let me quote from the paragraph on page 167 of " Bernoulli's Fallacy" by Aubrey Clayton which mentions this problem: " In a little known paper in " Transactions of the Actuarial Society of Edinburgh(1891)",though,Chrystal explained that his objections were to Bayes' theorem itself because he...

In Aubrey Clayton's book" Bernoulli's Fallacy" which documents the conflict between frequentists and Bayesian interpretations of probability, he describes a problem that was proposed in the 19th century that gives a counterintuitive result. The Problem: "Infer the state of a bag of 3 balls...

The most recent issue of Sky and Telescope had an article that 100 years ago most asrronomers thought that red supergiants like Antares were young stars and that as they aged they joined the main sequence and became more like the sun. Today we consider blue giants like Spica and Rigel as young...

The winters in Scotland must have been long cold and dark for in the following years Briggs created the log of trig functions(sines, cosines, and tangents ) to the one hundredth of a degree also to 14 decimal places.

I haven't used a log table in a long time and the one I used in High School went from 10 to 99 with four significant figures for the logarithms. I wondered how did Briggs create a log table 400 years ago? How did he find the logarithm of 7(base 10)? I looked around the internet and You Tube and...

The first person to realize the night sky is filled with stars similar to our sun was a great leap in imagination. Cassini in 1672 measured the sun distance by parallax measurement of Mars so I assume he knew. But you didn't have to know the solar distance to speculate that the stars were more...

Uranium fission bombs have explosive power ofabout 10 000 tons of TNT. I understand that you can't make a uranium bomb with explosive power of 5 megatons of TNT brcause of the critical mass of U-235. Similarly you can't make an atomic fission weapon with explosive power of 10 tons of TNT...

It is said that some physicists doubted the existence of atoms in 1900 until Einstein proved their existence a few years later. Did Mendeleev's creation of the periodic table in the 1870s already prove the reality of atoms by giving the known elements atomic masses?

Thanks Dale for the formula

An excellent article on Bayes and Bayesian statistics was found on Houston Public Radio.https://uh.edu/engines/epi1876.htm The problem is in the first 2 paragraphs of the article.. I will summarize: Your wife and her friend went out and got you a white dog for your birthday, and you wonder...