Recent content by TheOtherDave

For what it's worth, Wikipedia says that Feynman agrees with you. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction#cite_ref-3 I think it's interference until there are so many waves that it'd be annoying do the math for each one, at which point it becomes diffraction.

Right, my mistake (and that's what I get for PWT - Posting While Tired). I'm still unclear as to what would happen outside the event horizon if a field from within was changed (and this lack of clarity may just be from RWC - Reading Without Coffee). Wouldn't changing a field constitue a wave...

Sorry, I'm about to fall asleep so my brain's not quite all there (here?)... Are you saying that a black hole's EM field can't change because that would make it a wave? Why can the field escape but not the change in the field? And what if the probe "falls in" because the black hole grows...

Yeah, I guess so. Oooh! That gives me a follow-up question! Could we construct a probe that'd go into a black hole and communicate its findings back out by modulating a electric and/or magnetic field that it creates?

If a magnetar gets big enough to become a black hole, would said black hole have an intrinsic magnetic field beyond outside of its event horizon? Perhaps a better phrasing would be: can electric and/or magnetic fields escape a black hole, or is it just electromagnetic waves (and matter) that...

It's sort of completely nearly nonsense... If the limit of whatever/x as x->0 is the same from both sides, then I call that close enough as long as it's not part of some weird "1=0" abuse of math. It is possible that I just haven't taken enough classes to know that I'm wrong, though.

At the moment my two main hobbies are trying to learn as much about physics as I can (I'm trying to decide if I want to go back to school and study physics), and trying to teach myself Mac OS X Cocoa GUI programming (never has there been a topic more vexing). I'd include pictures, but they'd...

Yeah, but directionality, in the sense of the word that you're using, results from the interaction between the light and your eye (specifically, as you pointed, with the lens); it's not normally information that the photon actually carries. We're talking about how the eye perceives color here...

Doesn't intensity come from how many of them there are? Hmm... maybe I'm thinking of something else. AFAIK, photons don't directly carry directional information. You can guess a few things about their past based on where they came from, but it'd just be a guess. Kinda like if you saw a guy...

Yeah, that's about right. It's just the frequency of the light. When a photon hits something, it'll either be absorbed, reflected, or pass through, depending on the properties of what it hits. Stuff that looks red, for instance, reflects "red" light and doesn't reflect the rest. You can get...

No, aside from the photon's frequency (color, since we're talking about vision), there's no transmission of information, electrical or otherwise. Photons just bounce around until they're absorbed by something... In this case that'd be a rod or cone in the back of your eyeball.

That's what your eyes do... They sense energy in the form of EM radiation within a certain frequency range. It's just a sensor doing its job.

Minor point... It's still possible to get lost with GPS. For instance, my car is thoroughly convinced that I drive through a cornfield on my way to work ("Recalculating... Don't forget the butter..."), but the reality is that I drive over an ex-cornfield that's been turned into a tollway and the...

For step three, it's supposed to be the other way around, right? x is supposed to equal y? Otherwise there's no reason for y to approach zero (or any other number). I don't know if it always converges, but on average it converges to x (by "average" I mean that for any given random y value, the...

Hmm... It is possible that I might not have interpreted his question literally enough... :smile: