Recent content by vanmaiden

I start on August 24th. I am taking Chemical Kinetics and Reactor Design Engineering Economics and Optimization Materials of Chemical Engineering Separation and Mass Transfer Operations Laboratory Introduction to Combinatorics 1 =)

Dear Physics Forums, Pressure is force / area, and force is mass * acceleration. When you have a gas in a container, it's said to exert a pressure on its container. Therefore, the particles are accelerating toward the container's walls. What's causing these gas particles to accelerate...

You see this picture of the second fundamental theorem of calculus and you are taught in high school / early college calculus that the t is a dummy variable. However, couldn't you view this as some sort of transform? You convert a function f(t) into a function of f(x). Is this a valid way to...

Hello Physicsforums, I'm curious to know what stability hydrogen receives through adding one more electron to its 1s sublevel level. The whole sublevel is at the same energy state, so why must it fill that one more space to attain stability? What does a full 1s orbital do to make it...

When an electromagnetic wave pushes on the electron, what causes the electron to release energy in the form of radiation?

Hello everyone, I've been told many times that when the right frequency of electromagnetic radiation hits an electron, it is excited to another energy level. My question is this, "why do electrons get excited to higher energy levels when hit by electromagnetic radiation?" Why does the...

Is it fair to say the equation was obtained through experimentation and not so much mathematical manipulation?

Yeah, I thought there was. I should have asked it a different way actually. How does the mass times the velocity of an object yield the characteristic we've named momentum?

Possibly. Is there not a reason that we know of that can explain why we can combine mass and velocity in a multiplicative fashion to yield momentum?

Good Afternoon, How is it that we are able to get the value of momentum from multiplying mass times the velocity of a moving body? A lot of people settle for knowing how to get momentum, but I want to know why this equation works. I understand as much calculus as calc II permits me with a...

Hey Physicsforums, This is something I run into quite a bit in my study of mathematics. Proofs are very important - that much is true. However, there are many instances when I don't need a proof to understand a concept; I just understand it. For example, I don't need...

Glad I'm not the only one here that's a slower reader when it comes to scientific texts :smile:

Hey physicsforums, Normally I enjoy reading texts that explain or elaborate on scientific phenomena. Also, normally, these texts take me awhile to read, but I just found out that I can read fiction works A LOT faster than books where I'm legitimately learning something scientific. Is...

I see, but this is a concept that I see on any site that teaches set theory. Would it matter if we wrote {{a}, {a,b}} as {{a,b}, {b}}? Like the fact that we can even represent an ordered pair as {{a}, {a,b}} seems odd.

I just started studying set theory, and I've seen this definition for an ordered pair (a,b) = {{a}, {a,b}} However, I don't understand how this definition makes sense. Could someone explain this definition to me? Maybe use a concrete example too?