Recent content by zeta101

Thanks, I will check out the book. Indeed you are correct about splitting hairs, I'm thinking that it might be best to just state that the angle is very small, but I would like to put a upper limit on it, I may have to make an estimate somehow. I will still have a look in Adamson just in case...

This is a long shot, but maybe someone will know or can point me in the right direction. I'm looking for an experimental value for the contact angle between tetrahydrofuran (THF) with both mica and graphite substrates. I've done numerous googling and also did a search on the web of knowledge...

I would say that the first humans used their fingers to count from 1 to 10, and anything above that would be considered "a lot of damn numbers". In this sense, they would consider 12=11=many :-) The real "answer" is probably having changed based without indicating it though (which is cheating...

This isn't directly answering your question but it may help at some point. Something I read once about balance is that it's not about making tiny corrections so you are always at the equilibrium position (i.e., in your case when theta = 0), it's about gently oscillating back and forth about the...

We know "the constant" in eqn (3) is constant, so we have the freedom to call it *whatever* we want, as long as it is indeed constant. Calling it -m^2 is just a trick because it simplifies the algebra later on (when you get the equation (4)). Another way to explain it is that the differential...

hmmm interesting question. I would say it would have something to do with a special material for the object that's moving, such that, as the object moves and the contact surface heats up due to friction, the surface undergoes some physical or chemical change so that its coefficient of friction...

Hi leila, Do you know if you university offers summer placements where you get to go abroad? (my university, the university of birmingham, does one where you go to france). Your physics department will definatly have international ties with other universities, and even if there isn't a...

When you do a PhD, its very specific piece of research, and by research I mean you actually work on something that no one has done before. You don't do a PhD in physics as such, it would be a PhD in nuclear physics, solid state physics, particle physics, astrophysics, or theoretical physics...

What is your native language? some of what you say does not make sense - when you say axe, do you mean axes? (x.y,z axes?). I agree with you that it is not good to blindly accept all of physics, but you need to explain yourself more clearly. Do not forget that it is *possible* that you...

Is it possible to "install" LaTeX (for windows) on, say, a USB pocketdrive? Or better yet could I just copy over all the directories from an existing computer and then be able to compile .tex files using the packages I have installed? I know you can get other pieces of software that run off...

You do this by hitting the tuning fork really hard, or not very hard at all, there will still be a sound but it won't be resonating (just like if you push someone on a swing really weakly or really hard, they wil lstill move by they won't move in the "resonating" fashion). Hmm, just re-read...

...to clarify a bit on my last post. Thinking about it, really it's your brain that 'does the measuring' of the temperature, and it measures the temperature of your skin. Since your skins temperature is linked to the temperature of the air around it, you (or your brain) can infer the...

What is your skin (or special cells in your skin etc, I'm not sure exactly) measuring the temperature of? that's the question you need to ask to solve the debate with your friend. Your friend says it is measuring the temperature of the air (which seems very reasonable indeed!) and so he came...

From a computer programming point of view the D means the number is stored as double precision where as E is stored as single precision (for exmaple this is the notiation used in the fortran programming language, but it may apply to other languages, I am not sure). If you arent doing any...

with google you can also type things like "1 mile in centimeters" as well as "1ev=". google also acts as a basic calculator which can sometimes be better than the default windows calculator as you can write out a long calculation and then get google to evaluate it.