Reason Definition and 285 Threads

Have you ever wondered why what tastes good is often not healthy despite the fact that from evolutionary point of view the whole purpose of taste is to get you to eat what is healthy? I found an interesting explanation that probably none of you have thought of. On a grand scheme of things, what...

Hi all, I have a little out of track question and I was forced to consider this after reading FQXI Essay competition title Is Reality Digital or Analogue and Kant's Critique of Pure reason simultaneously. If I am not wrong, according to Kant, there are limits of pure reason. Is not the...

We know that work is the dot product between force and displacement .. so dot product always gives scalar (horizontal projection etc) hence work is a scalar quantity? I want the reason behind it... we always do work in specific direction.. suppose a man in appliying force at the angle...

It is said that massive stars spin faster than less massive ones and I am always wondering why.Could someone please tell me the reason? Thanks a lot.

Hello, I'd like to get some more accurate idea of entropy in general: dS=\int\frac{dQ}{T} Given an adiabatic isolated system. Work is irrerversible done onto this system. Entropy will rise because of the fact that some of the work is transformed into irreversible losses and therefore...

statement: body's weight Newton on the surface of earth.Its weight one-earth's radius above the surface will be one-fourth weight. can you tell me the reason.. why?

I tried to pick the most appropriate subforum, feel free to move this if there's a better one! I'm not a physicist, but I had an epiphany recently that I've never see anywhere else, and it seems so incredibly obvious that I think it's either the accepted theory of time directionality, or I'm...

Hello everyone, I am really looking out for some literature which has reported the physics behind the occurrence of the phenomena in which two blocks of same color seems different when kept in different background. I have attached an image which depicts the query in a very evident manner...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/22/cern_coverity/"]CERN's[/PLAIN] boson hunters tackle big data bug infestation It's the software or the science that's been wrong One's analysis when processing experimental data must account for possible errors in the tools used to identify and detect...

Homework Statement A dam is shaped like a right triangle, 4 height and 6 across. The right triangle is oriented so that the right angle is at the TOP RIGHT. (we are looking at the face of the dam) Density is a weight density, and is 64 lb/cubic foot Homework Equations The...

What is the reason gravity should be stronger than magnetism. I heard a speaker talk about what prompted scientists to look for other dimensions, and it was because they were looking for the drain on gravity, but what is it about gravity that makes it appear that it SHOULD be stronger than...

Homework Statement Select the FIRST correct reason why the given series converges. A. Convergent geometric series B. Convergent p series C. Comparison (or Limit Comparison) with a geometric or p series D. Converges by alternating series test The Attempt at a Solution I will...

Why does the sun have dark spots on it (sunspots)?

I can now although do the maths related to plane stress etc but I have struggled to grasp the logic behind this concept. It says changing the way you see the stress by rotating the view, stress changes. My question is why ? Why is this so that we see stress with one value when standing at let's...

WHY aren't voltage sources open circuited and current sources short circuited? Thevenin's theorem (and even Superposition Theorem) states that we need to 'suppress' or 'nullify' the effect of all sources. We do this by short circuiting voltage sources and open circuiting current sources. WHY...

Why, hello there. I'm doing Karnaugh maps. I'm using them to device gates to express the numbers 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 in a seven segmented digital display. Our teacher has provided us with predrawn Karnaugh maps, where we simply fill in the 1's and 0's. However, he's decided to invert the...

Hello! Beards are awesome. There is no denying that a beard is the ultimate symbol, for men and women, of awesomeness. The most awesome and legendary of beards, is of course, that of Karl Marx. This is fact. Karl Marx's beard is also, although not fact but supported by strong evidence...

I've never gotten around to joining Facebook, and lately I've become happier and happier about that, e.g.: Facebook's Ticker broadcasts everything you do (CNN/Money)

Preface: This question is a result of personal interest, and has nothing to do with any assignment. Okay here's the deal; I've tutored trig in the past, and I've noticed one thing that a lot of folks have trouble with is the fact that there are two pi radians per circle. (It doesn't help that...

I think this process happens very often. Somebody starts with some assumptions or premises and his or her reason is justifying these premises. I mean words are circular after all and if you open any book on theology and/or God you might get my point. Here's the question. How do we avoid...

aluminium is a good conductor of heat, but still it is used so that food remains warm. what is the reason behind it?

Is it possible shortly to explain, what is reason that neutrinos oscilate, from one color to others? It can be found some articles, but, is it possible in a few word, maybe in similar language as Feynman, who use basic rules of quantum physics.

A little over a year ago, I came upon the idea that the eccentricity of Mercury's orbit around the sun creates a tremendously oscillatory solar gravitational force (essentially, massive "solar tides"), which ripped the tectonically dying (now tectonically dead) planet apart.* It also included an...

In van der Waals' equation for real gases, the adaptation to account for intermolecular attractions in real gas is a\frac{n^2}{V^2}. This implies that the pressure due to the VDW forces on the container is proportional to the square of the density, \rho^2 = \frac{n^2}{V^2}. When I do...

What is scientific reason behind skin effect of conductors?

Why is electric potential (voltage) necessary? I can see how creating the electric field as the force per unit charge allows the force on one charge in the field of another charge to be calculated and accounts for the observed action at a distance by forces. I don't see the correlation of...

Some time ago I wrote an exam where I had to write a pseudocode to sort elemens in a list. I used a quicksort with the pivot in the middle and wrote that the algorithm has time complexity in best case O(n*logn) because it is a divide-and-conquer algorithm. That didn't satisfy my teacher and he...

It's a fundamental principle. But *why* does it have to happen? I can easily intuit why conservation of energy has to happen, and I can also intuit why conservation of mass has to happen. But with conservation of momentum, I can't intuit why.

Do you consider this the reason for conflicts in the world- Political Leaders Love their country men more than people in other countries, they love their family more than their country men and they love themselves and their egos more than anything else. In more clear sense, I meant that the...

Does anyone know how Newton knew that the force of attraction between two objects is inversely proportional to the distance between the two objects.

I would like to talk economics. One thing that is clear to me, at least historically, is that our deficit problem transcends political party. We have been running a deficit (often increasing deficit) through generations of different political rule. Please keep the political finger-pointing...

I know reason is thought in a philosophy course, and scientists are very good at reasoning, so does that mean all scientists took a course philosophy to learn how to think critically and reasonably? If not, then how does a student of biology learn how to think outside of his field of study...

I found this hilarious. This guy makes a pretty amusing argument for why we should destroy the Sun. http://destroythesun.com/" Surely, we should set aside our differences, band together and fight this threat.

First post! Hey people! I hope this isn't a topic already posted before. I already used the search function but I couldn't find the question I was looking for :/ Anyways, I was curious as to why equations in physics are set up the way they are. Let me show you what I mean: KE = ½mv²...

Apologies in advance if this has been asked and answered somewhere else, I searched but could not find anything. I just wanted to verify if my intuitive understanding of why space time (if it is to be physically plausible) can not be compact. According to Hawking and Ellis (and others)...

This question may be one of those questions that is hard to talk about because it seems so obvious that a certain thing has to be a certain way that it becomes impossible to figure out how you know that it has to be that way. When you derive the Lorentz transformations from a certain set of...

Are there any developed theories to explain why Muons and Taus decay so quickly, and why they don't stick around and leave us with x-ray emitting hydrogen atoms? It would be interesting if we could get them to last longer (I suppose relativistic speeds do, but that's still insignificant on the...

Dear all It is known that the ratio of the magnetic attraction to the static repulsion of two moving (similar) charges is in the ratio of (v/c)^2. A learned friend of mine tells me that this is relativistically correct also. When v is nearly c, the two forces are equal and we have an...

Hello, I am learning very, very basic quantum from the internet, and I have a question about the reason why dineutrons cannot exist. I know that the standard answer is that they aren't bound, but I don't understand why they are not, whereas a proton-electron system is. Here is the context in...

1. You can't think if you're dead. 2. Therefore you'll never think you're dead (and be right about it) 3. Therefore the subjective experience we will all have is that we never die. ("afterlife" is not death, just more life) As time goes on, we will always find that we're still alive -...

if I have an expression gca * dwab is there any reason for the resultant tensor should be dwcb vs. dwbc?

whether light has mass?if yes what is the reason behind it?

What is the explanation for the phase change of pie that occurs when a light ray gets reflected from an optically denser medium? This fact was demonstrated by the Llyod's mirror experiment, but what is the theoretical explanation for it? Thanks

The main reason why East Asia did not modernize before Europe is this. East Asians are holistic, they see the whole before the individual elements constituting it and we believed that the whole was more important than the individual. This led to the following belief that continuous scientific...

Can anyone explain why we humans have the innate ability to extrapolate 3-dimensional images from 2-dimensional images. I am not interested in how it works (i.e., how the brain accomplishes this feat). Instead, I would like to know why it was so important in the evolutionary process. In other...

the reason you can't be flat footed in the military is because you have a lot of back, hip, and knee problems. I have wanted to join the military since i was a little kid. but recently i have just found out that i can't since i am flat footed. and that is the reason. I know for a fact because I...

For some reason, the syntax is not working and will not print what I am coding so I will just direct you to this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lane%E2%80%93Emden_equation" I am trying to analytically find a solution to the second order differential equation for the case n = 5. I...

There's constantly people saying that genes are the reason for this and that. But I don't get it, as far as I know we have somewhat of an understanding of what genes do. And if I'm not completely mistaken what genes do is encode a certain family of proteins and regulate their expression in the...

Dear All, May i ask you all one important question? Sometimes, yes, many times, we get some sort of dirt in our eyes (very light yellow color). What is the reason for that tiny dirt? why one get it ? Is that really a problem ? Or if one works all the time in front of a PC will get it ? WHat is...

what is exact reason behind choosing basic primitive shapes for elements in FEA? Why it can't be hexagonal, pentagonal, octagonal, etc. in both cases 2D and 3D... Thanks in advance...