# All Questions

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### If someone shoots a gun (45 caliber) at someone holding up a table or desk 10 feet away, does it slow or turn the bullet away?

Assume it's a standard .45 caliber handgun. Shooter is 10 feet away, and we hold a desk, mini-table, blackboard, etc on our chests(to protect vitals). How do you figure out the bullet's decrease in ...
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### Does the current light pollution set a fundamental limit for the range of Earth-based telescopes?

As far as I know, all deep-sky pictures are captured with the Hubble Space Telescope. If there would be no atmospheric distortion, could we make deeper pictures in the optical spectrum with ...
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### Resistance from voltage and charge [closed]

I'm sure this is pretty basic, but I'm not very good at electricity. At both ends of a conductor we apply 12 volts. For one minute an electric charge of 72 C passes through the conductor. What is ...
623 views

### About the delta potential well

If a particle in a delta potential well has negative energy, why the particle will be bound in the well? And if it has positive well, why it is free to move in either half-space: x < 0 or x > 0? I ...
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### Metal Dilemma: Only very few civilizations per galaxy

This is a question in the area of extraterrestrial life. While life may be possible without it, space travel is probably impossible without metal. Metal is created in stars and heavy metals (above ...
504 views

### Non-interchangeability of time-like intervals

I am reading Landau's Volume 2 of the course of theoretical physics. I have a doubt after reading the first few pages of it which I explain below. Landau first defines intervals and on pages 5 and 6 ...
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### Radio waves within an atom

What effect does the quantum world have on radio waves? For example, if I could shrink myself down and stand on the nucleus (or even smaller sub atomic particles making up the nucleus) with a device ...
471 views

### Rocket launch from a mountain

If we were to build a high speed rail up the side of a mountain like in some ScFi movies, what is the velocity needed at the point of living the mountain excluding angular momentum from earth’s ...
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### Why is pseudorapidity defined as $-\log \tan \theta/2$

Why the log? Is it there to make the growth of the function slower? As this is a common experimental observable, it doesn't seem reasonable to take the range from $[0,\infty)$ to $(-\infty,\infty)$ ...
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### Why is the universe so organized?

If you think about the Big Bang and the flow of matter in all directions, you would think, how unorganized would this universe be? No matter how long it would take. The idea that matter or most of it ...
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### What is the volume of a parcel of air of a giving weight at average sea level pressure

I know this is probably some basic math once you have the figures, but my Google-fu is failing me. Say I have 5 pounds of air. Air meaning, the typical composition of the atmosphere of Earth. And by ...
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### Would the ionic wind power fence actually work?

Described here and in the references (patent, patent), the idea is to use a large fence as a grid electrode. Spray water droplets near a high voltage to charge them, and then the wind blows them ...
1k views

### What is the fundamental reason of the fermion doubling?

Recall that the fermion doubling is the problem in taking the $a \to 0$ limit of a naively discretized fermionic theory (defined on a lattice with lattice spacing $a$). After such a limit one finds ...
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### Iterated dimensional regularization

Given a 2-loop divergent integral $\int F(q,p)\,\mathrm{d}p\mathrm{d}q$, can it be solved iteratively? I mean I integrate over $p$ keeping $q$ constant Then I integrate over $q$ In both iterated ...
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### Lagrangians combining terms with 1 and 2 derivatives

How are field theory Langrangians treated when some terms have 2 derivatives but others have only 1? Because the number of derivatives in a Lagrangian term is more easily even than odd, the ...
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### What does a frame of reference mean in terms of manifolds?

Because of my mathematical background, I've been finding it hard to relate the physics-talk I've been reading, with mathematical objects. In (say special) relativity, we have a Lorentzian manifold, ...
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### Why isn't pressure used for flight?

Why isn't pressure used as flight? I've heard that 2L bottles can hold a pressure of up to 90 PSI safely. Since $F = PA$, if the nozzle of a pressure rocket is about 4 inches squared in area, that ...
289 views

### Physics Equivalent of Physical Chemistry (P-Chem) [closed]

Before I take P-Chem I would like to understand how physicists view the same material. What Physics course(s) should I take and/or books should I read to learn the same material from a physicist's ...
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### How come an anti-reflective coating makes glass *more* transparent?

The book I'm reading about optics says that an anti-reflective film applied on glass* makes the glass more transparent, because the air→film and film→glass reflected waves (originated from a paraxial ...
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### Total power consumption of electric device

For some electric devices, like a fan or air conditioner, I read about their power consumption in watts on their specification guide. Does it tell about the power at normal or full speed? or Does the ...
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### Review of Gas Chromatographs?

Could anyone suggest a recent review article or book on gas chromatography instrumentation? My interest is in the devices themselves, rather than using them for a particular application. This ...
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### Why don't waves with different wavelengths interfere with each other in white-light?

The book I'm reading about optics says at some point that "each color (wavelength) contained in the white light interferes only with itself". But why is this so? Edit: I moved the rest of the ...
4k views

### Why is electricity not transmitted wirelessly?

Why is electricity not transmitted wirelessly such that we don't need to span cables on the earth's surface? As in: electricity is transmitted wirelessly from the power plant to the household.
3k views

### Solving Schrödinger's equation with Crank-Nicolson method

I am trying to numerically solve Schrödinger's equation with Cayley's expansion ($\hbar=1$) \psi(x,t+\Delta t)=e^{-i H\Delta t}\psi(x,t)\approx\frac{1-\frac{1}{2}i H\Delta t}{1+\frac{1}{2}i H\Delta ...
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### People eating and gaining energy

Let's say we have 100 grams of chocolate which has 571 kilocalories (so it's about 2.4 megajoules) and we have barbell which weights 100 kilograms and need to lift it to 0.5 meters height. So how ...
867 views

### Get an intuition for pressure values

I am currently working with pressure differences in the milibar range. However I do not have a good feeling for pressure differences. In every day life: Where does a pressure of say 100 mbar over ...
2k views

### What is the Jost function in scattering theory?

What is the Jost function in scattering theory? Is it an operator or some kind of determinant? How is it obtained?
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### Charged Black holes - What is the Interest in those?

Here in this forum (and elsewhre) I read about "charged" black holes. What is the background for this questions? Is this more a question of theroretical interest? In "practice" :=) black holes ...
338 views

### Stern-Gerlach-Experiment with j=1 atoms?

Suppose you do a Stern-Gerlach experiment with atoms in a $j=1$ state. There would be three separate beams ($m_j = -1, 0, 1$) coming out of the apperatus. But what would be the relative distribution ...
19k views

### Book recommendations [closed]

Every once in a while, we get a question asking for a book or other educational reference on a particular topic at a particular level. This is a meta-question that collects all those links together. ...
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### Physicality of claims regarding AC ice energy storage units

Many of us may remember the problems from thermodynamics where we had to determine if a pretend air conditioning unit supplier's claims violated the 2nd law. I want to pose a similar question ...
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### Why should one expect closed timelike curves to be impossible in quantum gravity?

From the Wikipedia article, it seems that physicists tend to view closed timelike curves as an undesirable attribute of a solution to the Einstein Field Equations. Hawking formulated the Chronology ...
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### What keeps galaxies united like a solar system?

Blackholes may be really strong but they act in a very short range. For example if the sun was a black having the same mass, it will be dark but we will still be revolving around it. It wont engulf ...
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### Detection of the Electric Charge of a Black Hole

By the "No Hair Theorem", three quantities "define" a black hole; Mass, Angular Momentum, and Charge. The first is easy enough to determine, look at the radius of the event horizon and you can use the ...
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### How to predict how much data to collect

The same question on CrossValidated Apologies if I'm being a bit vague in what follows, I've been asked to keep certain aspects of the experiment confidential for the time being. An analogous ...
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### What exactly is a mole?

I have some trouble understanding exactly what a mole represents. As I understand, one unit mole is 1/12 of the mass of an atom of carbon-12 (thus it is the mass of one nucleon?). What is a mole, ...
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### Do nearby gamma ray busts/supernova damage more than just the ozone layer?

So we know that many people are putting hard constraints on the galactic habitability zone based on the presence of nearby supernova/gamma ray bursts. But if they only affect the ozone layer, then I ...
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### Does my model aircraft propeller beat the sound barrier?

I fly model aircraft. Recently I changed from a "1300kv" motor to a "1500kv" motor. The difference is in speed; the 1300kv can go about 16,400rpm full-throttle and with a fully charged battery and the ...
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### Is the Keppe Motor “real”?

Its makers say that it's a highly efficient motor because it resonates with (what they call) "Essential Energy", which is free energy that is everywhere in space. (I think that’s just a different name ...
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### How would we tell antimatter galaxies apart?

Given that antimatter galaxies are theoretically possible, how would they be distinguishable from regular matter galaxies? That is, antimatter is equal in atomic weight and all properties, except for ...
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### Why does everything spin?

The origin of spin is some what a puzzle to me, everything spin from galaxies to planets to weather to electrons. Where has all the angular momentum come from? Why is it so natural? I was also ...
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### Equation for calculating the Sun's position

SunPosition Calculator calculates the Sun's postion based on the location and time. What is the equation used for such a calculation?
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### Speed of light, observed speed while travelling at the speed of light

I was watching Discovery channel the other night, they were telling that time slows down when you travel at a higher speed. This means there is a difference between the actual speed you travel at, and ...
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### Fuel usage at the same constant rpm at different gears

I've had a discussion with my father today, about the fuel usage of a vehicle at the same rpm, but a different gear. He claims that the following situations have the same fuel usage: ...
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### Deriving Newton's Third Law from homogeneity of Space

I am following the first volume of the course of theoretical physics by Landau. So, whatever I say below mainly talks regarding the first 2 chapters of Landau and the approach of deriving Newton's ...
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### Calculating time for a fully charged UPS

I have a UPS of 1000 Volts connected with 2 batteries each of 150 Amp. How much time it will take to consume the whole UPS (after fully charged) when a device of 1Amp is getting electricity form that ...
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### How does stuff glow in the dark?

Many things have glow in the dark properties (glow sticks, paint, toys ..), and I am wondering what is the physics behind them. How do these materials store light energy and emit it later when dark? ...
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### Ozone generation [closed]

Another crazy question: 1) I will need to generate some ozone for chemical reactions, and what seems to be the most straightforward way is using germicidal lamps, but the question is how to estimate ...