Posts by Olin Lathrop
If you are already heating the space to maintain a constant temperature, and if both humidification methods result in the same eventual humidity, then the net energy used ends up the same. Any ene...
Let w be the price of water that I'll use to dilute. Forget that. Unless you are in extraordinary circumstances, the price of water is so low compared to the vinegar as to be irrelevant. How do ...
No, this site is about physics, not chemistry. Whether something is on topic anywhere else has no bearing on it being on topic here. That said, there are some gray areas between physics and chemi...
Think about how that is supposed to work. It seems you want two photons to somehow combine into a single photon and nothing else. That means the output photon must have the combined energy of the...
How do I deduce which setting suffices for mixing table salt + COLD tap water? Measure it. That really should have been obvious. My gut feel is that any reasonable agitation will work about equa...
Basic answer It depends on what you care about. If you're primary concern is to minimize injury to the people in your car, then hold the brake firmly in ordinary low speed cases. This minimizes ...
As the pendulum swings, it experiences a changing magnetic field from the externally fixed magnets. Any changing magnetic field causes eddy currents in a conductor. Since these conductors aren't ...
Pretty much any system where the state of one thing effects the rate of another, and the state of that other thing effects the rate of the first. Surely you can think of a few of those. One examp...
Can we use other laws of electromagnetism to calculate the inductance of a piece of wire just like we used Gauss's law to calculate the capacitance of the 2 seperated conductors? Yes. The inducta...
Why can these Single Vision lenses slow myopia for kids, but not adults? Kids' eyeballs are still growing, so there is opportunity to steer them into growing to a less myopic final result.
This site is not for five year olds. We are not kindergarten teachers. Asking a bunch of volunteers on the internet to explain physics to a five year old is a waste of time. Explanations at that...
All refractive lenses are approximations of the ideal. This is particularly the case of single-element lenses such as in eyeglasses. It so happens that the centers of such lenses are closer appro...
The light shines on everything in an unblocked direct line from the light source. This light is quite bright, so can be seen by human eyes all the way out to the horizon (until the curvature of th...
It counters intuition that although a light fails to illumine the area between the source and the target, the light can still illumine SOLELY the target! The light is illuminating everything. The...
The "R value" of insulation is its thermal resistance. It tells you how much of a temperature difference is required to transfer a certain amount of heat power per unit area. The R-value you see ...
We don't know the details of your setup, but most likely there was a partially reflective surface over the actual photoresistor. The photoresistor itself may also be partially reflective. A highe...
The electrons by themselves don't absorb or release this energy. They do that within the context of the atom they are within. The discrete energy levels available to electrons are only there due ...
The spring constant specifies force per compression distance. When you put multiple spring in series, the force on each spring is the same, which is also the overall force on the combined spring. ...
I'd say it's not the best design. Maybe that's why they discontinued it. However, there are also advantages. Cooling will be a little easier without a cover. But the real advantage is price. U...
After 4 edits, it seems you are asking whether there are places in the universe where galaxies can form, but planets in those galaxies can't support life. It seems you want life to be impossible d...
The center of thrust is effectively the weighted average of all the thrust locations. The weighting for each location is proportional to how much the thrust from that location contributes to the o...
We need marketing more than moderators There is so little activity here, even one person can easily handle the rare moderation tasks. If you just need to put a name in a slot, then I'm willing to...
You are somewhat misquoting what I said. It would help if you provide a link to the comments you are asking about, but the issue was most likely about lack of units on numeric values, not variable...
Back when what light is and how it propagates was poorly understood, people naturally related it to sound. Sound propagates thru a medium, like air. Light was therefore assumed to propagate thru ...
It depends on what you want from your calendar. If you simply want a way to keep track of time, then you can base it on anything you like. The earth spinning on its axis, the moon orbiting the ea...