KipIngram

I would say that basic physics is particularly useful (I'm referring mostly to the mechanical aspects of physics). I could see that knowledge, and even more so the math you learn in high school, which gets "practiced" in physics, useful to all kinds of tradespeople who build things and so on. High school physics gives you a "basic understanding of how the world works," and that is potentially valuable. I think it's all worthwhile, but I grant you that other topics (say, chemistry) might wind up never used by a lot of people.

Mathematical, I haven't been here for a terribly long time, but from what I've seen the moderators are excellent at shutting down the nutty stuff. They run a tight ship. And the user base is pretty attentive - if you ask a question and someone gives you a nutty reply, it's almost guaranteed that someone else will quickly step in. This is the best forum I've ever been on in that regard.

The University of Texas at Austin recently announced a possible breakthrough in battery technology that, if it pans out commercially, could really make electric vehicles a lot more usable than they are now. Higher energy density, higher cycle count, much faster charging time, and higher safety factor. I have my fingers crossed - I always been doubtful about EVs because of the "less than fully 'there'" battery technology, but if we could surmount that it would be a whole different story.

Yes, with two stations they were only able to triangulate a line through the sky along which the source would lie.

aramis720: Just so I can get calibrated here, are you contesting whether or not LIGO works, or are you complaining that the explanations you've seen so far are too hand wavy to suit you?

Well, in point of fact you do - you have to get others to choose to take you seriously in order to get your work considered. I think today hasn't been a very good day for you in that respect. One last time: angular momentum is conserved in all closed systems. If you have accurately measured some apparatus exhibiting a changing angular momentum, then it is not a closed system. End of story, and I am done here.

Yes, definitely - I think if they'd been able to see Jupiter with the available sensitivity that would have happened - we wouldn't have had to "wait for a scream." And dI think they've actually worked out the distribution of dark matter exactly that way - by deducing that it has to be there based on observations of things we can see.

I believe the way I'd phrase it is that incidents of extremism on both sides all represent one and the same problem.

Quote from dimreepr's link: The Conservative manifesto pledges regulation of the internet, including forcing internet providers to participate in counter-extremism drives and making it more difficult to access pornography. Because, obviously, we all know that pornography causes terrorism... Give me a break.

Yes, there we go again.

I hope I don't come off as meaning it that way - I have little tolerance for extremism on either side. In fact, when I wrote that bit you quoted I thought I was being critical of May, not supportive of her.

Well, <insert favorite expletive>. I was just half-told, half-caused-to-remember that Steinbeck didn't write Gatsby - Fitzgerald did. I hate it when stuff like that happens. Thanks to everyone who refrained from giving me a wedgie over it. I feel silly enough quite on my own, thanks very much.

Yes, they carry momentum and energy, the dynamics of which lead to propagation.

Ok. I don't really see the two as mutually exclusive, though. You've got this mountain of data. And you have a list of theoretically predicted "patterns" for things like black hole mergers. So you can look at your mountain of data searching it for such patterns. Or you can just look at it - it's all good. It's routine, for example, for astronomers to search for outer solar system objects by taking photographs from two different times and using computers to scan them for things that have moved. That's how they found Eris, for example.

Photons by definition travel at c, since they have no rest mass. Once they exist, they move, regardless of what's going on at the source. Also, from a classical view, Maxwell's equations show that EM waves propagate, again without reference to their source.

I see no reason we couldn't have both. Take a tough stand against the actual perpetrators of bad acts, but refrain from sweeping up entire religions in that net. It's the same thing we discussed either above or in some other thread - letting a fringe group drive policy. It's contributed to my a number of things we've discussed here - poor education of the masses, craving of the media for sensationalism, etc. The poor education thing leads directly to people lining up behind drum beaters on both sides, rather than thinking things through for themselves.

No.

I wouldn't do well there - aside from The Great Gatsby I've read very little Steinbeck. I believe I may have read an abridged version of East of Eden as a high school assignment, but that nearly 40 years ago. What I cited was present in my own family, at least - both of my grandfathers were farmers / laborers, but both wanted their children to go to college. And both of my parents did; my dad wound up with a PhD in organic chemistry and my mom with a master's degree that led to an elementary school teaching career.

Um, the same thing that we did for hundreds of years prior? Your point is good re: "knowledge for the sheer sake of knowledge," but for ages upon ages people recognized that knowledge brought benefits as well as having a cost. Parents strove for their children to become educated even if they were not, so that their children could have access to better lives. Of course that is still why those that pursue these management paths do it - they've watched TV show after TV show where handsome / beautiful people in their 20's hold all the power and call all the shots. Absolutely not an accurate depiction of the world, nor should it be. Right along with it they've watched show after show teaching them that all that matters is coming out on top. Concepts such as honor and values have become passe. Results are all that matter to them, as opposed to the notion of a "life well lived." I always thought of that as a bedrock of American thinking. But then we get 9/11 and what do we go and do? The Patriot Act.

Absolutely.

Best kind of distraction! I have none yet, but I have five daughters ages 12-23, so I anticipate a boatload of them as time goes by.

Oh, I am very worried about the educational state of the west. Even amongst those that do pursue an education, the tendency (amongst native-born Americans, particularly) is to seek a career in business management and to expect a meteoric rise to the top. I saw this sort of entitled expectation of "big shottery" showing up as early as the late 1990s amongst the newly-graduated engineers I managed. My own stint in management and executive positions came after twenty years or so of purely technical roles. I see very little interest in the young people of today in acquiring knowledge for the pure sake of having knowledge. And yeah, the "Question Authority" mentality is deeply burned into me.

Mordred, are you referring to electrons or photons? He has another thread re: bundles of photons attracting electrons.

studiot makes a good point - in fact both of the particles in your model will move. The system will have a fixed center of mass, and both particles will move around it. Your "fixed central point" scenario is the limit as the central mass becomes >> than the other mass, but it never applies fully. No - if your experiments seem to be showing that angular momentum isn't conserved then you are overlooking a source of external torque.

Yes, because they have mass.