Photon Guy

Yes, a fictional and very funny character.

So are you saying Howard Wolowitz isn't a scientist?

An engineer is a specific type of scientist. The term "scientist" is very broad, an engineer is just a specific type of scientist, there are many different types of scientists. Not all scientists are engineers but engineers are all scientists, of a type.

An engineer is a scientist. The Wright Brothers were engineers, so there you have it, an engineer is a scientist, a type of scientist. And I do believe the Wright Brothers did become relatively wealthy from their airplane inventions. From early on Jeff Bezos displayed scientific interests and technological proficiency and he graduated college with a Bachelor of Science in Engineering degree in electrical engineering and computer science. Elon Musk graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in physics. Bill Gates took computer science courses. I would say all three had some training in science in their educational backgrounds. Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard because he didn't need to go there anymore, he was ready to start his career in computers.

For somebody with a passion for science, it can, in my opinion, be a very rewarding career. Also, there's lots of wealth in a career as a scientist, indeed you can make mountains of money. Something that is inaccurate, I believe, about the fictional character of Sheldon Cooper, is that he isn't rich. He lives in an apartment that he shares with Leonard. A good scientist should be rich enough to be able to live in a mansion. Im not saying a scientist necessarily would live in a mansion, just that a good scientist should be able to afford to live very well if one wants to. Take for instance Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates. There you have it, scientists make mountains of money.

Who would've thought that the inventions of Charles Babbage and Alexander Graham Bell would be merged and miniaturized. Now, if we could only do the same thing with the inventions of Henry T Ford and the Wright Brothers.

So having electric engines would be less polluting, not just in terms of emissions but in terms of other factors such as friction.

Motors for any kind of gas or electric machine be it a car, lawnmower, ect.

Well I don't see why such pollutants would be any worse in an electric motor than they would be in a gasoline motor. So is there any point to having smoke stacks?

In terms of electrical systems causing pollution, I do know that electricity creates ozone which I believe can be harmful at ground level. I don't know about any other harmful emissions or pollutants created from electricity.

It is common knowledge that burning fossil fuels can be harmful to the environment. However, if we are going to burn fossil fuels I believe there are ways to do it that are less harmful. For instance, smoke stacks. With smoke stacks you don't have ground level pollutants. Ground level pollutants are more harmful than pollutants way up in the air which is why I believe factories are required to have them. However there are some machines that burn fossil fuels that will result in ground level pollutants the most obvious being cars and trucks. Other gas operated machinery such as lawnmowers, leaf blowers, tractors, etc, further contribute to the problem. As it is, they do have cars that are 100% electrical and more and more are being developed. While 100% electric cars are not so common, yet, what has become quite common are hybrid cars, cars that use both gas and electricity. Lots of people drive hybrid cars including myself. I see no reason why electrical versions of other machinery also can't be made. However, even if everybody drove electric cars and used electric machinery the electricity would still have to be produced and electricity is produced in power plants which burn fossil fuels, hence you're back at that problem of the pollutants that result when fossil fuels are burned. However, power plants could use smoke stacks so that we at least won't have ground level pollutants, not the kind that are produced by cars and trucks. Also, there are methods for producing electricity that don't use fossil fuels. Solar, wind, and water power come to mind. The Niagra Falls has water wheels that produce electricity that power much of the surrounding area, I remember seeing that when visiting. In places such as Iowa you see windmills all over the place. And solar power, while it leaves much to be desired, it is being researched and developed right now and new developments in the field of solar energy are being made all the time. So we're making good progress. Im for clean energy.

From what I know, when you melt down rusty metal the rust floats to the top. However, I heard that with smelting there are chemical procedures to actually reverse the rusting effect, that after melting down the metal they will somehow turn the rust back into its natural form. Rust forms when oxygen combines with the metal so supposedly there's ways to remove the oxygen from the rust. This reversal process I believe involves the use of chemicals.

If the Earth was the size of a tennis ball, this video explains the size and scale of the universe. This video will make you feel very small.

How about a water wheel, isn't that harnessing gravity to power a motor? If you've got a waterfall and you build a water wheel, you're using gravity to make the wheel move.

So its the Kelvin scale that's used in Physics.

So with the Celsius temperature system zero degrees is the temperature at which water freezes and one hundred degrees is the temperature at which water boils, quite simple. Fahrenheit is a bit more complicated with 32 being freezing temperature and 212 being boiling temperature. To the best of my knowledge Fahrenheit started out with 8 being the freezing point but then the entire scale was multiplied by 4 to give it a greater range and so 32 ended up being the freezing point, although I could be wrong. Zero degrees in the Fahrenheit system doesn't really mean anything unlike zero degrees Celsius which is when water freezes. The USA uses Fahrenheit although I believe most other countries use Celsius and supposedly Celsius is considered an all together superior system which came after Fahrenheit. I don't see the USA as ever converting to Celsius as people are used to Fahrenheit and will most likely stick with it.

I think that's a good idea as this discussion has become more or less primarily a political one. Surely I wouldn't think that 100% of your taxes is being used in ways you want it to, I certainly can't say the same for myself. As this discussion has become more political and has been moved into the political section I am going to take a more political position. To say that none of your taxes ever go to waste would be saying that the government never wastes money.

You're the one who came up with the 80% figure. If you say that when you drive a car 80% of the energy is being wasted I'll take your word for it but that's beside the point. The point is that not all of the energy being used when you drive a car is being used in ways you want it to, whether its 80% or some other figure. The same thing with taxes. Im not saying as much as 80% of taxes aren't being used in ways we want but I would say, for just about all of us that not all of our taxes are being used in ways we want. As for what percentage that depends on the person and exactly what they want their taxes to be used for and not used for.

But when you drive a car 100% of the energy is being used, its just not all being used for what you want it to be used for. When you drive a car you want the energy to be used to make the car go. In Physics we know that not all of the energy is being used to make the car go but it is being used in one form or another. The energy that is not being used to make the car go is being used to do other stuff such as heating up the engine. We might not want the energy to be used to heat up the engine but the fact remains that its being used to do that whether we want it to or not. As cars get more advanced and more efficient less of the energy will be used to heat up the engine and more of it will be used to make the car go but the fact remains that all of the energy is being used, for one purpose or another. Whether or not the energy is being used for purposes we want it to be used for is a different matter. Therefore the same can be said about taxes. Taxes are used but they're not always used for stuff we want them to be used for. Just to name one example I certainly don't want my taxes to be used to pay the salaries of certain politicians who I am not going to mention and Im sure most if not everybody here agrees with me, that their taxes aren't always used for what they want them to be used for. But that's the way it is and so therefore I do see taxes as a loss, at least when they're not being used for what we want them to be used for. At one time gold was the standard and although its not that way any more, it used to be that the government could only print enough money as there was gold to equal it so money at least used to be a conserved quality.

Lets say you're driving a car, as you're doing so you're converting energy into lots of different forms. The energy starts out with the gasoline in the gas tank. The gasoline has chemical energy. As the gasoline burns the chemical energy is released and converted into kinetic energy as it drives the pistons. The pistons turn gears which turns the crank shaft which finally turns the wheels that sends the car forward. Now each time the energy is converted some of the energy is lost. When the gasoline burns not all of the energy it gives off goes towards driving the pistons, when the piston turns the gears not all of the energy goes towards turning the gears. When one gear turns another gear not all of the energy goes towards turning the other gear, when the gears turn the crankshaft not all the energy goes towards turning the crankshaft and wheels and so forth. Energy is lost in the form of heat and friction. That is why engines get so hot and need cooling systems, because of all the energy that is lost as heat which heats up the engine. So anyway, I see something similar with the economy and with money. Whenever money switches owners some of it is lost, it is lost in the form of taxes. Lets say you buy a pair of shoes, money goes from your pocket to the shoe store and in exchange you get this nice new pair of shoes. When you buy the shoes in addition to the price of the shoes you also pay sales tax. So not all of the money you spend on the shoes goes to pay for the shoes, some of it is lost in the form of taxes. If you work a job where you're paid an hourly wage you pay income taxes on the wages you make. So not all the money that goes from your employer to you per hour actually goes to you, some of it is lost in the form of taxes. So this is what energy and the economy have in common.

Apparently the light speed barrier can't be broken by conventional means. Well how about in a case such as this? Lets say I've got a spaceship that goes at over half the speed of light. Now lets say I've got a gun that shoots a bullet at over half the speed of light. Now, Im in my spaceship and its going forward at maximum velocity. I fire my gun forward in the same direction the ship is going, would my bullet break the light speed barrier?

So concerning black holes, my advice, don't go near them.

Once you cross over the event horizon of a black hole you cross the point of no return. The speed of light is 186,000 MPS but once you cross over the event horizon you would have to have a speed faster than that to escape from the gravity of the black hole and nothing can move faster than 186,000 MPS because as weight increases with speed, once you reach that speed your weight becomes infinite so it would require infinite energy just to reach light speed. That is why you can't escape from a black hole since the escape speed is faster than the speed of light and you can't go faster than the speed of light according to conventional physics. Anyway, I was thinking, if you could somehow increase your speed beyond the speed of light, lets say you could go at 200,000 MPS, even though physics says you can't lets say you can, could you, at least in principle, escape from within the event horizon of a black hole?

Science projects can be expensive. Just look at how costly NASA is and even putting NASA aside, other science projects are expensive too such as the Hadron Collider in France/Switzerland. And back to NASA, they're now apparently going to try to create Oxygen on Mars, which will be expensive. Anyway, as expensive as pursuing science projects might be, a great benefit to putting more money into science is that doing so will create more jobs. If we're going to pursue science projects we obviously need people to do the projects and that means more jobs, so pursuing more science projects would mean more employment.

I am doing research into colored lights for this project I want to do. When you switch on an ordinary flashlight it emits a plain white light which is all the colors but Im interested in lights that only emit light of one color. Now at the most basic level having such a light can be very simple, all you have to do with your flashlight is put something on it to make it a certain color, for instance if you want your flashlight to be red you could just fit a red balloon over the end of the flashlight and it will make the light red. To the best of my knowledge that works by filtering, the red balloon filters out all the colors from the flashlight except red and so you've got red light. Anyway, I don't want something so simple. Im interested in a special light that only emits a certain color without a filter. I believe they do make diodes that operate like that. Im not sure that's how traffic lights work or if traffic lights use filtering much the same way as fitting a red balloon over an ordinary flashlight but the reason Im asking is this project Im working on, I want to make a special type of flashlight.