insane_alien

no, not really. gluons are responsible for the strong nuclear force. this force only acts over a tiny distance. It aslo behaves in a different way, it gets stronger the further you pull two quarks apart until it gets to its limit (defined by the mean lifetime of gluons) and then suddenly dissappears. its some complicated stuff and i don't fully understand some of the intricaces involved.

http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~vawter/PhysicsNet/Topics/DC-Current/Current.html okay so i was a little slow with the speed i remembered turns out the typical drift velocity is around 0.1 mm/s thats 6 centimeters a minute or 3.6 meters per hour

1/ the electrons would drift towards the positive terminal, yeah. Diagrams use 'conventional current' which is an american thing. and like george bush, its backwards conventional current assume that its a positive charge thats moving and real life is a negative charge thats moving. so they come out in different directions. it doesn't really matter as the equations come out to the same either way. 2/ The electrons don't carry voltage, they carry charge. You can think of the voltage difference like a difference in pressure. the electrons flow from the high pressure to the low pressure, kind of like water in a pipe. 3/ yes, the electrons move. they don't move spectacularly fast(couple of centimeters an hour IIRC) but they will move from one end to the other. And finally, don't worry about how simple your question sounds. Do you think we learned all we did by keeping quiet? the only time we'd find your questions annoing is if you suddenly go an say 'science is all wrong, everything works with little pink faries moving everything about when we blink and theres nothing you can do to disprove it'. then you'll be annoying.

1/ no, electrons don't change charge. ever. a power source just shunts them round the wires. 2/ the 'free' electrons are electrons involved in metallically bonded elements. the proper name for them is 'delocalised electrons' which means they are drifting from atom to atom with no direction or effect. when a voltage is applied, they tend to move preferentially to the positive electrode. hope this helps, if you didn't understand anything just ask.

i know someone who can move one up and the other down. damn freak that he is you could probably do it if you kept on trying

it didn't happen in london. it happened on the moon. the fact that half the earth could see it also knocks the london theory off a bit as well.

you want to make a nuclear fusion reactor fuelled by salt?!? seeing as we haven't done it(to over unity) with hydrogen in the most advanced labs then your not going to be able to do it at home. you could maybe build a particle accelerator and get a couple of fusions if you fire some form of gas at the salt. not going to be anything spectacular though.

righto. now i've just got to stop it getting vapourised in 20 seconds

see if you make a bulb that might just happen to give off a dangerous amount of UV that you wouldn't want to be around for 10 minutes(without some protection) would it still be acceptable?

have a look at LADAR(or is it LIDAR, i can't remember) its a radar system that uses lasers for detecting objects rather than radio/micro waves. There is some interest in terahertz radiation (a fuzzy bit between high microwaves and far infrared.) that could maybe be usedonce its developed further.

we woudn't know what hit us. they would probably disperse a viral plague into the atmosphere while they are enroute and have a nice clean 'un infested' planet waiting for them when they get there.

why don't you just use google.

well, if you knew the velocity of the copper wrt to the observers frame you could work out the relativistic mass of the coper assuming the 42.7g is the rest mass. or something.

you can't have religion without morality but you can have morality without religion. so i would agree with ecoli here. morality is not a product of religion. it is an aspect of religion though. no aargument there.

evolution is amoral. they don't really influence on or the other. morality could actually be a product of evolution.

probably give a bit. then they only get efficient above mach 1. you could probably get it to burn fast if you soaked it in LOX for a while but thats a tad expensive and dangerous as LOX makes nearly everything burn fast when its lit.

alrighty, i'll have a go at explaining it. Above gamma is kind of iffy, after a certain frequency there are some quantum mechanical effects that come into play that reduce the frequency back to a high energy gamma ray. This is where the photon forms a particle-antiparticle pair (usually electrons) which then annihilate and you end up with two other photons. if those photons are high enough in energy the same thing will happen so you'll end up with lots of lower frequency gamma photons instead of one big one. light travels in a straight line but it can be refracted when it passes through materials and gravity (which bends space) can bend light. when you turned off the torch the photons would still keep going. lets take a star as an example. its a pretty big light source. if the nearest star (other than the sun) disappeared right this instant it would take 4 years for us to see it. The light would have stopped emmitting but the light already on its way would stop because of that. you could think of a water pistol, you fire it and the stream of water is photons. when you let go of the trigger and it stops spraying the stream of water doesn't just disappear it carries on. same thing with light.

okay, i was going to say i would donate any salaries to charities if i couldn't have it, but oh well. yeah i would work as a chemical engineer but i'm not sure whether i would go into research or the actual manufacturing side of it if i get paid anyway. since this deal isn't likely to come along, i think i'll give research a miss. although, i'll probably change my mind several times before i graduate.

thanks swansont, i was running late for a class so i couldn't get a link there

first of all, i would finish university then go a tour of europe with my friends, find a job, and do that till i retire. then try and fulfill my ambition of living to be the worlds oldest skydiver See the not getting a salary for a job thing, are you allowed to donate that salary to a charity? or does it just not exist at all.

trigger, they've already stored an image on a single photon, the article was on slashdot a while back.

no, i don't recommend vista. it is a bit of a resource hog and if you want to run it with better than XP you've got to buy a powerful machine. stick with XP if you've already got it as that still does everything well enough and with a good AV, firewall and common sense, is just as secure. Personally, i would recommend either OSX or a distro of linux but they might not be for you. if you tell me what you use your computer for then i, or someone else, can tell you which one would be best for you.

weknowthewor, it doesn't matter if you accept it or not. reality, frankly, doesn't give a damn.

not everything has to happen quickly, and there are unknown conditions here, was it sitting perfectly ontop or over to the side, were there small animals near it that you couldn't see, was it windy, etc. etc. there are a multitude of reasons why it could have fallen off. also, it may have been tipping over since you left it there, its just that friction was slowing it down enough so you couldn't see it til the final tip.

yeah, gravity is a direct force, until you get into the very wierd world of relativity with effects like frame dragging and the like. it all gets very complicated and it can look as if its slightly off centre but its not. as i said, its complicated and it warps my mind.