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What is the current consensus about the age variation of the existing galaxies in our observable universe? Not to be confused with the age of very distant galaxies as observed today by our telescopes which is actually observing these distant galaxies as they were many billions of years ago in the early formation but in...
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Let's assume that a cylindrical magnet is clamped by an horizontal arm extending out of the wall. The top of the magnet is its north pole and the smooth face facing down is its south pole. If I bring another cylindrical magnet and position it perfectly in line below the fixed magnet, with its top being its north pole a...
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I'm looking for an accurate method to measure the tension in a guitar string, without using a sonometer setup nor by measuring the frequency. the current method that I have in mind is to measure the force perpendicular to the string and the string's displacement, and then try to resolve the vectors (the method is expla...
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Clicking through the OEIS I found this sequence that seems curious - the number of "labeled" groups. It cross references the usual sequence of the number of groups up to isomorphism (the very first sequence in the OEIS) as well as saying it is "a sequence related to groups". So I've tried to look up this concept, but G...
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Neither my wife nor I have English as our mother tongue, but we use English to communicate to each other, which sometimes causes confusion. My wife often uses the expression "until now" to mean "so far" or "yet", meaning that the action is not yet finished. I didn't receive any answer from the landlord until now. To me...
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If i place some charge on a conductor then it will distribute itself in such a way that electric field everywhere inside is zero. My text book says that only one kind of such charge distribution is possible. Or if i place charges outside the conductor then charges will be induced on the surface of a conductor to make f...
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I'm looking for a word similar to "free" or "without cost", but that makes it explicit only that no money is exchanged, while still allowing (or implying, or explicitly specifying) that some other exchange of some value has taken place. For example, if I rent a room to a friend in exchange for language tuition, I have ...
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Imagine a train moving relativistically according to an observer at rest wrt to the tracks it's moving on. The train seems contracted in the direction of motion. At the points where the wheels make contact with the tracks, the wheels have zero velocity, so the distance between these points is not Lorentz contracted (li...
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I had a recent conversation with a professional mathematician about the status of relations, functions and predicates. I was arguing that it seems intuitive (to me at least) to classify them in this hierarchy (as to which is more primitive): All predicates are functions. All functions are relations. The obvious problem...
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It's well known the effect of Rayleigh scattering on the color of the sun, and it's explained several times on this website. Here's one of them. The summary of these explanations is, that when light travels through a colored medium, that color is being "used up" to make the medium the color it is, and only the other co...
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I did some online search and found the explanation using the following two diagrams. It's not perfectly convincing to me. Or at least it is not clear to me in the following details of the process: For the secondary rainbow to have the inverted order of bands, do the light rays have to exactly reflect twice and cross ea...
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I was reading a physics problem related to astronomy, and upon re-reading it, I realized that it could be really indicated to extrapolate some really interesting physics-related information. One of these is: How could we measure the ratio of a planet's radius to a star, for example using transits? The only idea I have ...
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Suppose I have a nonlinear ordinary differential equation, in several variables, with a stated initial condition. How would I go about finding a nonlocal linear approximation? What is known about such approximations? By nonlocal approximation I just mean that the would-be approximation minimizes the maximum distance be...
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While reading the Wikipedia article on Drag Crisis, I found: The drag crisis is associated with a transition from laminar to turbulent boundary layer flow adjacent to the object. While, the Wikipedia article on Turbulence states: In general terms, in turbulent flow, unsteady vortices of many sizes appear which interact...
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I'll put pictures from the book (Introduction to the Structure of Matter: A Course in Modern Physics by John J. Brehm and William J. Mullins) as I think they are relevant to understand my problem: I have trouble understanding the case where the observer watches the source in a direction perpendicular to the magnetic fi...
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The standard explanation in textbooks goes that in the presence of electric field (e.g. external electric field) the free electrons inside the conductor will keep moving until electrostatic equilibrium is reached and that they will create a field which will cancel out external field (e.g. electrons move to one side lea...
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I'm looking for a phrase that describes a problem whose complexity starts to increase exponentially, either because the problem is recursive, the definitions/conditions of the problem interlink with themselves, or it turns out that it's connected to a great many other issues, and changing one changes all the others in ...
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A congruence is a useful notion in general relativity, relating mathematcal definition and physical interpretation: "A congruence (more properly, a congruence of curves) is the set of integral curves of a (nowhere vanishing) vector field in a four-dimensional Lorentzian manifold [...]" Following up some intuition (most...
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In my physics textbook, the foundation for work is derived using newton's third law, where F_surr = - F_gas, where surrounding represents a piston-cylinder device and gas is pushing against the inner surface of the piston towards the right. My questions are: Given this information, it is obvious that W_surr = - W_gas. ...
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Given two probabilistic distributions (red and blue) it is well known that a linear interpolation between them is well defined (see this). For example, by the Wasserstein metric we have the following interpolation: When I first saw this approach, it crossed my mind that the Bayes 's posterior could be explained by a si...
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I am curious about magnets and their interaction with the electromagnetic field. So I tried to find this answer and stumbled upon (Magnetism and Photons), this is an interesting description that I quite like, but it doesn't really explain how a magnet can keep a piece of metal on a string hovering in mid-air indefinite...
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I am looking at a tutorial create for the FENICs finite element method package. The tutorial shows a system of advection-diffusion-reaction equations occurring in a solution that is moving according to the incompressible navier-stokes equations. In the tutorial, the authors simply present the weak form, without explain...
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I am really confused about the part where the photon shares a part of its energy with the electron. It is said that the photon loses some of its energy to the electron causing the change in its wavelength. In my understanding photon isn't something that contains energy, it's the energy itself. A single photon has a fix...
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A person might say on one day: It is hot outside - let's go out for a picnic! It is healthy. Another person might say on the same day in the same place: It is hot outside - stay inside where it is safe from extreme weather! It is unhealthy. The weather and health together is our internal model of what is happening at a...
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I have two lists, and six elements: V V V M M M I would like to compute every possible combination of those elements into two lists (left and right): So, five possible solutions could be: ([V, V, V], [M, M, M]) ([], [V, V, V, M, M, M]) ([V, V, V, M, M, M], []) ([V, M, V], [V, M, M]) ([V], [V, M, V, M, M]) My first appr...
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I need clarity on some definitions and mathematical "skepticism". In a recent video by Matt Parker, he says "(...) although the existence of the sign function, which says if a value is positive or negative, upsets some people (...)". What does he mean by this, and can this "upsetting" be extended to functions like the ...
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Consider the following sentence: "This paper introduces a new alternative for generating synthetic data based on images." What I want to say is that "the new alternative" is "based on images". Thus, the noveltiy of the new alternative is in the fact that it is based on images. What I would like to avoid is that one thi...
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I'm a native English speaker, but I'm drawing a blank on how to describe this complicated exchange of situational emotions in words. Maybe someone can help. I'll just illustrate the situation with a narrative scene. Two doctors examine a patient. "Have you been eating any protein-rich foods lately?" one of them asks. "...
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In the nuclear physics book by Krane, I was reading about how mathematically and numerically Q value of the reaction are measured. So he decided to prove it by solving it in Lab frame, And he goes saying this, "Let's apply them (the formulas he wrote to measure Q value) first to the laboratory reference frame, in which...
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This is a follow up to a previous question. I use pandoc to create PDFs from markdown files, which uses pdflatex behind the scenes. After a bunch of system upgrades, the type in my printed PDFs started to look off.The weight was heavier, and the the kerning was bunched up. At first I thought this might be a problem wit...
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I work in quantum field theory in curved spacetime. Within QFTCS, we have a bunch of phenomena showing that the notion of "particle" is quite subtle. For example, the Unruh effect let's us know that the notion of particle is actually observer-dependent. As a consequence, I tend to be quite skeptic about fundamental the...
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I have a GRIN lens with the refractive index varying linearly with y, and supposedly this lens tilts the wavefront. Since the rays are travelling normally in both refractive index materials, they stay normal to the plane of the lens at all times. However the wavefront travelling with them tilts because of different spe...
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When one studies representations of (bosonic) Lie groups in physics, whether dealing with spacetime symmetries or gauge symmetries, it is often left implicit whether the representations are over real or complex vector spaces, without acknowledging of course that the representations of an algebra or group can be differe...
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What's the term for a line of dialog that is repeated later in a different context? Christopher Nolan seems to be fond of these lines. In Batman Begins, Ra's first says: Always mind your surroundings And then in the climax Batman says You never learned to mind your surroundings. In The Dark Knight Rises, Bane first say...
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The general bin-packing problem is NP complete. I have read several papers and other source but I am still not clear about whether a bin-packing problem with a fixed number of bins is NP-hard. Wikipedia says: "Computationally, the problem is NP-hard, and the corresponding decision problem, deciding if items can fit int...
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I'm learning about functional programming, In functional programming, functions are treated as first-class citizens, meaning that they can be bound to names (including local identifiers), passed as arguments, and returned from other functions, just as any other data type can. This allows programs to be written in a dec...
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I am seeing many people claiming that cumulus clouds that sometimes form periodic wavy patterns (see images for "altocumulus undulatus" or "Radiatus" for instance) have no explanation aside from being chemtrails, and I'd like to be able to respond with a sound scientific explanation. I'd like to understand the phenomen...
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If we are moving a block on a rough surface extremely slowly (quasi-statically) with the help of an external horizontal force, then is it the case that no heat will be produced, but the work done by friction force will still be equal to the work done by the external force for any given displacement? The reason this que...
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Suppose we have a system of electrons a very tightly confined space (like a tiny magnetic trap). Let's say we continually increase the degree of confinement such that the electrons are confined into a smaller and smaller space, to the point where the degeneracy pressure reaches a scale comparable to the masses of the o...
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Consider a simple experiment, such as boiling water in a pot in your kitchen, is it possible to estimate the time needed for the water to boil based on elementary properties of water ? In the physics and chemistry literatures we find many computational and theoretical works attempting to predict the boiling temperature...
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Suppose we place a current carrying loop of wire in a magnetic field. Of, course its easy to see that for a uniform field the wire will experience uniform force in all directions and so it'll get stretched out into the shape of a circle. But I wanted to ask if we could make any comments about the shape of the wire, in ...
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I just started reading about the conduction mechanism in polymer. From what i read, polarons are used as method of charge transportation in non-degenerate polymer. While for degenerate polymer, both charged soliton and polaron will do the job. As i go a bit deeper, polaron can be defined as: A polaron can be thought of...
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Basically, as the title says. Maybe this is trivially true or false, but I have not enough intuitions about topological surfaces or aperiodic tilings. To make it a bit more precise - I mean the kind of aperiodic tilings such as Penrose tilings or the tiling generated by the recently found hat tile. By "gluing" the patc...
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I saw a question asking "If the Moon was moved to the surface of the Earth, from how far away on the Earth's surface would it be visible?". (The question says to ignore any other factors like gravity making it smash into the Earth's surface and effectively destroying both bodies). Basically, it's this, I think: We know...
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EDIT: Completely rewritten because of the 'needs clarity' tag and some useful related questions appearing in the side-bar. I hope this is clear now This answer gives a long list of properties of particles whose value differs by a minus sign when comparing a particle to its antiparticle. We know that anti-particles exis...
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I am beginning to learn some very basic electronics. I was learning how and why lightbulbs light up. It turns out it happens because they have a very thin filament which makes the passage very narrow for electrons so they lose a lot of energy colliding with the molecules making up the filament instead of using it to dr...
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I've been struggling with proposed answers to the twin paradox. I know that an object traveling at relativistic speed ages slower than a stationary object. This must be caused by some interaction with spacetime that leads to a slowing of time. But how does this work when we are looking at relative time dilation between...
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Exactly what the title asks. "Diode" comes with it the ideas of depletion layers and forward/reverse biasing and electron-hole recombination, but SPAD physics doesn't seem to be dependent on any of that. You just put a giant electric field on, and as soon as a photon comes and promotes a charge to the conduction band, ...
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I have figures which I use in several places, some of them in dark context and some of them light (for example, a my obsidian vault is dark but a PDF of my thesis is light). As such, some of the figures are colored to work in a dark environment, and some in light. But sometimes I want to take a figure from a dark conte...
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Noether's theorem states that every differentiable symmetry of the action of a physical system with conservative forces has a corresponding conservation law. Energy, however, is not conserved in an expanding spacetime because there is no symmetry on the time axis. This enables dark energy to exist and is the reason tha...
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I was taught that there are four types of nouns: singular countable: journey, sheep, child plural countable: journeys, sheep, children singular uncountable: travel, water, fruit plural uncountable: groceries, customs, thanks Some words are only used with: countable nouns: one, two, three, many, number, few uncountable ...
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While trying to understand General Relativity, I'm struggeling with disentangling coordinates and curvature. The metric tensor contains information on both: coordinates as well as curvature. Curvature is a physical characteristic of spacetime, while the coordinates can be chosen completely arbitrary. Is there a method ...
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We know that a complex manifold with a hermitian metric h is Kahler if and only if the corresponding Kahler form (which can be obtained from Hermitian metric) is closed.The complex manifold has an underlying real smooth manifold whose Riemannian metric can be found from the Hermitian metric of the corresponding complex...
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I have been using lists inside multicols for a "condensed" typesetting of lists of short items. However, I do not like what happens if a page break occurs inside, and I couldn't find a way to automatically force a page break before multicols if it cannot fit onto the current page. So I have been thinking about using so...
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In quantum field theory (e.g. lattice QED), perturbation theory can "break down" when interactions become too strong. Can something like that happen in classical non-linear optics? Can there be any combination of material (absurdly non-linear) and light (attosecond pulses, petawatt lasers, etc.) which can (somehow) be ...
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Plasma and fusion physics experts, help me with this one: Suppose we have a D-T plasma with net positive electrical charge inside a positively charged metal sphere. As the containment sphere's net positive charge increases, my ignorant intuition would expect the plasma to be compressed and its internal pressure to incr...
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Consider a horizontal long rod that is undergoing free fall. Consider the torque about an axis through the rod (perpendicular to the rod and to the direction of gravitational force), that is a little to the left of the rod's centre of mass. Clearly, there is a net torque about this axis, but we know that the horizontal...
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Is there a distinction that we make between what we call "elements" and what we call "sets" in Von Neumann type set theories? Two textbooks I have used for an introductory study of NBG both made distinctions between sets and proper classes (the prinipal primitive undefined notion being that of "class"). The distinction...
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When studying supersymmetric QFT's, it is very common to compute the moduli space of the theory by solving all F-term equation (derivatives of the superpotential). More precisely, one should also quotient by the complexified gauge group. Here are three fact that I believe to be true about moduli space and IR flow: Let ...
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I had a guess from three years ago that I couldn't prove It is impossible to find a polyhedron whose perimeter (represented by the sum of the lengths of its edges) is equal to its area (represented by the sum of the areas of its faces) and numerically equal to its volume It is easy to find a similar shape with any shap...
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The infinite square well (and variations) are some of the best-studied systems in quantum mechanics and are often used as the starting point for any quantum mechanical education, as the Schrodinger equation is easy to solve for such a system. I'm looking for specific research papers that describe experimental results t...
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I am aware that this series is incomplete, but it has a large body of existing content, and I am also aware that it is written to be "accessible to non-specialists", but that is obviously quite vague. All that really tells me is that I don't have to be a CFSG scholar, and on the other end that I can assume it's probabl...
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When a tiny spherical charged particle (having a conductive surface) moves at a relativistic speed, the Lorentz transformation for EM-fields predicts that its electric field increases at the top and bottom of the charge whether or not it has been made of something conductive, whereas the field decreases at the left- an...
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My only familiarity with topology is the basic theory of mereotopology, so apologies is this sounds strange. An open region is a region without a definite boundary--that is, there is no way to draw a boundary including only points in the region such that every point in the region is inside that boundary. I think of it ...
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I have combed through various sources on the internet and I don't have a definitive answer for the above question: The best that I can come think is the following: Because when I remove synthetic clothes, the body gets charged one way, the clothes the other way. Then as I continue the process of removing the piece of c...
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Consider two free-falling observers in the Earth's gravitational field, A and B, who meet at point C, where A orbits the Earth at a constant radius from the Earth's center, and B falls towards the Earth's center along a constant radial line: Can either detect the other accelerating locally at C? As an attempt to answer...
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I am using the word 'avatar' in my work in the sense that an avatar is the physical representation of some higher entity. We could say that a particular person, animal or object is the avatar of a deity, or that a symbol or picture is the avatar of a person, or that a player-character in a computer game is the avatar o...
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Nondeterministic refers to a system or process that does not have a single predictable outcome. In other words, when a system is nondeterministic, it means that multiple outcomes are possible for a given set of inputs or conditions. Given that it can be associated with randomness. For physics nondeterministic is the la...
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I've seen the notion of the models in the title a lot in the context of automorphic forms and representations, but I wonder if there's any nice reference for the definition of them for general reductive groups, with some motivations for their namings. I'm pretty sure that the name Whittaker model comes from the Whittak...
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I want a term for someone who generally doesn't care about their individual popularity or how other's view them and as such is willing to break social expectations about behaviors and do their own thing, even hen doing so may affect how other's view them. So something close to the phrase "Marches to their own drum", bu...
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I have some idea of what the main concepts of calculus are about but I have never actually taken a calculus class or studied myself. My general understanding is that before the concept of limits were formally defined by later mathematicians, the first people that actually invented calculus explained the idea of derivat...
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Could you simulate a Turing machine by a sequence of Turing machines each with strictly fewer states than the simulated machine? By a sequence of Turing machines I mean this: the first machine is given the input tape, then executes until it accepts, then the contents of the tape are given to the next machine in the seq...
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I recently came across some discussion on the fact that "no bueno" is not gramatically correct Spanish, and generally not a phrase Spanish-speakers use, unless they find it funny. Of course, "no bueno" is just a literal translation of the common English phrase "no good". Sometimes, the phrase appears with the implied s...
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sorry if the title seems vague. English is not my first language and I dont know what to search to find the answer to my problem. I will preface this by explaining the purpose of this question. I have a robot that I know the position of (x,y) through odomotery. and I also have an IMU that returns the robot's yaw angle ...
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I have a data set of values each with a different associated error. If I take the mean, I can use standard error propagation to calculate a much smaller error. This will therefore incorporate the individual uncertainties of each data point. However, is there a method to propagate the individual uncertainties when takin...
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What would happen to metals or ceramics (non-porous) when subjected to extremely high pressures (dozens of GPa) ? I feel like the sample will deform elastically only. So a ceramic object (think carbides) wouldn't crack. Typically, we assign a maximal compressive strength to metals and ceramics. After which, they underg...
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I'm interested in writing a document following not only the Chicago Manual of Style in principle but also very literally the style used by the University of Chicago Press in their publishing. In other words, I'm not just trying to follow the style guidelines outlined in the manual, but also directly emulating the full ...
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Suppose we have an arbitrarily well-isolated empty region which we initialize with a cold, diffuse, homogenous photon gas, such that the only energy density gradients are random thermodynamic fluctuations and the only massive particles are those that are created after initialization. Thor pokes a tiny hole in the arbit...
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I have been revising some maths and in particular I have been focusing on vector calculus. Today I have just finished looking at surface integrals. I do understand how we parametrize a surface integral starting from a region R, but I am having troubles actually understanding how these integrals are put in context when ...
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Something got messed up in my lyx settings and now the editor window previews the text in a very ugly and informal looking font. The pdf output is still the regular latex font. How can I reset the editor window font? This would probably be fixed by a complete uninstall and reinstall of lyx, but I can't figure out how t...
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My question is both naive and subtle. Naive because I don't know much more than the layman about physics and in particular quantum physics. Subtle because physics is an attempt to model the world, and as a computer scientist, with a strong interest in machine learning but also formal logic and models, a model is just t...
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I live in an arabic speaking country, and while I was sitting in a food court today, I noticed that the sound of the crowd was the same as the one I see in the stereotypical sound of the crowd. I have seen many threads discussing this on different forms, eg: Quora , reddit, Metafilter, and on this site, there is this t...
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Recently I was on an airplane on a sunny day. The sun was shining on the other side of the plane and noticed a bright patch on the ground following beside us. Eventually I noticed a dark centre to this bright patch, the plane's shadow, which became more distant as the plane descended. When the plane flew over a city ro...
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For a general linear map, there are infinitely many matrix representations. You choose a basis of the vector space, and this gives you a certain matrix for the linear map. You choose a different basis, and this gives you another matrix different from the first. For a linear map that does nothing however, we only get th...
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In quantum mechanics, unbound states will tend to spread out in space over time according to the Shrodinger equation. So it seems to me there is a degree of freedom for "wild" particles (i.e. those have not been prepared in the lab) as to how much they are spread in space and momentum. So my question is: do we have any...
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Why can't we see light from beyond the observable universe? I've done a lot of research on this and all I've found is unsatisfactory answers and straight up nonsense. Some claim that the universe "expands faster than the speed of light" beyond the observable universe. Such a claim doesn't even make sense because the un...
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Let's suppose the earth is perfect sphere and let's ignore its rotation and movement. What would happen if i would be in the center of the earth? Would the gravity be zero in any direction so i wouldn't feel any gravity force? Or would there be 'pulling' forces (of half of the gravity force on the surface) that would a...
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If I'm trying to advertise that you can scroll through this webpage to find additions that go in/on your home, would it be... "Find new additions for your home." "Find new additions to your home." Does "find for your home" technically mean that your home itself is literally looking for new additions and you're looking ...
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I was once asked the question: What French word is commonly used in English for which an English word is commonly used in French? The answer was respectively rendezvous and date, which I found very unsatisfying. So, does such a situation exist, in which a French loanword is used in English to mean something for which a...
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I am working with optically active nanomaterials (quantum dots, perovskites), that have pretty large exciton binding energies and can form multiexcitonic complexes, e.g. biexcitons, relatively easily. It has been well established that they also exhibit biexcitonic lasing/ASE under above threshold excitation, so here I ...
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Massive compact halo objects ("MACHOs") include a wide variety of hardly detectable bodies such as brown / white / black dwarfs and black holes, to name a few. If we take into account the inevitable end of all stars into either a white dwarf, a neutron star or a black hole and we compare the average lifespan of a star ...
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I have recently watched a couple of lectures in order to revise some of the notions that I will have to tackle in the coming months, and as I did so I have stumbled over something which baffled me a tad. Now, within these lectures the lecturer described a relation as being a function solely if it maps one element from ...
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According to Archimedes' principle, the buoyancy force on a submerged object is given by the product of the mass of the displace fluid and the gravitational acceleration. Effectively, it is determined by the net pressure difference of the fluid between the bottom and the top of the object, or in other words the weight ...
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I want to start learning some optimization theory (mainly to get into ML in the future but I'm also just very interested in mathematics that intersects heavily with engineering) and I would like to get some recommendations to start tackling the subject. I found two books: Bierlaire's Optimization book and Convex Optimi...
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Very roughly, dark energy tends to cause space to expand and mass tends to cause space to contract. If nothing gets in the way, the math on that contraction breaks down when it forms a black hole singularity. So the question is, can enough energy halt the contraction before it forms a singularity, but after it forms a ...
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For each segment of a piecewise Lyapunov function that exhibits asymptotic stability, we can utilize the LaSalle-Yoshizawa theorem and solve it using a differential inclusion. This allows us to merge all the piecewise Lyapunov functions and demonstrate that the entire system is asymptotically stable. Now, if each segme...
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I'm not a physicist in any way, but I'm curious enough to watch and attend some pop-science lectures. Let's imagine the following situation - there is a free-standing unbound electron. It has its wave-function describes probabilities to find it in particular position. Also there is incoming photon with a proper wave-le...
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Was all the energy that is the universe today, present at that femtosecond theory has pushed back to or was there an influx of energy for a period of time? My question was: is the big bang like a pin prick in an infinite balloon of water? Initially, you have very high pressure, then as the hole expands the pressure dro...
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I was interested in electromagnetic induction in loops, since ground loops and such tend to be a problem in electronic system engineering. To me, it seems like induction in loops may tend to cancel out. For example, if the plane of a simple wire loop (that is just a ring of wire and nothing else) is perpendicular to an...
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We, as humans, given our height and size, view the world from the same general perspective. An ant, on the other hand, will understand the same world in a completely different way, given how limited their knowledge and experiences can be. When we spend a couple seconds taking a step out onto our front yard, it might ha...
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