Recent content by Tom MS

Say you had two isolated hydrogen atoms. Because of the spherical distribution of electronic charge on each hydrogen and the net charge of 0 outside each atom, wouldn't Gauss's law dictate a 0 net electric field outside each atom? If this is the case, why does diatomic hydrogen so readily form...

Since, under rayleigh's criterion, the angular resolution is dependent on the wavelength of light, wouldn't blue light be more sharply focused by our eyes?

Homework Statement A fish watcher at point P watches a fish through a glass wall of a fish tank. The watcher is level with the fish; the index of refraction of the glass is 8/5, and that of the water is 4/3. The distances are d1=8.0 cm, d2=3.0 cm, and d3=6.8 cm (a) To the fish, how far away...

Wikipedia seems to think that a binary system is defined by a single semi-major axis, but I've seen other sources such as hyperphysics that define it using two semi-major axes. Is the semi-major axis of the system simply the average of the two?

You really should be right. Can you make sure you wrote it down correctly?

The friction will be directly opposite mgsinθ if the car is going slow enough, but it will be the other way if the object is going fast enough. Therefore, the equation depends on which way the car is slipping. If it is in perfect equilibrium, then mgsinθ and friction cancel out and you're left...

The wording is a bit wonky, but because of the solution, the wording can be interpreted as: One wavelength of a wave goes by a point every second (because one wavelength is the distance between two crests). Thus, the period is one second and the speed can be determined by dividing the wavelength...

Could you please give a source I could look at or an explanation as to why this is true and why my way of thinking about it isn't adequate?

I'm trying to get an understanding of the Coriolis effect, and I understand it when the wind moves longitudinally (North-South). Basically, the wind has a certain horizontal component of its velocity due to the rotation of the Earth, and as it moves North or South the rotation of the Earth...

Yes yes yes. It slows down absolutely. There have been experiments to make it slow down more. Measurements such as a Planck length assume light going through a vacuum. Everything points to the fact that light slows down. Saying "The speed of light is constant" simply means that as an object...

To throw a rock requires applying force over a distance, or work, on the rock. Work is the dot product of force and displacement. There is no extra force due to gravity horizontally therefore the dot product does not vary with gravity. Therefore, both use the same force (assuming it takes the...

My bad. A better explanation would be that a measure of tipiness is the angular acceleration, which is basically how fast the speed of angular movement changes. This value can be related by: \alpha = \frac {\tau} {I} In English, the above equation means the angular acceleration equals the torque...

I wouldn't think it would matter because the torque is proportional to the radius from the pivot point AND the sine of the angle. If the center of mass was higher, the radius would increase but the angle would decrease. "Tippy", of course, is a relative term that I suspect in this case describes...

Beam standard atomic clocks work by changing the magnetic state of a cesium atom by applying a microwave frequency that matches the resonant frequency of a cesium atom. What is this resonant frequency of the atom in terms of actual events that occur on the atomic level...

I suppose if you dropped the clothes into a separate airtight chamber below the original chamber and then separated the two before pushing the clothes out, it could remove most of the water. Of course, if any pockets of water vapor were in the clothes, that would pose a problem, so knocking the...