Recent content by papernuke

If they're recycled paper, why are there so many colored spots? Is there really that much colored paper being recycled?

So I was playing with a USB microscope at my desk, and I just viewed a Subway napkin with it. Attached is the picture I saw at ~75x magnification There's dots of all sorts of colors.. yellow, light blue, green, red.. even pink. Does anyone know what the colored dots might be? There's a...

Thank you both for the explanations! I understand it now

Assume there's a person standing at the pole of the earth. When the Earth rotates, he/she has no tangential velocity because the person is at the pole. Now if the person were to take a trip by plane and land at the equator, the person would now have a fairly large velocity because the...

So in terms of the energy levels, is it like simply having the new electron start at n=infinity or some other high n and undergoes transitions down? And could you please explain this bit again in simpler terms?

I don't know the process in which a free electron finds its way back down to the ground state of a hydrogen ion and thus forming a neutral hydrogen atom. I have tried my hand at Googling the topic, but I can't seem to find any detailed websites about the electron-ion recombination for...

Oh yeah, makes sense. Thanks!

Hydrogen gas is supposed to be colorless, but what causes the murky grey-white color of the hydrogen gas produced in this reaction? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQz5YEsx7Fo&feature=related skip to 00:30

Wait, the absorption spectrum of what is similar to the H atomic emission spectrum?

I was under the impression that by the time plasma had formed, nearly all of the H-H bonds would have been broken already because of its low bond energy (only like 4.5eV). The first excitation of atomic H takes 10.2eV (n=1 to 2) Is that right or wrong?

If a hydrogen spectrum tube is filled with H2 gas and powered on, why do online sources show the tube emitting the spectrum of atomic single H hydrogen (the spectrum defined by the Rydberg formula)? Why not the H2 spectrum? For example, here: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/hframe.html

I was reading the wikipedia page on laser light, and on a linked article, I saw this image: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/Flickr_-_Israel_Defense_Forces_-_Nachal_Brigade_Reconnaissance_Battalion_in_%22Commando%22_Training_%282%29.jpg What is causing those red specks to...

But when a volume of helium is released into the open, all of it is pushed up by the buoyancy of the surrounding air. And in that case, only helium rises, no oxygen or nitrogen mixes with the helium and rises with it. Wouldn't the same happen in the smaller container? The 95% helium would be...

Is helium miscible with O2, N2 or any of the other gases in air? If a container were filled with 95% helium and 5% O2, would the O2 gas settle to the very bottom of the container, leaving very pure helium gas at the top?

But outside of any given pair of charged plates, Gauss' law shows that the electric field should be zero (or near zero), because Qenclosed = (charge on + plate)+(charge on - plate) = 0 So outside of a pair of plates, the electron should feel no forces from that pair