Recent content by Schnellmann

Seems a little harsh. The videos I’ve been watching are by scientists working in the field eg Don Lincoln from Fermilab not just random bods posting fake science from their shed. Learning from textbooks would be a challenge as I haven’t done any advanced maths in 35 years so would need to...

I’ve watched a few videos recently that explained that gravity is not a force rather it is caused by time dilation because clocks tick slower closer to mass. Objects will follow a geodesic through spacetime and require a force to move them away from a geodesic - so the surface of the Earth is...

your dictionary may tell you a pillion is a passenger seat but bikers (at least in the UK) also refer it to the person sitting on the seat.

Pillion = passenger Football on the left

I’m not sure if this is the best place for this question but will go ahead anyway. On another forum a user described something he claimed happened whilst riding his motorbike. He said that he was riding along a road and someone kicked a football into his path. The motorbike apparently went over...

The universe is currently expanding but I understand it might contract in the future (towards a Big Crunch). Question relates to that scenario.

My somewhat ropey understanding of entropy is that it is a measure of order/disorder and that in a closed system entropy always increases. Was discussing it with my teenage daughter. Whilst trying to convey my limited understanding it struck me that if the universe is contracting (we had also...

Even if their technology and knowledge is much more advanced than ours they still face the problems of vast distances, time necessary to travel those distances and the energy required to accelerate and decelerate a spaceship. Those problems get wished away in Sci Fi with warp drives or just...

Much as I would like to believe that instellar travel is possible and that we will be visited by ET I think the distances involved are just too far for living beings. Despite the incredible technological advances of the last fifty years the reality is that those advances have been predominantly...

Yes this is exactly what I was asking

This is what I've suspected. So our only realistic chance of picking up a signal is if aliens are deliberately beaming a powerful signal at stars they think could have planets that are home to civilisations. So absence of signals could also be a deliberate policy of non communication.

So you are saying that aliens would be able to detect our signals at 100 light years?

To date we have not picked up any signals from aliens. Some take this as a sign that we are alone in the universe or that intelligent life and culture, if it exists elsewhere, is rare. What I am not clear on is what we are expecting to find. Reversing the argument, if aliens were searching...

Homework Statement I was doing some multiple choice questions. One question was: "Which of the expressions below has the largest value for 0 < x < 1 The two relevant options (dismissing those obviously wrong) were: x-1 (can't do superscript on my iPhone - that should read X to the power of...

Is the rate of radioactive decay fixed or does the environment have any impact eg would the rate of decay be the same in a low or very high gravitational field (in both cases measured from the viewpoint of the radioactive material)?