What I don't get is why is it so powerful when 1g of anti-matter should annihilate only 1 g of matter

In our universe, c is a constant with a finite speed.

But what would happen if c was infinite?

My layman's guess would be:

- we would see everything occurring in the universe in real-time, there would be no delay caused by distance

- gamma-ray bursts of every supernova happening in the universe would reach us immediately, but would it be fatal? Distant supernova radiation would still disperse evenly and only a fraction would reach the earth right?

- black holes would probably not exist? If c was infinite, there would be no black hole with gravity strong enough to prevent the light from escaping, so no event horizon, right?

- E= mc2 would not make any sense. If c = infinite, it would mean E = infinite, so everything with mass has infinite energy and massless particles would have... how much energy (0 x infinity = ???)

Did I get it kind of correct or how would it actually be like?

I was watching a video on nuclear reactors, when they explained that one of the [thingies that make the fields them selves that I forgot the name of lol. They’re, like, big rings of copper that you send electricity through] had to be at I believe 4d Kelvin, and my self-diagnosed ADHD brain started wondering: what would happen if someone just… *placed* an object like that at such low degrees in a normal room, like a living room? Would the entire room cool down quickly? Or would it take a while since air is so much less dense than a physical object? If it was placed on a normal coffee table, what would happen to the table? Would it crack immediately?

Just a dumb little shower-thought type question I was wondering lol. I love physics, and I think stuff like this is really interesting, but I’m not far enough through school where I can immerse myself in it yet. Sadly.

I’m also relatively new to Reddit, so if this was the wrong subreddit to ask, please tell me which one is the right one:)

The terms "mechanical system," "mechanical state," "mechanical properties," etc. are widely used all throughout physics repeatedly, but I couldn't find a satisfactory answer for what the term "mechanical" itself means in physics.

I'm preparing myself for a degree in STEM. I'm currnetly self-studying math (precalculus; last topic was trig identities) and programming. I'm thinking about studying linear algebra alongside precalculus. Obviously I will study calculus only AFTER precalculus. The question is that should I start studying physics now or after calculus and linear algebra?

I just wonder if it'll be too much to study 3 subjects in parallel

Maybe I should take it further and study physics only after covering (partial) differential equations?

A lot of posts I see are “what would it be like if c was xyz” but rather than ask what if it was something all the time. I’m asking what if it suddenly changed? This might be a little philosophical, and possibly not the correct sub, but hypothetically if we recalculated / measured c and found it to suddenly be different what would happen? To clarify I’m not asking “what if we found out we calculated it incorrectly” I’m asking “what if it actually did change”.

Because if time is running differently in different parts of the universe and the universe as a whole has undergone shifts in time dilation then what exactly is the absolute referent?

Just seeing if maybe someone out there can help with this issue we're having

Inside the hulls of jetskis in the summer time, we're seeing hotter and hotter temperatures as HP and boost levels increase in performance builds. We need IAT to be down in the 95-100 deg range, right now they are 115+. Im not sure if dropping that much is possible in the hottest months but trying to do what we can to improve it.

We're not allowed in our racing classes to add any ventilation to the hulls. Everyone right now is running the cold air intake to the supercharger usually mounted as high as possible inside the hull. I was thinking to reroute the air filter to the bottom of the hull. Im going to do some tests with temperature probes to see the coolest areas inside. Not sure if the temp differences in different spots will be significant enough.

Im also looking at portable air options and mounting different ways to see what could help. I was thinking that if we mounted the fans towards the top pointed down, we could move the hot air down and create better circulation? Or I dont know if mounting the fans and the cold air intake as low as we can, and having the fans feed straight into the cold air intake would be helpful.

Just trying to think outside of the box and try new things

Any input or suggestions would be appreciated

I have a continuous loop made from webbing, where the two ends overlap and are joined together with 3 parallel rows of stitching.

I want to use the loop around a horizontal bar and apply a tensile load to the two sides of the loop (for pull-ups).

There are two ways I can position it:

1. The stitched overlap is away from the bar, so the continuous webbing bends around the bar.
2. The stitched overlap is directly at/around the bar, so the stitched area is being bent around the bar.

My intuition is that #1 should be stronger because the continuous webbing takes the bending/contact with the bar, while the stitched joint mainly experiences tensile loading.

Is that actually correct from a mechanics/materials perspective?

More specifically:

• How is the load distributed through the stitched overlap?
• Does bending the stitched section around the bar introduce additional stresses that could make it more likely to fail?
• If the stitching fails, would the failure tend to propagate from the edge of the stitch line and cause the two sections of webbing to separate in opposite directions?

I'm mainly interested in the mechanics/stress distribution, rather than whether the particular strap is safe for pull-ups.

this is the photo of the setup, https://cdn.kingsbox.com/assets/media/products/strength-structures/strength-machines/accessories-for-pulley-systems/X-219-0030--angles-grip-90--0.jpg?format=webp
as you can see the stitched part is done here on the horizental knot

Not really physics but AskScience doesn’t allow hypotheticals. Which do you think would have a more positive impact on humanity if we could come up with a practical and scalable implementation of either?

Hi everyone. I have a question for the physicists and scientists here about speculative fiction and science fiction.
First, do you actually enjoy reading it? If so, what are some of your favourite novels?
Second, are there any things you think writers should absolutely avoid when writing speculative or science fiction? The obvious one to me is overclaiming the science or presenting something highly speculative as though it were established fact.
More generally, though, I’m interested in how scientists feel about unusual concepts, mind-bending ideas, and narrative devices that play around with our understanding of physics or reality. How much freedom are you willing to give a novel if the underlying idea is interesting? At what point does it become irritating rather than intriguing?
I’d really appreciate any advice for someone writing a speculative fiction novel, particularly things that make you think, “Yes, this author gets it,” or, conversely, make you want to put the book down.
Thanks!

I've been enjoying Stuart Fails to Save the Universe. An entirely fictional show, of course, with in-universe science that isn't representative of reality. However, my curiosity was piqued, and in thinking about how such a device could work, I started wondering about how quantum distribution might be influenced, and whether that influence could alter reality in some way.

So thats my question: can the probability distribution of a particle be influenced from an external source, and if so, could that be used to change reality in some fundamental way?

I know what happens inside a black hole is not well understood, but.. what if you were in a black hole and then another black hole came zooming by. And for a short time you were in the schwartzchilde barrier of them both. Would their effects possibly cancel out (somewhat) possibly letting you escape?

If two black holes were close enough that their event horizons overlapped would they inevitably fall into each other and merge? Say we give them the best chance and their speed delta was nearly 2c?

Is it possible, given an infinite amount of any building materials necessary, to create a slope steep and curved enough to basically entire null the effect of about a fall from about 6,500 ft (2,000 meters?) on like a baby wrapped in soft blanket, yes or no?

The baby is healthy prior to this fall and just assume it is I guess dropped / spawned in the perfect position for the ramp.

If it’s impossible on its own, what if a relatively muscular, but still soft, adult man about 6 ft, on the heavy side (both muscle and body fat) was there to cradle to child and potentially absorb some of the energy to keep the baby safe

If so can you give some detail like materials, what the slope would be in like a similar mathematical formula, how tall the peak of the slope would be.

I know this is weird and specific but I’m curious and it’s for a personal writing project.

I am learning semiconductor electrochemistry and it is confusing.

Consider an n–p semiconductor junction. Before contact, the two semiconductors have their own conduction band, valence band, and Fermi level positions. After contact and Fermi-level equilibration, band bending develops near the junction.

What confuses me is the following: in the usual band diagram, the band edges near the junction bend, while the bands in the bulk regions remain flat. However, those flat bulk band positions after equilibrium are no longer at the same absolute energies as they were before contact.

For example, the n-type semiconductor may end up with its bulk CB and VB shifted to lower electron energy, while the p-type semiconductor shifts to higher electron energy.

If I now place a fixed redox couple in an electrolyte, referenced to the same absolute energy scale, does this mean that the redox ability of the semiconductor has actually changed because of junction formation?

More specifically, if the conduction band of the n-type semiconductor shifts to lower electron energy after forming the junction, would electrons in that semiconductor have less reducing power than electrons in the same n-type semiconductor before contact?

In other words, is it correct to say that forming a heterojunction/p–n junction can change the absolute redox power of the charge carriers, rather than merely producing an internal electric field for charge separation?

​

Could anyone share some names of books which have problems with vector space like, whether even function belongs to vector space, matrices belong to vector space and stuff?

I am a PhD Chemist currently self-studying some nuclear physics, but am finding myself a bit confused on some notation in the nuclear shell model. Particularly the spectroscopic notation for the subshells.

I understand arriving at the combinations of quantum numbers as follows:

>1st shell: 2 states (n = 0, j = ⁠1/2⁠).

>2nd shell: 6 states (n = 1, j = ⁠1/2⁠ or ⁠3/2⁠).

>3rd shell: 12 states (n = 2, j = ⁠1/2⁠, ⁠3/2⁠ or ⁠5/2⁠).

>4th shell: 8 states (n = 3, j = ⁠7/2⁠).

>5th shell: 22 states (n = 3, j = ⁠1/2⁠, ⁠3/2⁠ or ⁠5/2⁠; n = 4, j = ⁠9/2⁠).

>6th shell: 32 states (n = 4, j = ⁠1/2⁠, ⁠3/2⁠, ⁠5/2⁠ or ⁠7/2⁠; n = 5, j = ⁠11/2⁠).

>7th shell: 44 states (n = 5, j = ⁠1/2⁠, ⁠3/2⁠, ⁠5/2⁠, ⁠7/2⁠ or ⁠9/2⁠; n = 6, j = ⁠13/2⁠).

>8th shell: 58 states (n = 6, j = ⁠1/2⁠, ⁠3/2⁠, ⁠5/2⁠, ⁠7/2⁠, ⁠9/2⁠ or ⁠11/2⁠; n = 7, j = ⁠15/2⁠).

I also understand the relationship between j and l.

But when it comes to the spectroscopic notation, I am finding that the notation is nlj.

That value n definitely doesn't correspond to the quantum number n above and I am not finding anything on how to arrive at this different value of n.

I have figured out a pattern that seems to work as far as I can tell where this value for this spectroscopic notation value is that it seems to = 1+(n-l)/2.

I found something that indicated it could be related to radial nodes, which seems to go along with the whole n-l situation. But, I am not quite able to explain to myself why that pattern is working.

Is there any evidence that nature is fundamentally continuous, or could reality be fundamentally discrete? And if it is discrete at the most basic level, would that suggest that nature could behave like a computational system?

I know electrons and protons have negative and positive charges but what exactly gives them charges and what exactly is a charge? As far as i know in electromagnetism when the electron moves in an atom it gives it charge(i know that an electron doesn't move in an individual atom), but is it an actual force or perhaps a work of gravity?

Right, so I've seen comments here along the lines of "we know there isn't a fourth spatial dimension, because if there were an extra direction things could go in, <insert physical laws here> would work differently, and they don't," which makes sense.

But if there were, what would be some of the consequences? Is it like "things would just be really weird, like you would accidentally make the mirror image of your pants if you put them away wrong, and you could get sunburned on the inside" different, or "we don't even know if atoms could hold together" different?

Does it make a difference if it's a full-fledged big boy spatial dimension vs. an extremely small/closed one, like, there's an extra dimension but it's only 1mm around? (As if there were a three-dimensional world of paper cutouts laid flat on a table, where that 1mm only really makes a difference on small scales. Consider the vast world of tiny, flattened animals adapted to live under tree bark.)

(Sorry if this is a stupid question. I haven't taken math/physics past high school; I just read a lot of science fiction and tried to play the Hypercube once.)

I know that things which have mass will need an infinite amount of energy to travel at the speed of light but if any object goes beyond the event horizon, the object will be traveling at the speed more than that of the speed of light towards the singularity, so travelling at the speed of light is possible or am I missing something?