Seemingly trivial things that intrigue you
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I imagine Boomers are getting a bit tired of Millennials - walking around, acting like they rent the place.
"I spent most of my money on birds, booze and fast cars: the rest of it I just squandered." [George Best]1 -
Give it time. You are ahead of the curve as I said.
The above may be fact, or fiction, I may be serious, I may be jesting.
I am not sure. You have no chance.Veronese68 wrote:PB is the most sensible person on here.0 -
I think it's broader than that, suspect I've been shoehorned in there.
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In which case it's everyone who disagrees with Rick. Safety in numbers I guess 😀
"I spent most of my money on birds, booze and fast cars: the rest of it I just squandered." [George Best]0 -
What causes the heat - electrons moving due to an old balance of charge bumping into the metal ions causing them to vibrate more
What is heat - kinetic energy of particles moving or vibrating. More movement more heat (and vice versa)
We're in danger of confusing passion with incompetence
- @ddraver0 -
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No, that's internal energy.
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Yup. Still inspired by the way he thought about science and learning stuff - that boundless enthusiasm for finding stuff out then trying to find ways to explain it using metaphor and analogies. And I like all his thoughts about embracing doubt and the necessity of getting things wrong if we're going to learn new things.
I saw those two programmes (Horizon?) he did back in the 80's, I think, and the impression he made on me was profound. Virtually every utterance he made was quotable.
Quite apart from that, I think he was quite good at physics too.
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Obviously Google/Twitter is listening to me on CS.
That's actually something that I think is true. I have fun asking people doing PhD's in arcane subjects to explain their research in terms that a person who makes music by pressing just three buttons can understand. The clarity and the simplicity of the language they use to explain it usually tells you how well they have grasped what they are doing.
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Einstein said something similar about explaining things to a child.
He also liked cats.
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I've always been wary of people giving convoluted answers using larger than necessary words.
The above may be fact, or fiction, I may be serious, I may be jesting.
I am not sure. You have no chance.Veronese68 wrote:PB is the most sensible person on here.0 -
For those who don't get the adapter this will do your noggins in. If you leave a solar panel in the sun not connected, where is all the electric going?
No Google cheating, just sit back and wonder at the supercalifragilisticexpialidociousness.
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In a lot of cases it's an occupational hazard, like acronyms. A particular word has a particular meaning, and some other word or words doesn't quite mean the same thing. And scientists, doctors and lawyers can often be predisposed to unnecessary precision.
Doing science for the masses (or law or medicine, or engineering, whatever) is a real skill that not many have. Myself included.
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It is getting constantly absorbed and re-emitted, I reckon. Based entirely on memory I promise, solar panels work by absorbing light, causing electrons to move from one pond to a pond higher up (which are called bands, and have different energies). Like height with water correlates to pressure, energy for electrons correlates to voltage. When a solar panel is connected, that voltage tldrives a current. When they aren't, the electrons drop back to the lower level of their own volition, a bit like water reaching it's own level, and spits out a parcel of energy.
You are going to ask why they don't glow now aren't you. I don't know, because I've forgotten whether there are any mechanisms that induce the electrons to drop back down, but working non googling assumption is that there is no reason for the amount of energy to be the same. Could well be that the lowest resistance is between the bottom of one pond and the surface of the other, so that the light is not visible.
Any other takers?
EDIT: shouldn't have used the word resistance, because it can be confused with electrical resistance. the hazards to trying not to be technical. I meant the highest probability energy transitions. The electrons most likely to drop down....
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Indeed. There's useful jargon for talking to others in the same line of research/work - there's no point in spelling out complex concepts every time (indeed, compelling reasons not to). There's also the essential goal of wrapping your head round complex concepts well enough that the jargon allows you to juggle multiple complex concepts and work out how they are related/interact. I'm fairly certain that Feynman didn't spend his time working on the development of the atomic bomb speaking in simplified analogies with colleagues.
Feynman's skill as a communicator/teacher was in seeing the world through the eyes of ordinary people who take a fascination with the world around them but who don't have specialist knowledge or vocabulary, such as his father. The books I enjoy the most are ones that challenge me with a concept that I've not considered before, but then have a helpful "Think of it like this: .... " relating it back to something(s) I'm more likely to have observed. I still might not get it, but at least they've tried.
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Fine if you are speaking to someone in the field, not so good with the masses.
Doctors have to be precise, but they also have to explain at a level that the patient understands.
The above may be fact, or fiction, I may be serious, I may be jesting.
I am not sure. You have no chance.Veronese68 wrote:PB is the most sensible person on here.0 -
I would agree with you. I expect that the photon of energy emitted does not have a wavelength in the visible light range. I suspect it's Infra red.
There is an issue with this particular topic though which is that our usual language and out bodies are not scientifically accurate.
We don't touch a hot pan and feel atoms jiggling more, we feel HOT!!!!. Likewise with cold we don't feel energy transfering from our hand to the ice cube we feel and use language that says cold is coming into our hand which is scientifically wrong.
We're in danger of confusing passion with incompetence
- @ddraver0 -
Yup. Heat is a flow of energy, and our perception of temperature is related to the direction and rate of heat flow. Temperature, as such, is a gauge of total internal energy in a system.
I'm trying to adopt my inner Feynman and come up with a good analogy. I suppose it would be judging the depth of a dammed lake by the rate at which water flows out of it. It is a reasonable gauge, but doesn't account for the width of the pipe.
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I’d argue physics is more easily predisposed for that kind of explanation because it’s always tangible in some way.
The specifics of biology can get very tricky to follow as a n00b as there is so much technical knowledge required.
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Quite the opposite. You can explain a lot of biology with a good set of rexel colouring pencils. Have a stab at wave particle duality using a crayon.
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haha. Sometimes light/electromagnetic energy it acts like a wave. Sometimes it acts like a particle, isn’t that the basic premise?
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Sort of. And that it depends on the method of measurement and scale.
Fwiw those pictures are worse than useless. For one thing they suggest electrons are particles. Which they are. Or aren't. Depending on your perspective. One of the "waves" is an offensive combination of a wave and a probability distribution. Utterly uninformative.
And no, I can't explain it. It always did my head in, which means I am among the majority of moderately bright people just about smart enough to know they only "understand" by wrote.
I came away from my studies considering that the quantum world is the correct one, and that we see the macroscopic sum of all of the probabilies summed over time as particles.
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Incidentally, depending on which version of the atom you happen to be using, we regard the photoelectric effect as particles of light changing the energy level of electrons - described by their wave functions. i.e. more or less the opposite 9f that picture.
It was actually really hard but beautiful to study. I really.miss feeling like I understood it.
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One of the parents of one of my pupils is a professor of "quantum systems and nanomaterials". I must ask him to explain it to me... and maybe do some drawings in crayon.
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Nanomaterials irritates me. It means materials, but zoomed in. Nanochemistry was just a rebranding.
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Come to think of it, quantum systems is equally irritating. It'll be a chair created pursuant to some EPSRC funding. Having applied for a job there once, and interacted with them from the other side of the fence, I know the organisation suffers from FOMO and desperately follows trends.
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Seems like you're right about EPSRC funding, looking at the 'team page'.
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