I'd like to keep the focus here on physics discussion, so please feel free to come with whatever questions, thoughts, and ideas you may have, however grounded or outlandish they may be! I'm also open to allowing physics comics/humor/memes, but I don't necessarily want that to be the main focus.
I'd prefer if we avoided posting pop-sci articles with ridiculous headlines, you know the ones: "New Research Suggests Some Black Holes May Actually be Quantum Tangles in the Fabric of Space-Time"
Please don't post that here. If you're not sure about an article, check if the title contains one or more of the following words: "black hole", "wormhole", or "quantum - something". That's normally a good indication that the article might be garbage.
Finally, I'm just one dude who's in the middle of writing his thesis, so if you're interested in helping moderate this community please let me know!
Remember to follow the usual rules, don't be a dick, etc
In the summer the warm exhaust from the fridge gets dumped into the kitchen along with heat from cooking. Then the cooling system has to work harder, or if there is no cooling system it just means less comfort and fans running more.
So I have to ask, why don’t refrigerators have a duct so the warm air can be vented outside in the summer?
In the winter I actually adjust the fridge temp to be colder so food lasts longer because the output is beneficial anyway.
“Cold, clean tap water is generally best suited as cleaning fluid. The cleaning effect can be enhanced by the addition of approximately 3 drops of washing-up liquid. Do not use caustic cleaners, ammonia, bleach or heavily perfumed detergents.” (emphasis mine)
I know a professional jeweler with decades experience who cleans jewelry (mostly gold) using “Mr. Clean”¹ and ammonia, diluted, in an ultrasonic tub. The cheap ultrasonic I bought for myself is not for pros - but jewelry cleaning is the advertised purpose and it has a stainless steel tub just like the pro models have.
So the question is, what’s the purpose of the ammonia avoidance guidance, and is the pro jeweler I know making a mistake by using ammonia?
UPDATE: I also have to question why the manual of my cheap domestic ultrasonic says to use cold water. Pro ultrasonics have built-in
I was inspired by someone's username and found this video. A video much like this one was one of the things that got me into studying physics to begin with over a decade ago.
The characteristic blue glow is caused by Cherenkov radiation, which is analogous to a sonic boom, but instead of a jet breaking the sound barrier, it's charged particles moving faster than the phase velocity of light in a medium (normally water).
Let me preface this by saying I am not at all well versed in QM, but I've just recently finished a course that took us through most of Griffiths and I have some thoughts.
The thing that blows me away the most about QM isn't necessarily all the standard "weirdness", like tunneling and superposition and whatever, but rather that all of this weirdness can be accurately described by (mostly) pre-existing mathematics. Linear algebra was a growing, but already established field, and the concept of abstract linear vector spaces, and later Hilbert space, came just before and evolved alongside QM.
The fact that we discovered a mathematical language before finding out what that language could describe just blows my mind. I understand this isn't the first time the maths came before the physics, but considering how groundbreaking and unintuitive the theory is I think that fact is quite exceptional. Even more so is that we can use this mathematical formalism to *derive physically observable ph