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sineral Member Profile Member Since: 2006-07-24 Last Power Points used: never • Available: now Max Power Points: 1 • Get More Power Points Now Comments 1 |
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Brain Videos Submitted by sineral
In reply to this comment by sineral:
rottenseed is being pedantic
If we have two horses, A and B, in a race, where A is faster but currently behind B, A will eventually pass B and when it does we could say A "overcame" B. Or, if we have two piles of sand, one of a fixed size and the other constantly increasing in size but currently smaller than the first, when it eventually becomes the larger of the two we could say it "overcame" the first pile.
Gravity imparts an acceleration on the anvil. Acceleration summed over time gives a velocity. We could break the anvil's velocity into a pair of components such as initial velocity vs velocity changes during the evolution of the system, or put more simply as gunpowder vs gravity. As time moves forward, the velocity under the gunpowder column is constant, but the velocity under the gravity column is steadily adding up. When the gravity and gunpowder components of the velocity are equal, the anvil has stopped moving. When the gravity component is greater, the anvil has switched directions. To say gravity "overcame" it seems adequately accurate for casual conversation and, in fact, more descriptive than you would expect from most people in casual conversation. My impression when I heard him say that was that he was actually familiar when the relevant equations.
In reply to this comment by sineral:
I haven't read exactly what the video is suppose to be, but I'll do some explaining and make a guess.
You can't see electrons, period. Of all the different kinds of particles in the universe, the human eye evolved to detect just one kind: the photon. You see photons by them passing through the optics in the front of your eye, impacting chemicals in the back of the eye and thus setting off chemical reactions that eventually lead to nerve impulses. The eye as a whole extracts information from photons that the brain then processes to create the imagery we see. "Seeing" imagery is just thinking, no different than doing a math problem in your head. We don't think of it as thinking because it is so vivid and automatic(to our consciousness), but thats just due to all the resources evolution put into developing the ability.
Photons interact with electrons, so you could see photons that electrons give off(in fact, this is what happens with basically every thing you see). An electron in motion, giving off photons at a fast enough rate, could then be seen as a featureless line tracing the path of the electron, but that is the limit of the imagery you could see. Individual electrons can not be percieved as objects with size or shape because of how photons interact with them. With an apple, photons leave the apple from different points on its surface, entering the surface of the eye at different points at different angles, thus conveying information about the shape of the apple; the apple has a size, shape, and surface exactly because it's made of multiple particles spread over different locations.
Worse, electrons can't be made to hold still, and it's impossible to tell exactly where they are due to quantum mechanics. To make a guess at what we're seeing in the video: it's a computer generated map of the wave function of the electron, with each speck of that blue fuzziness being a possible location of the electron. The average location of the specks oscillates up and down as the electron "circles" the atom(electrons don't really do that, but I've typed enough already).