Viewing profile — contact_fusion

My suspicion is that you are thinking of the tool VisIt ( https://wci.llnl.gov/simulation/computer-codes/visit/ ). VisIt vs yt has some tradeoffs, but by and large it is very usefu…

It's already been said that, essentially, most PhD graduates are in a state of delusion - the truth is that nobody would make a rational decision to become an adjunct. This is very…

No, graduate students in general have no leverage over their advisors. A single word from your advisor and you're out of the field. There is little incentive to root out professors…

Liquefaction has nothing to do with triboelectricity. The article has a pretty good description of how liquefaction proceeds: higher pressure -> water present in material reduces c…

Keep in mind that you are viewing the orbit in projection. The axes are simply the angular offset from the pointing. Before I give away the punchline, try to imagine the orbit in a…

The sound wave is not a "by-product." It is precisely the phenomenon you are describing. And while we are discussing equations and distribution functions, you might as well get the…

But a more complete notion of "object" isn't what solved the problem. Much of what constituted physics prior to the advances by Galileo and Newton (and many others) was essentially…

I wouldn't say that general relativity suggests that gravity is an "ambient side effect" of material presence. It means precisely that the geometry of spacetime is determined by th…

It may seem obvious to our modern eyes, but the notion that objects of different mass fall at the same rate is not at all obvious outside of the framework of physics that Galileo h…

High energy density systems are quite hard to develop an intuition for. While average kinetic energy is one way to think about temperature, think about it instead in terms of the M…

Other replies have explained that the ions and electrons can be at different temperatures, and that is of course true. I can offer some more explanation why. While you have linked …

It sounds like you have a particular viewpoint - atheistic ethical relativism. I'm sure you can appreciate that the existence of god and the existence of universal ethics are two s…

Feynman lectures are excellent for physical intuition but if someone doesn't have a few years of practice with physics it will be difficult to get much out of it. Feynman also does…

I know this may be perceived as nitpicking, but I am generally annoyed whenever the reproducibility/reliability crisis is referred to as a problem in science, writ large, rather th…

Your assumption is frankly incorrect. Physics is generally expressed in terms of differential equations. This is not due to their analytical tractability - as anyone who has attemp…

While I sympathize with your sentiment - indeed much research is done that is incremental, not groundbreaking - your comment does not accurately describe academic research. Full-ti…

Nuclear fusion is nuclear power.

Lasers are still subject to the diffraction limit, regardless of the quality of focus. We can examine this limit in the context of delivering energy to a remote object. This analys…

I think you're definitely right. Most programs out there are not worth paying anything for in the first place, much less $25,000 a year. The problem, at least in my diagnosis, is t…

The article referenced in that piece is available here, from the arxiv: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1603.07224.pdf The article has been up for some time, but has just now been published …

Fusion research is actually very well funded. It doesn't seem that way because nearly all news stories about fusion are about the Q factor of the latest shot or experiment was. (Q …

"Millimeter" refers to the wavelength of light. "Continuum" is a shorthand that in this context refers to thermal emission. All matter emits thermal radiation. The spectral energy …

I gently disagree that this is a skewed definition. By convention, a "resolved" image of an object implies an extremely high quality measurement. On the other hand, we can resolve …

That image is quite stunning. As the 2008 press release [1] states, this image was one of the first successes at direct imaging an exoplanet. It raised some interesting questions, …