Ask Your Resident Physicist Questions

-Anything with chocolate, frankly.

-I'm a picky eater, so I prefer to stick with what I know I like.

 

I watched someone blow up a capacitor in my electronics class today. While not particularly weird, it's the best I can come up with.

 

Hm... There are a handful of things in calculus that I originally thought "Why would I ever need this?" when I learned about them. Those things would later be frequently used in several of my physics courses.

Well, I'd find some Valyrian steel, hunker down somewhere, and wait for-
Wait, wrong winter.
As a kid in college, I try to stockpile more food in my room than usual, since walking through the bitter cold to get food can be too arduous at times. I also try to stay in my room as much as possible.

 

-Hm... I left my Pearl cartridge out and my dog chewed it up. I was heartbroken, since I loved that game, but it was a convenient excuse to get Platinum, a game I would pour nearly 500 hours into.

-Anything brass, though I favor the trumpet since that's what I play

-Oh, undoubtedly. At the sane time, though, I need to know more.

 

-Eh, I don't get that many, it seems.
-The closest I got to being a mod here was being MOTM shortly after I joined. That was a few years ago. Technically, I haven't been a mod.

-The beauty of physics is that it applies to everything. Everything is governed by the laws of physics, which means everything can be broken down and explained through those laws. We may not have the framework to truly do that yet - there are many mysteries to solve and connections to be made - but when we do, the Universe will literally be at our fingertips.
-Probably something with computer science. I'm pretty decent with coding, and it's a booming industry. It's actually my fallback plan if my ideal situation doesn't work out.
-Fairy. I completely understand why they were added to the game, but that doesn't lessen my disdain for them. Dragon happens to be my favorite type, so a type that directly counters them is an not too high on my list of friends. The only good Fairies are Mimikyu and the Tapus.

 

Usually, no, I don't. I'm the kind of guy who likes to think things through before committing to them.

From the brief bit of searching I did, in the purely mathematical world, it actually is. Because the reasoning for it is similar to how I'd justify it, I'll explain it my way (which is a bit difficult without a picture to show what I'm talking about).
Instead of simple parallel lines, imagine parallel ray of light. Normally, because they're parallel, they would never intersect. However, thanks to Einstein, we know that the fabric (and therefore the geometry) of space itself is flexible and can be distorted by massive objects like planets and stars. Because these objects have mass, they exert a gravitational force, which curves the space around them. When objects traveling through space meet that curve, they will follow that curve. Light is no exception to this. (This, by the way, is exactly how Einstein proved that space can curve) So, if one of our rays of light passes near a star, it will curve, and if the star in the right place, it will curve into the other ray of light. The ray itself didn't change, but the space it traveled through did.
If that doesn't make a lot of sense to you, I completely understand. A lot of the things Einstein discovered and studied are not intuitive at all.

 

You could interpret it as a physical representation of non-Euclidean geometry, but I would ask someobe who's more math-savvy than me. I admit, I'm not the best at abstract math stuff.

 

I think it's a simple case of Einstein creating something new without knowing the whole picture. The cosmological constant was generated before Hubble's observations of an expanding Universe. The mindset at the time was that the Universe was a static, constant machine, a thing with perfect behavior. Einstein probably wanted to prove that mindset mathematically. When the technology came around to prove it with observations, however, that answer was found to be inaccurate.
He may be right after all, though, as ongoing research is gathering evidence that successfully the value of the cosmological constant is not 0.