There are two problems with this. First what happens if the components are resistors? Is this some new rule you have invented that only applies to capacitors while resistors in the exact same arrangement will not be connected in parallel just because they cannot generate their own EMF? Next this argument seems to distinguish whether something is in parallel or series based on the addition of two unconnected wires. If I remove those two, unconnected wires are you trying to tell me that this will convert the connection from parallel to series? Really? If A and B are connected to some external circuit with a current flowing through it then you have a parallel connection. If that circuit is removed then the circuit becomes the capacitor loop and that's a simple series loop - two unconnected wires with no current in them make no difference.

No, it only behaves that way relative to an external circuit applying a pd between A and B. If A and B are disconnected then one capacitor can be driving a current around that, now series, loop and charging the other and good luck describing that circuit with a single capacitor.

Yes, when the switch is closed those capacitors are connected in parallel to the battery. When the switch is open the battery is no longer part of a circuit and the capacitors are connected in series with each other because now any current will have to flow around the capacitor loop. Simply adding superfluous, unconnected components to a simple series loop does not convert it into a parallel connection.

Yes, now see the text directly under the diagram which says, and I quote, "Things hooked in parallel (Figure 1.1) have the same voltage across them.". So no the source of the EMF is not shown but it is clearly there as the text underneath states. Thank you for proving my point.

The line you quoted answers the question you asked: if the current does not divide between two or more paths then the devices are not connected in parallel. Apply that to your situation: if there is a current and it splits to pass through two devices you have a parallel circuit. If not, you do not. It's literally that simple. Apply that simple rule to whatever ideas you come up with and it will tell you if it's connected in parallel. It's not pedantic, it's simple and easy and the definition of a parallel circuit. Switches break circuits and so yes, it should not be a surprise to someone who has Horowitz & Hill on their shelf that they can change whether something is connected in parallel. In fact it's really easy to imagine using switches to convert a parallel circuit to a series circuit.

The literal definition of a parallel circuit is one where the circuit divides and the current is split between two components - look it up. That is not possible if your circuit consists of two capacitors and nothing else. If there is not more than one path for the current the circuit is not parallel. This is not a physics vs. engineering definition, it is THE definition of what parallel means.

Unfortunately for the vi-faithful it's going to be emacs because it can actually run DeepSeek.

Yes. Name one main-stream science, engineering or medical degree from a decent university that was not helpful in getting a job 10, 20 or even 30 or more years ago.

No it has not. What has happened though is that you now have a lot of for-profit private colleges setup to rip people off without providing them with a decent, or even useful, education. You also see established institutions suffering from government funding cutbacks adding some programs that prioritise profit over education. You are also starting to see institutes starting to prioritise social issues over education. However, the basic value proposition of university is still very much there it's just that, like many things in today's world, social and financial pressures are corrupting it in some instances.

That's a nice idea but I've yet to meet anyone with e.g. a good grasp of physics who achieved that by teaching themselves from the internet. I have met several people who _think_ they have a good grasp of physics from teaching themselves but invariably they have gone off the rails somewhere because it's easy to misunderstand or misread things when teaching yourself and you need to have someone challenging and correcting those misunderstandings when they occur as well as checking that you have reached certain standards. There are very good reasons why we do not let someone just read a lot of medical texts and then start practicing as a doctor.

If we judged morality based on how moral people feel they are then the least moral person would probably be someone like Mother Theresa because their standards are so high that they never feel that they meet them while people like the Taliban, Stalin and Hitler would be highly "moral" because they followed their own internal twisted morality without regard to anything else leading to what the rest of us regard as some of the most immoral atrocities ever commited.

No, I'm being appropriately pedantic for a physics question. When you have a capacitor charged to 100V and another is connected in parallel to it the usual implication is that this too will be charged to 100V since connecting something in parallel implies the same pd across the device. If the capacitor were already disconnected from the external power then parallel and series have no meaning since they would both be the same as your circuit now consists of just two capacitors.

Thus, in specifying parallel the question is either saying that the EMF is still connected or, at worst, it is heavily implying it.

The overnight flights are one thing. The problem I have is on the westward flights across the Atlantic which are day flights: they take off in the morning and land in the early afternoon. I've often had the window partially open on those flights, especially if you are flying over Iceland or Greenland and the weather is clear since the view is spectacular and exposure to sunlight is the best way to minimize jet lag.

I rarely, if ever get questioned by cabin crew when I'm doing that and even when I am questioned I explain I'm looking at the view and they just ask that I close the window when I'm finished which I do. The problem is that with the 787 cabin crew now will refuse to let you open the window at all on daytime flights. Part of the problem may be that with a mechanical blind I can open it enough to see without having to open it entirely but on the 787 it's either all or nothing and the windows are larger too.

Really? The article points out that the amount of light we generate has more than doubled since 2011 and somehow I don't feel that human happiness levels have increased or that crime has decreased and while perhaps social activity has increased a fair amount of that seems to be people protesting about how unhappy they are so I'm not sure it helps your claim.

The problems with the question you stated have nothing to do with ideal capacitors. Your first problem is that you have 'x' as a charge to start with and then as an energy at the end. Then there is the problem that if your first capacitor is charged to 100V and a second is placed _in parallel_ with it that too will be charged to 100V, not 9.1V since connecting something in parallel implies that you are connecting it to an external EMF such that the potential difference across the components is the same as opposed to in series when the current through both is the same.

I am guessing that what you meant to say is that the initial capacitor was charged to 100V and that the _energy_ stored was 'x'. Then you disconnect the original capacitor from the external voltage and connect the new capacitor across its terminals and now the voltage drops. I'm not sure that the AI will do any better with the corrected questions but at least you will have given it a question that it is possible to answer.

Yes, coral has survived a far warmer planet but that warming happened at a much slower rate than today's human-induced changes and that could definitely cause problems for coral since it is a not incredibly mobile and will take time to migrate and it is not clear that it can migrate quickly enough. However, that suggests that some of the damage could be mitigated by transplanting coral ourselves and it would be nice to see mitigation strategies like this explored by the experts instead of just the doom and gloom.

Perhaps not by themselves, but what if we gave them a helping hand transplanting them to waters that have become warm enough to sustain them? We know that coral survive a much warmer planet because it has done so in the past. The only difference now is that the rate of warming is much greater so if we helped them by transplanting them deliberately it seems like that would let them survive.

That may be but a lot of the coral in a reef is not alive. The important question is how long does it take to establish a number of living coral elsewhere equivalent to the number in current coral reefs? It may be that this also takes far longer than the time we have available but it should be much less than hundreds of thousands of years.

US television was like that back in the late 90's when I lived there for a few years and the insane frequency of ad breaks made it unwatchable for me, coming from Europe where channels like the BBC were completely ad-free and even the commercial stations were limited to 2 breaks in a 60 minute show and 1 in a 30 minute show.

While the golden age has ended now in Europe too - the BBC is a pale shadow of its former self - I'd say it lasted longer that US TV that, from my point of view, was already dead back in the late 90's. The only way I could watch anything on US TV was to tape it and then fast forward through the incessant breaks. Streaming revived things for a while back when it was just Netflix but now that has got fragmented, ads are creeping in again and I expect that will be almost as bad as TV by the time they are finished unless someone manages to develop an ad blocker that works on them.