Been thinking about armor penetrating munitions and the like. There is a limit to how far you can penetrate into a piece of metal that is nearly independent of speed--i.e. the kinetic energy of the incoming bullet. How strange! Where does the rest of the energy go? I suppose it goes into heat, but at some point the heat should actually melt the other material, allowing the blob that used to be a bullet to go through since momentum must be conserved. Let me see: If I crank up the speed t

Its funny how interested the general populace are in reading/listening/discussing science, especially "radical" or "paradigm-shifting" ideas. I mean, you can strike up a conversation with nearly anybody about perpetual motion machines and keep them occupied for 15 minutes, even if all you say is they are bunk and he says no they aren't. There is a general misunderstanding about the scientific discovery of laws of nature, and what they mean when they are codified. Most will tell you that th

Then I came upon this thread on FTL travel http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/11/1819208
and I found another way to kill time--researching the truth of the story. By tracking back to the published articles
--http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0505098 and citations--I found that there is nothing very useful about the critical velocity that Felber solved for. In fact, there was a Russian article several years earlier
Blinnikov, S. I.; Okun, L. B.; Vysotsky, M. I. (2003-10-03) I

Wondering at the beauty and simplicity of Euler's formula: exp(2*pi*i) =1, which links two transcendental numbers, one imaginary and comes up with a natural number. What does itreally imply about the connections between numbers and our way of thinking mathematically?