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I mostly share that position, but a lot of people don't, and they have unreasonable expectations of science. I always feel a need to caution against it. It's definitely the "Unless" not "Until." They are mathematically equivalent and there are theorems to that end. Point is, you can have a precise (or precise enough) model, and still have absolutely no answer to the question of, "How does the world actually work." And yes, I agree that if we can't measure the difference, it doesn't matter. The world, to us, after all, is just a sum of our perceptions. But that still leaves some void which I can at least understand a lot of people yearning to fill.

Hubble could resolve 0.1" in 0.5 micron. This makes Webb about 2-3 times better at resolving power, and this increases number of stars where we could look for planets at least 10-fold. Webb should also do much better with high contrast stuff, because Hubble's optics had some problems. Add to that additional features of the sensors, better tracking, more opportunity for image processing, and I think it might just get us to the point where we can actually see a planet.

That's very engineer of you. I mean that in the best possible sense. And yes, if that's your measure of "truth", then you are right. But to most people, "truth" depending on desired accuracy is something wild. If you launch a satellite, Newtonian Mechanics is the truth, but when it comes to programming a GPS sat, it is not? People like objective truth to be, well, more objective. So suppose there is such a thing as an objective reality. And suppose there exists a mathematical model describing that reality that is precise to arbitrary precision. There is no guarantee that such a thing exists, but if it did, it's something that most people would agree to call "the truth". This is usually what we strive towards with physics. And, of course, it's an obviously unreachable goal. All we can do is try to get a little closer. And even if the "true model" just happens to be simple enough for us to stumble upon it, we won't really be able to verify it as such. Of course, even if you have a model, many people might question if whether it actually is the answer to the question of what is reality. We have equivalent models with very different interpretations. Consider the difference between Copenhagen Interpretation and Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, for example. Both make absolutely identical predictions for any experiment. One says there is one world and one time-line, the other says there are many parallel worlds with their own time-lines. They can't both be "the truth," as far as most people chose to think of it. And yet, there is no way to distinguish between them scientifically.

Constructing an envelope of possible torque vectors resulting from RCS (with or without net force constraints) is a rather simple task. Basically, construct a matrix of individual RCS torques, then invert the matrix, run a unit sphere through it, and then normalize to maximum thrust. Run that back through the matrix and you get the convex hull corresponding to the possible torque values. If you add net force to the matrix and have it set to zero when running the inversion, you'll get a hull that corresponds only to balanced RCS use.

It's not just asymmetry. Every known process conserves lepton and baryon numbers. Yet for there to be an imbalance due to an asymmetry, these numbers must not be conserved. Instead, the difference of the two should be a conserved quantity. Some models predict such a thing, but there is no experimental confirmation. Direct or indirect.

Ah, right. Blood is still going to be losing oxygen through lungs and skin. I didn't really think of that. Makes sense for the time before loss of consciousness to be that much smaller, then.

For the record, I am a Ph.D. Candidate, doing research in particle theory with focus on non-perturbative quantum field theory and meson structure. If you need links to any of my conference talks, I can provide them. As for whether I'm as qualified as a CERN scientist would depend on the scientist and the topic. Statistically, a random CERN scientist is likely to have more experience. And if we start talking about specifics of the experiments, I'm going to be way out-classed by almost any experimentalist. But in terms of theory, I am going to at very least know where bounds of my understanding are.

You shouldn't try to hold your breath for the same reason that you should never try to hold your breath while surfacing when SCUBA diving. (Actually, you are never supposed to hold your breath while SCUBA diving.) You are going to get lung damage due to pressure difference. Going from 1 bar to vacuum is equivalent to going from 10m (33') bellow to the surface. So your lungs won't help you one way or another. That leaves you with whatever oxygen is in your blood. Typically, you are looking at 20 seconds to 1 minute before passing out. Maybe a few minutes on top of that before brain damage and subsequent death. As far as damage to your tissues, there really shouldn't be any over such short period of time. The only one I'm a little worried about is lungs, as they are going to rapidly cool due to evaporation, and unlike skin, they aren't really meant to be exposed to low temperatures. But even there, it would take some time for significant damage. So all in all, so long as you remember to exhale during depressurization, and you manage to get to an air lock before you pass out, you should be fine.

He means the image of the object's it sees won't be more than a few pixels. As for seeing a planet next to a star, this telescope's main mirror is 6.5 meters across. In 1 micron band, this will let the telescope resolve 1 AU from about 100ly. The figure quoted by the site, 0.1" at 2 microns is only slightly bellow this theoretical limit. So yes, in principle, the telescope is large enough and sensitive enough to resolve planets orbiting some relatively nearby stars. Whether it actually performs as expected, we will find out.

Of course. But this sort of logic only applies if there are many universes. If it is so, then however unlikely life is, if there are enough universes out there, it will happen in some of them, and we are guaranteed to be in one of these. But if there is just one, then it bearing life only by chance is still very unlikely. You can't rely on statistics to fix that. As far as things being just right for life, consider the blocks of atomic matter. Despite up quarks being slightly heavier than the down quarks, and despite the fact that separating two charges takes energy, it turns out that the neutron is just slightly heavier than a hydrogen atom. A lone neutron left to itself will decay into a proton and an electron. This is why the most common element in the universe is hydrogen. Now, imagine that, as common sense would dictate, hydrogen was heavier. Every atom of hydrogen in this universe would decay to neutrons. There would be no clouds of hydrogen plasma to make stars. Just clouds of neutron matter. No such thing as chemistry in all of existence. Not even the most remote opportunity for life. Fortunately, isospin asymmetry played in our favor and allowed this multitude of elements to exist. But this requires quite a few parameters being just right. Do they have to be this way? Who knows. But it's hardly so by chance. Either there were many "attempts," or there is a much deeper reason for all of this.

This is slightly misleading. They produce equal number of both, since charge is a conserved quantity, and KL is a neutral particle. However, it is slightly more likely to first decay into a À- + e+ than À+ + e-. This is a major puzzle, and it might hint at the preference for one kind of matter over the other, but not the reason for why it's not the same of both. The pion (˱) is still going to eventually decay into e± and you end up with equal number of particles and anti-particles produced.

97% of statistics are made up on the spot. The percentage you quote has no chance of being accurate other than by mere chance, and even then, highly dependent on how you choose to gauge the fraction. The most important thing you should understand about science is that while it answers many practical questions, like how we would go about building a bridge, it doesn't actually answer any fundamental questions, like why any of that is true. Or even whether it's actually true, for that matter. Pretty much all of the physics we've known turned out to be wrong, and what little that hasn't looks very suspicious. But science isn't about finding truth. It's about finding practical models. By that measure, there is no guarantee that it's even possible to know how things actually work. So what fraction of the unknowable do we actually know? Is there even a way to answer such a question?

This is a good place to start: Baryogenesis. Edit: They only discuss the spontaneous symmetry breaking as an option. (Universe starting with zero baryon number.) But there are some hypotheses that are based on baryon number starting out non-zero. Simplest having to do with geometry of the space-time and suggesting that anti-matter is "before" the big-bang. All of this goes way beyond Standard Model, however.

You are confusing multiverse and Many Worlds. Many Worlds does, indeed, have something to do with our interaction with the observable universe and the Schrodinger Cat. Though, it's a bit more complicated than that. You don't really "create" new worlds at quantum events, but for simplicity, looking at it as time-line splitting up isn't all together wrong. Also, M-Theory is something completely different. Neither. Think of it more like intensities. A beam of light can be 50% red, 25% green, and 25% blue. It's really all just the same beam of light, but you can decompose it into components of different intensities. The reason it gets interpreted as probabilities has more to do with stat mech than pure quantum physics.

The question isn't why it's just matter and not anti-matter. The question is why there isn't the same amount of both. In every experiment we have ever been able to conduct, we produce equal amounts of matter and anti-matter. Not a single known reaction produces more of one or the other. Not a one. Yet, here we are, in the universe filled with one and not the other. Of course, we chose to call the one that's in abundance matter and the other anti-matter. Which is which isn't really a big problem. But where did all this matter come from? Seems to be from big-bang. But then where is all the anti-matter that should have been created along the way? There are several different hypotheses on the matter, and I won't get into details. Either way, however, it points to limitations of our knowledge, and figuring out the answer will be a major breakthrough in fundamental physics.

Actually, the way gimballing works in KSP, you always want center of thrust behind/bellow center of mass. The gimballing algorithm assumes this to be the case, so if you put CoT ahead of CoM, the controls for thrust vectoring are reversed. Of course, if you turn off the gimball and only use surfaces for control, this doesn't matter.

No, it doesn't work that way. The way the forces split depends only on temperature and density of matter. How the matter expanded and cooled doesn't make a difference. Besides, the constants of which the multiverse hypothesis talks are a bit more fundamental than that. These are, among other things, the very parameters that determine when certain forces will become relevant. There is absolutely zero evidence for this hypothesis, however. It's a convenient one, because it is an ad-hoc explanation for any set of conditions in the surrounding universe that seem to be just right for the existence of human kind, but it is difficult to falsify for that very reason, and as such, will probably remain untested.

Leapfrog/Verlet only marginally improve stability of the orbital simulation, unfortunately. If you want to improve precision significantly, you have to go for higher order implicit RK integration, and that's a royal mess. And even then, you are going to have energy drifts. As far as I know, a general conservative method for n-body 1/r potential is not known. Of course, for a 2-body problem, you can always just fall back on analytic solutions.

What are the exact formulae you evaluate on each step. This isn't just numerical mess, you definitely aren't computing relevant quantities correctly.

Ellipse like that corresponds to a body in central harmonic potential. I suspect it's due to the way you are dealing with force as a vector, but you'll have to paste a portion of your code to say with certainty where the problem is.

I'd start with review of introductory mechanics, then. Udacity has a course that might work for that. First four lessons cover the things you need to know before you get into orbital mechanics. You can also see if your local library has a textbook on introductory mechanics and see if you can follow that. After that, you should be able to follow most of the Wikipedia's article on orbital mechanics. It doesn't replace a proper course, but it should at least answer some questions, and maybe give you a better idea of what else you need to understand. Typically, more serious topics on orbital mechanics are covered in the course on Classical Mechanics, but that tends to involve far more serious math because you typically step away from Newtonian Mechanics and start dealing with Lagrangian Mechanics. You don't, strictly speaking, need to know any of that if you don't want to deal with N-body problems, though. So you might be able to find a textbook on orbital mechanics that's done entirely from perspective of Newtonian Mechanics. I just don't really know what to recommend for that.

That... Wasn't public knowledge? Wow. I used to live about 30-40km from that place. The Star City was on the drive to Moscow, and one of Moscow's defense ring objects was located almost in the city. (Officially, any incident there was reported as taking place in our city, including when a stockpile of AA missiles went boom.) We were basically told in kindergarten that Gagarin's plane went down because another plane flew too close to it. I had no idea this wasn't the official version until now.

Oh, I know that any modern fighter will have all input filtered through a controller. When you want your aircraft physically unstable but stable with respect to pilot input, there is just no way around that. But the requirements there are still quite different from what you listed for Aerobus. Pitch control -> Load factor translation is very natural for large passenger or cargo plane, where you basically want to maintain something like 1G in the cabin during every maneuver. It's not what you want for precision flying, though. Having fine control of attitude is far more important than fine control over the load factor, especially if you are operating near critical AoA while flying formation. And yeah, for a fighter sim, I wouldn't even worry about it. I'd have stick alter reference and PID to that. There's a reason why pilots call these things lawn darts. For the purposes of this discussion, think conventional aircraft with a cable or hydraulic controls and physical trim tabs on control surfaces. It might sound like I'm being particularly picky, but this is the interesting problem. I know how to write a controller for a fighter jet or a commercial airliner. These are solved problems. This one does not seem to have a standard solution. That's what makes it worth solving.

Even with these things disabled, that thing behaves nothing like a normal aircraft. I understand perfectly why you'd want this on passenger plane. Makes for smoother, safer ride. But you aren't going to want this sort of thing on a fighter jet or a stunt plane. I really don't want this to turn into training wheels you'd disable when you get a hang of flying. I want it to be absolutely unnoticed by a skilled pilot while helping a novice. A smart enough system looking after the trim setting ought to do just that.

That's kind of the point. I don't want overspeed and stall protection. I want a skilled pilot to sit down and feel almost no difference from directly controlling an aircraft save for not needing to touch the trim wheel.