Jsalt's Let's Talk Science

I came across an interesting question which brought me back to highschool physics. Want to hear it? Probably why you're here... If I'm travelling forward in a car at the speed of a bullet, and my partner in crime shoots an actual bullet out of the back of the car (ignoring the windshield), what happens to the bullet? Hm, seems simple right? It is if you have a basic understanding of vectors! Remember vectors? Imagine an arrow, pointing in the direction of the car, and another pointing in the direction the bullet was fired. So you should be picturing two arrows pointing in the opposite direction of each other. Now vectors aren't just arrows, they represent both direction AND magnitude. Magnitude in this case being the speed of the bullet, which was also the speed of the car. So these arrows (vectors) are equal in length (representing the magnitude) and opposite in direction. Pretty easy to follow, right? Now, here is where I want you to think of the scenario mentio

Maybe you saw, maybe you haven't yet, but Stephen Hawking and other scientists have recently been talking in the media about travelling to another star system. That's fancy talk for another solar system! Like ours, but, different, and very, VERY far away. But how is it that we are planning to send space crafts out that far into deep space when we can't even get humans out of Earth's own orbit? How are we able to send something that far and be alive to witness it, if it took us over 20 years to just get a spacecraft past Pluto? And this star system is way, way farther than Pluto relative to us. Like, unfathomably far.  Well, as interesting as it seems, you're probably overthinking it. If I make a rocket and launch it into space, it will take A LOT of energy to get that rocket out of our atmosphere and into space, because it weighs a lot and gravity is a bitch. Well, and a blessing so we don't float away, but in this case, it's a bitch. Then, to make such

The word half is weird. Think about it, if I have a long rope, say 10 feet long, and want to cut it in half as many times as I can, what would be the length of that rope when I'm finished? Sounds like one of those math problems you got in school that seemed easy and then ended up being a "What the #%!& is going on?" question. Because it is . If I cut the 10 foot rope in half, I'll have two 5 foot ropes. If I cut one of them in half, well, I'll have two 2.5 foot ropes. If I cut one of those in half 10 more times, I'll have two 0.0024 foot ropes. That's about 0.03 inches or about 0.7 mm. That's about half the thickness of a dime. Pretty thin, but if you see where I'm going, theoretically you can cut that in half again and do so for infinity. In real life, well.. I would have stopped cutting that rope a while ago since it's quite difficult to cut a half inch rope, never mind one that's less than 0.1 inches. Regardless of the fact th