Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2010 September 3

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September 3

Xyliooligo saccharide

Xyliooligo saccharide —Preceding unsigned comment added by 220.136.107.152 (talk) 01:50, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Does this help? hydnjo (talk) 02:30, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

What is protium hydroxide?

Is it the same stuff as dihydrogen monoxide? --81.96.185.94 (talk) 05:37, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Yes. Someguy1221 (talk) 05:46, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Yes. Compare protium, hydroxide, water. It's just water, and someone is trying to be silly. --Jayron32 05:47, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Cheers.--81.96.185.94 (talk) 05:49, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Wrong. If you actually look at the protium article you will see that it means hydrogen-1, the most common isotope of hydrogen. In normal water, most of the hydrogen is protium but there is a small amount of deuterium, forming molecules of heavy water. Protium oxide would be water without any deuterium in it. "Dihydrogen monoxide", or simply hydrogen oxide, on the other hand, is just water. --Anonymous, 06:48 UTC, September 3, 2010.

What happens when you mix diprotium oxide with dideuteriuum oxide? (heavy water) entropy is increased, but is there any temperature effect? Graeme Bartlett (talk) 11:14, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

I don't have my tables handy, so I can't tell you which way the temperature would go, but there should be a small change. The protons and deuterons are labile, so there will be a rapid equilibration reaction converting some H₂O and D₂O into HDO. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 14:10, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

OK, but for most practical purposes, are they the same? By the way: what's the difference between "protium hydroxide" and "protium oxide"? Was that a typo, or are those the same? (I abandoned chemistry when I was 14.)

You know, something named "protium oxide" could be a great spoof miracle drink!--81.96.185.94 (talk) 11:06, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Protium hydroxide implies ¹H-O-H, i.e. one of the hydrogen atoms is definitely protium (no neutrons in its nucleus) but the other hydrogen atom may be any one of protium (¹H or just H), deuterium (²H or D), or tritium (³H or T), that is to say, the other hydrogen may or may not have neutrons in its nucleus.

Seen another way, protium oxide is ¹H-O-¹H, whereas protium hydroxide encompasses three isotopomers:

• ¹H-O-¹H, i.e. H₂O
• ¹H-O-²H, i.e. HDO
• ¹H-O-³H, i.e. HTO

Heavy water covers:

• ¹H-O-²H (aka semiheavy water, deuterium protium oxide, HDO)
• ²H-O-²H (aka heavy water, deuterium oxide, D₂O).

Tritiated water covers:

• ¹H-O-³H (aka tritium protium oxide, HTO)
• ³H-O-³H (aka super-heavy water, tritium oxide, T₂O)

Ben (talk) 11:17, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

water, water everywhere, yet not a drop to drink... --Ludwigs2 16:27, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

You guys put WAY too much effort into analyzing a joke. The person who introduced the OP to the words "protium hydroxide" wasn't expressing a scientific concept, they were using a marginally accurate bit of obfuscation to mask the fact that they are talking about ordinary water. The DHMO joke made its first run through the internet like 15 years ago, this is just another minor variation on it. --Jayron32 02:54, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

Well, if you know what that person's motivation was, fine. The fact is that "protium" does not mean the same thing as "hydrogen", and it was necessary to say that to answer the question. --Anon, 04:19 UTC, September 4, 2010.

Yes, that was my motivation - trying to obfuscate what I had suspected to be the effective nature of the aforementioned subject.--81.96.185.94 (talk) 18:28, 7 September 2010 (UTC)

Quantum mechanics

Niels Bohr said about this theory that those who are not shocked by it don't understand it ! What I want to simply know is that - is there any implication in this theory that says that an electron, proton or photon starts behaving differently when it is under observation  Jon Ascton  (talk) 06:35, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

The simple answer is no! Particles are not aware when they are under observation. Dolphin (t) 07:33, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

... but, of course, the act of observation can change behaviour. Dbfirs 07:43, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

In quantum mechanics, an observation collapses the particle's wave function. So, yes, an observation affects a particle's future behaviour, in the sense that it changes the future shape of its wave function and so changes the probability that it will be observed in a given state at some time in the future. For example, in the double-slit experiment, observing the particle as it passes through the slits affects the interference pattern observed on the screen. Gandalf61 (talk) 09:07, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

If you're a follower of the Copenhagen interpretation, that is. If, on the other hand, you prefer the Many-worlds interpretation, then a wave function never really collapses, and we just observe one of all possible states. The math's all the same, but there are different ways of viewing the rules of quantum mechanics. Buddy431 (talk) 13:17, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

I would like to see that example in practice. I have my lamp, slits and screen set up with the expected interference pattern showing. What may I do that will change the pattern on the screen? Cuddlyable3 (talk) 11:40, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Block out one of the slits ;) That might seem trivial, but imagine an experiment where the photons are going through one at a time (this can be done practically, although probably not at home). You note where each photon arrives on the screen, and repeat the experiment a few thousand times. When you look at the number distribution of the photons, you have exactly the same pattern (to within experimental error) as you have from a classic Young's slits experiment. So either an individual photon goes through both slits at once or it somehow "knows" that the second slit is there... Physchim62 (talk) 12:41, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

If you want to see very weird things, look up Wheeler's delayed choice experiment. There are some very odd results that seem to imply some very weird violations of causality, for example. --Mr.98 (talk) 12:54, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

For Bohr, the heart of quantum mechanics was Complementarity. Give it a read. It is not just about things looking different when you look at them differently. It is about, in Bohr's formulation, the ultimate limits of what meaning means in the physical world. Not all physicists, especially modern ones, do QM in the same way that Bohr did. The best individual experiment that gives an indication of the kinds of "shocking" things Bohr is talking about is Wheeler's delayed choice, linked above, which was dreamed up to specifically show how "shocking" this could be, where very weird things happen that make very little sense using macroscopic (non-quantum) logic.--Mr.98 (talk) 12:54, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

I think we should really state what "observation" actually means in physics. We actually have an article about quantum observations, but I can summarize briefly. Let's say you want to observe a flower - you look at it, right? But what is "looking" at something? Light is involved - photons from the sun hit the flower and an amount proportional to the size of the flower hit your eye, thus giving it a nice image against everything else in your field of vision. But the key here is that, if there was nothing that actually hits that flower, there'd be no way to see it, feel it, smell it, etc. Something physical must happen to the flower, and in quantum mechanics, this physical interaction is "observation". It doesn't matter if you are a conscious being or not - when a quantum particle interacts with something, it must collapse into a definite space and time to actually make a cause-and-effect billiard-ball interaction. Once it's done interacting, it rapidly becomes the wavy cloudy quantum-uncertainty thing it was beforehand again. All it has to do is hit something - anything - to be observed. SamuelRiv (talk) 20:46, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

The simple answer is yes. A crucial prediction of quantum mechanics is that any act of observing a particle perturbs it, and there is a limit to how small the perturbation can be. Looie496 (talk) 22:52, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

ISOMERISM

What is D and L designations in organic isomers? and also what is meant by Racemic mixture??Rohit.bastian (talk) 08:25, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

See chirality and racemic mixture, respectively, and if these don't answer your questions then come back. HTH. --Ouro (blah blah) 08:36, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

mass and charge

what is mass and what is charge? I mean other than trivial attributes attached to different particles, what is it that is actually responsible for them? --91.103.185.230 (talk) 09:57, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

In the Standard Model of particle physics, charge (assuming you mean electric charge) measures the strength of a particle's interaction with the electromagnetic field and with its force carrier, the photon. There are various theories as to the origins of mass; one that has wide acceptance, although it is not yet experimentally proved, is that mass measures the strength of a particle's interaction with the Higgs field and the (hypothetical) Higgs boson. Gandalf61 (talk) 10:28, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

cheers for replying, youre a fucking legend mate. --91.103.185.230 (talk) 11:11, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Hurricane disruption

If a nation were to detonate a 1Mton nuclear device in the eye of a hurricane (for example a cat 3), would the hurricane be weakened, strengthened or not notably affected? Googlemeister (talk) 13:28, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Our Tropical Cyclone article says

"Scientists at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research estimate that a tropical cyclone releases heat energy at the rate of 50 to 200 exajoules (10¹⁸ J) per day, equivalent to about 1 PW (10¹⁵ watt). This rate of energy release is equivalent to 70 times the world energy consumption of humans and 200 times the worldwide electrical generating capacity, or to exploding a 10-megaton nuclear bomb every 20 minutes.

So an extra 1 Mton is not going to make much difference. Rojomoke (talk) 14:22, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

That logic doesn't quite work. The energy that the Sun transmits to the surface of the Earth is like exploding god-knows-how-many megatons every few seconds (the Tsar Bomba was only some 1.4% of the power output of the Sun), but the fact that it is dispersed over a great area means that it doesn't, you know, destroy us totally. Raw energy release is meaningless unless you take into account the scale. Nuclear bombs are impressive because they release a lot of raw energy in a very localized area. --Mr.98 (talk) 14:46, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

NOAA discusses it here. --Sean 14:23, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, it's a really bad idea. Aside from the fact that it probably wouldn't affect the storm (storms are not just a "thing" you can blow up, but a complicated system made up of tiny parts — it's the not the kind of thing a nuke is good against!), you'd spread fallout over a huge area. The worst way to deal with fallout is to have it be taken up by some kind of weather system and rained down on everybody, rather than having it dilute in the upper atmosphere to safe levels. It would be a catastrophic disaster. --Mr.98 (talk) 14:46, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

A hurricane is a heat engine that feeds on high surface water temperatures and favorable atmospheric circulation to produce a rotating storm system over a scale of hundreds of kilometers. In order to disrupt a hurricane you must disrupt these fundamental conditions. A nuclear weapon, apart from making the storm into an efficient fallout spreader, is but a pinprick. Since a cyclone makes its living by transporting heat into the upper atmosphere from the ocean's surface, you could argue that any large production of heat would actually feed the storm (rather doubtful that enough heat could be generated to make a difference). Acroterion _(talk) 15:09, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Wouldn't the pressure wave disrupt the eyewall? Googlemeister (talk) 15:28, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Not in a meaningful way. It would be of short duration. Also, pressure shock fronts from explosions are "zero-mean" - loosely speaking, this means that an exactly equal amount of wind blows in and then blows back out. So the effect is no net change on the pressure (after the transient pressure shock dies away). For an entity that operates on the size- and time-scales the size of a hurricane, these momentary pressure spikes would be negligible. Nimur (talk) 18:12, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Lets look at it from another angle then. If we wanted a weapon that could maximize casualties, all we would have to do is detonate a dirty bomb like a cobalt bomb inside of a hurricane, and that would assist in delivering casualties than just detonating the bomb alone? ScienceApe (talk) 15:39, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Well, it sounds sort of plausible, but I doubt anyone here really knows. Or more to the point, anyone here who does really know, is probably not allowed to say. --Trovatore (talk) 18:40, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Don't despair; User:Rocketshiporion will be around momentarily to simulate it for us... Nimur (talk) 21:05, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

But don't confuse a dirty bomb with a salted bomb... anyway, fallout effects are very hard to predict, even under ideal conditions. I think blowing up a cobalt bomb inside a hurricane would be a pretty good way to contaminate a large area. Whether it would increase the acute causalities much, I don't know. If you want raw casualties, just detonate a hydrogen bomb over a densely populated area. It's hard to beat that for raw numbers. If you were really going for mayhem, what you'd want to do is detonate a very dirty H-bomb over, say, New York, under conditions that would spread the fallout plume along the BosWash corridor. Castle Bravo transposed along the north east. Bleh. --Mr.98 (talk) 02:39, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

The more I think about this, the more I think that detonating an H-bomb in a hurricane would probably not increase the acute deaths at all, but would increase the clean-up costs, and possibly the long-term cancers, etc. The issue here is that you are diluting the fallout pretty considerably. That means less acute problems, more long-term problems (though at presumably lower exposures), and basically an impossible cleaning job. It would be a good way to make an entire region moderately radioactive, in other words. Whereas if you wanted megadeaths, what you want to do is detonate the H-bomb over a populated area under conditions that would spread the fallout only over other populated areas. --Mr.98 (talk) 13:38, 6 September 2010 (UTC)

• Interesting question. Theoretically, what would happen if a warm bubble were to be placed into the eye of an idealized tropical cyclone? Assuming the bubble is initialized at ~700mb, my intuition is that it would weaken the storm because the updrafts caused by the warm bubble would decrease the natural downdrafts in the cyclone, and thereby reduce the secondary circulation. As others have mentioned above, the effects would likely be very small. -Atmoz (talk) 23:06, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Now, if you have a storm, category 3 or higher(a major hurricane), instead of detonating a nuclear bomb, why don't NOAA or the DOD try a hydrogen bomb? That would probably freeze the water, if not drop the tempature well below the minimum needed to sustain the power of a hurricane? Yeah, so sea life will die, but in the long run, won't that save lives and billions of dollars?

Novichok agent

According to the article, this nerve agent is a fine powder instead of a gas or vapor. As a weapon, would that be an advantageous trait or a disadvantageous trait? ScienceApe (talk) 15:05, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

According to this, "the nanopowder can bypass most of the chemical weapons detectors commonly used in the modern armies. The nanopowder can, however, firmly attach to the skin and the toxic compound directly penetrates into the body." --jpgordon^{::==( o )} 15:54, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

What is the standard reduction potential for ascorbic acid

I have used ascorbic acid to reduce iodine to iodide, copper(II) oxide to a red powder that could be copper(I) oxide or copper, and chlorine to chloride. I am curious as to what the reduction potential of ascorbic acid is compared to stannous ion, for example? --Chemicalinterest (talk) 15:17, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

chicken

what is the breed of chicken found here

File:Industrial-Chicken-Coop.JPG —Preceding unsigned comment added by Tomjohnson357 (talk • contribs) 15:56, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

White leghorn, one of the most popular in the United States. They might also be bantys, based on their combs. See also, chicken breeds. Nimur (talk) 16:35, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

They wouldn't be Bantams - Bantam hens are too small to be decent egg layers, except for boutique/niche markets. (i.e. they have small eggs and wouldn't be raised industrially). -- 174.21.233.249 (talk) 02:24, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

Question about being born brain dead

Are there some people who are born brain dead? What happens to them, are they kept alive? Prize Winning Tomato (talk) 18:55, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Someone who is born brain dead usually does not survive, but not always. What happens to them if they do survive is usually up to the parents. They can be kept alive by machines, but (I believe) more often they let them die (by not providing any medical intervention). See also Anencephaly for a more extreme case. The bottom of that article also discusses the subject of their survival (see Baby K (which BTW does not have a NPOV). Ariel. (talk) 20:13, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Ariel, just out of curiosity, what part of the Baby K article did you see as not having NPOV? I just read the article myself and it seems to have a disinterested tone, presenting basically just the facts. Perhaps since I'm reading the article from my own POV, it seems sufficiently neutral, but I would truly be interested to know if there were parts that you found not so neutral. --- Medical geneticist (talk) 00:31, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

"despite the fact that being born without a brain is not curable or treatable" has kind of a POV tone to it — a snipey sort of thing that doesn't really have anything to do with the argument that the mother made about it. If it were up to me, I'd maybe word it a little more neutrally: "despite there being no medical chance for an improvement in condition" or something like that. --Mr.98 (talk) 00:59, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, I can see how that phrase was a little slanted; it looks like someone has already made some changes to the article! But overall, would you agree that the article handles a touchy subject pretty well? --- Medical geneticist (talk) 10:49, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

The article kept mentioning futile care and no chance of improvement, when those things don't really matter. Cancer patients are happy to get an extra year, this baby got 2 and a half. Doesn't seem futile to me. But the two quotes in "Significance of Baby K. case" were the real problem. "allocation of scarce resources"?? Medical care is not so scarce that this matters. And "right of physicians to make sound medical decisions"? So implying that killing the baby is the right decision, when maybe it's the wrong decision? Not to mention that the physician has no right to decide this at all, only the parents do. Ariel. (talk) 02:12, 5 September 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply, Ariel. It seems that you have pretty strong feelings about the issue and I won't argue your points, which are covered in the article on futile medical care. But please recognize that your phrase "killing the baby" is highly inflammatory and misrepresents the decision to remove life support or withhold extraordinary measures. When a discourse becomes charged with this kind of terminology it's hard to imagine any meaningful interchange happening. --- Medical geneticist (talk) 12:24, 5 September 2010 (UTC)

(ec)You may be interested in our articles on anencephaly (note: disturbing images) and Baby K. Matt Deres (talk) 20:19, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Brain death is the standard criterion for declaring a person dead, so somebody who is born brain dead is already not alive. Looie496 (talk) 22:45, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

But note that brain death has a very restrictive definition. Baby K specifically was apparently not brain dead, because she had a brainstem that controlled autonomic functions. Mere absence of all correlates of cognitive activity is not enough. I suspect that when a fetus experiences brain death, more conventional sort of death follows very quickly, so brain-dead-but-not-all-dead births are probably quite rare. --Trovatore (talk) 22:55, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Existence precedes essence Smallman12q (talk) 23:58, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

I would be wary to draw too many conclusions about what a "brainstem" can or can't do, when we're speaking of the product of a completely abnormal pattern of development. This may not the same as if you took an ordinary brain and chopped off everything but the tail, and how much do we know about that? In ordinary meditation, a person may try to focus all attention on breathing, heartbeat, such simple functions as Baby K concerned herself with; and who can say whether this awareness is a higher-order interpretation of the actions of the brainstem, rather than a perception that occurs in the brainstem itself? It may be inefficient, even intransigent, for the religious to insist on trying to save a doomed child, but how tiny this inefficiency and intransigence truly is, beside the similarly dogmatic and hidebound traditions of the medical bureaucracy, which transform such a simple pump as a mechanical ventilator into a mysterious, all but religious implement that can only be used in a certain building by certain people under such conditions as to make the formal expense rival a lifetime's wages, and demand the right to decide whether a child lives or dies based on this. Wnt (talk) 14:03, 6 September 2010 (UTC)

How to calculate the north pole right ascension and declination of Mars

Does anybody know how to calculate the north pole right ascension and declination of Mars using axial tilt, inclination, argument of perihelion, and longitude of ascending node? The north pole right ascension of Mars is 317.681° and declination +52.887°. The axial tilt is 25.19°, inclination to ecliptic 1.85061°, argument of perihelion 336.04084°, and longitude of ascending node 49.57854°. I couldn’t figure it how to get that answer. BlueEarth (talk | contribs) 21:56, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

The information you list is not enough, you need e.g. the argument of Mars' northern vernal equinox. In the Martian spherical coordinate system analoguous to our (Earth-centric) ecliptic coordinate system the Martian north pole's direction is (right ascension = 270°, declination = 90° - (axial tilt)). Now it's a matter of converting this direction to other spherical coordinate systems: Convert it to the system which is still in Mars' orbital plane but uses the ascending node as the zero point of the right ascension; then convert it to the (Earth-centric) ecliptic coordinate system; and finally convert it to Earth's equatorial coordinate system. You can derive the conversion from one spherical coordinate system to another by trigonometry, or use the formulas in the article on celestial coordinate systems (I haven't checked if they are correct). Icek (talk) 19:42, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

I saw that there are no such formulae in celestial coordinate system, so the only formulae I saw is converting equatorial to horizontal coordinate system. I believed in ecliptic coordinate system has good formulae, but I tried to calculate it but couldn't get it. So I'm not sure if they're right formulae to calculate the north pole coordinate of Mars. So can you show me the formula how to calculate it between spherical coordinate systems? I think that the simplest formula I can think of to calculate the north pole right ascension of Mars is simple, 270+Ω, which I get 319.57854°, but close to the actual value of 317.681°. So we need a better formula. I also believe to calculate north pole declination is simply use axial tilt and inclination, so 90−25.19−1.85061=62.96°, but the actual value is +52.887°. It also need a better formula for that. So do I have to use SOHCAHTOA to calculate the north pole right ascension and declination of Mars. I tried to search in google to look for good formulas but I couldn't find it. BlueEarth (talk | contribs) 21:28, 7 September 2010 (UTC)

The general way of transforming from one spherical coordinate system to another one on the uni sphere is this: The vector to the unit sphere with the angles $\theta$ and $\phi$ (in the geographical and astronomical convention that $\theta$ = 90° at the north pole) is:

${\vec {k}}={\begin{pmatrix}cos(\theta )\cdot cos(\phi )\\cos(\theta )\cdot sin(\phi )\\sin(\theta )\end{pmatrix}}$

For transformations "in the same plane" (i.e. the "equator" of the system is the same) you only need to subtract the new zero point from $\phi$ (e.g. you want a coordinate system where instead of Greenwich Paris is at 0° longitude you subtract 2° 21′ from the old $\phi$ to get the new $\phi$). For transformations with a different "equatorial" plane but with the same zero point of $\phi$, you can use the following equations:

$sin(\theta _{new})={\vec {k}}(\theta _{old},\phi _{old})\cdot {\vec {k}}(\theta _{N},\phi _{N})$

$cos(\phi _{new})={\vec {k}}(\theta _{old},\phi _{old})\cdot {\vec {k}}(0,0)$

where the product of vectors is an ordinary dot product; $\theta _{N}$ and $\phi _{N}$ together are the position of the north pole of the new system: $\theta _{N}$ is (90° - (inclination or axial tilt)) and $\phi _{N}$ is 90° or 270°, depending on the convention (think of the particular system geometrically).

Using these two transformations, starting with ($\theta$ = 90° - (axial tilt), $\phi$ = 270°) you can chain together your way from Mars' orbital coordinate system to Earth's equatorial system: same-plane transformation into the ascending-node Martian system using the argument of the vernal equinox; then a transformation to an ecliptic system using Mars' orbital inclination; then a same-plane transformation to the standard ecliptic system using the argument of the ascending node times minus one; then the transformation to Earth's equatorial system using Earth's axial tilt. Icek (talk) 13:49, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

Why can we see stars?

I understand that some stars are very large and very bright, but they are also so unimaginably far away that my instinct tells me that they should not be visible to the human eye. Of course, they are visible, so I wonder, is it simply because they are so large and bright, or is there some other "effect" or "phenomenon" that makes them more visible than they would otherwise be. Thanks in advance for any input. Francis78 (talk) 22:21, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Stars are not all the same distance away. Some very large, very bright stars are so distant that you can't see them. Some small dim stars are near enough to see.

The further away a star is, the dimmer it is. This fact is used at times to gauge the distance to other galaxies, for example by looking for the spectra of cepheid variables, which are a class of "standardized" stars with known luminosity.

The light receptors in your eyes are sensitive to photons hitting them. One or two photons won't register, but above some threshold, you will perceive light. Stars that you can see simply happen to emit enough photons that a sufficient number get into your eye, allowing you to see them. The closest star, our sun, isn't especially big or bright as stars go, but it's so close that you get a huge dose of photons when you look at it, sufficient to burn out your optic receptors.

You are correct to imagine that stars are so far away that they should not be visible. Starlight is, actually, quite faint. That's why you can't see stars during the daytime, because the light from our own star illuminates our atmosphere to drown out the faint light from other stars. ~Amatulić (talk) 22:30, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Light from a star never "wears out", no matter how far away it is, any light that is emitted will keep going. So as long as a couple of the light photons hit your eye you can see the star. The light from the star does spread out, but stars make enough photons, that even when they spread out, enough of them remain next to each other for several of them to enter your eye at the same time. Ariel. (talk) 22:46, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

(Edit conflict with Ariel) You're quite right that we can't see most stars in the sky. Most stars in our galaxy are red dwarfs, which are very dim, even when quite close. In fact, the closest star to our solar system, Proxima Centauri is a red dwarf, and has an Apparent magnitude of about 11, well below the threshold that you can see with the naked eye. But even though there are lots of stars that we can't see, there are some that are big enough, bright enough, and close enough to us that we can see them. Some stars that we see are comparable in size to our sun, and are close enough that we can still get enough of their light to see with the naked eye; things like Sirius, Alpha Centauri, Epsilon Eridani, and others. See List of nearest stars. The ones with their apparent magnitude in light blue are bright enough to be seen with the naked eye. Notice that even among the stars closest to us, though, most cannot be seen. When you consider stars further away, it's only the largest and brightest stars that we can see: stars like Canopus, Rigel, and Betelgeuse are really enourmous, atypical stars, but it's only atypical stars that we can see at distances of hundreds of light years. I'm not sure what the farthest individual star that can be seen is, but I bet it's "only" a couple thousand light years away, easily still inside the Milky way galaxy. The Andromeda Galaxy is often cited as the furthest object that can be seen with the naked eye (at 2.5 million light years), and, while not strictly true (people have seen claimed to have seen Messier 83, for example), that's about the limit. And that's literally billion's of stars that can just barely be seen under good conditions. The point is, the vast, vast, vast majority of star's aren't visible from Earth (with the naked eye), but there are just a few (about 6,000 under good viewing conditions) that happen to be big enough, bright enough, and close enough that our eyes can (just barely, in most cases) make them out under very dark conditions. Amatulic also makes a good point: we can only just barely see even the stars that we can; we can't see them during the day, many we can't see when the moon is out, and a good deal of them we can't even see when there's any sort of light pollution at all. Buddy431 (talk) 23:04, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

So how many photons does it take to trigger our receptors? Clarityfiend (talk) 02:48, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

It depends on a lot of variables - but under ideal conditions, just one photon is enough to trigger a rod cell to fire. SteveBaker (talk) 05:29, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

And not many for it to be treated as signal rather than noise, see Can a Human See a Single Photon? and Optimization of Single-Photon Response Transmission at the Rod-to-Rod Bipolar Synapse. Sean.hoyland - talk 05:42, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

Also keep in mind that even the best star viewing conditions do not come close to these experimental conditions; if nothing else, light from other stars ruins the total dark that was used. I don't know how bright a star actually has to be to be visible, but it's certainly a couple order's of magnitude greater than these experiments suggest (Which is still very, very dim). Buddy431 (talk) 14:58, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

It's been remarkably hard to find out how much energy a given star actually deposits on the Earth (its flux). If we could find that, then it should be easy to calculate a number of photons/second/square cm, or whatever. Flux is used directly to calculate apparent magnitude, so obviously there are a table of star fluxes somewhere, but I can't find them anywhere. If we even found the flux from a single star, we could calculate it for any other stars, based on the widely reported apparent magnitudes. That's odd that the apparent magnitudes are so widely reported, but the underlying, physical data that is used to calculate them is not. Buddy431 (talk) 15:15, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

It's easy! We know the flux deposited by one star...the sun! That's a pretty typical star and there is tons of that kind of data in sun and sunlight. Then you just have to figure the ratio of the distance of your chosen star to the distance to the sun - square that number and divide the insolation flux by that number. I'd do it for you...but I'm kinda busy right now. SteveBaker (talk) 23:26, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

The Sunlight article only appears to have total flux at Earth (1.3 KW/m², give or take), while we need information for just the visible range. Mr. 87.81, below, is probably right that we need to be careful what we actually want, and at this point, I don't care enough to figure it out. However, if we user the entire luminosity, then we find that a magnitude 3.2 star (easily seen under most conditions) would give a flux of only one 10¹⁰th that of the sun. Using the sun's total flux (rather than visual) of 1300 W/m², that would give the magnitude 3 star a flux of only 1.3x10^-7 W/m², or 1.3x10^-11 W/cm² (the approximate size of a dilated eye). Assuming a wavelength of 500 nm (right in the red/orange region), each photon of which has 4x10^-19 J of energy (someone might want to check my math there), that gives 3x10⁷ photons per cm² per second. Obviously, not all starlight is in the visible region, and I've made some huge assumptions and approximations, so that number should be taken with a large grain of salt. Buddy431 (talk) 01:15, 5 September 2010 (UTC)

(Edit Conflict) That's probably because, historically, apparent visual magnitudes were not calculated from instrumental flux measurements, but estimated directly by human observations. This might sound rather imprecise but actually it easily yields figures accurate to 1/10 1/100 [belated correction - apologies] of a magnitude, by repeatedly comparing several stars in a single telescopic field of view, some with already established magnitudes, and judging their relative brightnesses. More precise visual photometric measurements were made using photographic plates (once these were available), though care in interpretation was needed because the logarithmic response of the human eye is not equivalent to the geometric(?) way in which photographic images form, and different plates respond differently.

Once we became interested in total flux, aka Luminosity, (i.e. all wavelengths, not just the visual ones) absolute flux measurements became more useful, but because measured values depend on variable elements - such as the momentary local 'seeing' or transparency of the atmosphere, the altitude of the star above the horizon and the altitude of the observatory above sea level (and hence the thickness of atmosphere the star is being viewed through), whether the instrument is in fact in orbit and outside the atmosphere entirely, and the characteristics of the individual instrument - raw data has to be carefully calibrated anyway and the results are generally thought to be of interest mainly to the academic specialists, but you should be able to track such data down. You may find searching on Stellar Luminosity (rather than 'flux') helpful. 87.81.230.195 (talk) 23:35, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

This is an interesting question: if a star is infinitesimally small, why can the retina perceive it? Of course, stars twinkle, the eye vibrates with each pulse, the lens is imperfectly focused... yet my feeling is that all of these things decrease, not increase, the ability to see the stars. So my attention would focus on the photoreceptor cell, i.e. the rods. Now consider that looking up at a hemisphere of sky, about 3000 stars are visible, and there are 120 million rods; thus for any given star, on average about 40,000 rods deal with a sector of sky containing that one star and no others. That's the square of 200; and so, roughly, a line of 200 rods should separate any two visible stars in the sky. Now "retinal ganglion cells respond quite reliably to single rhodopsin isomerizations (R*) with two to three spikes"[1] Bear in mind that a star's image is sitting atop not a single membrane to detect it, but a tremendous stack of disklike membranous projections of the rod cell, each with its own chance to detect the light. And from that source, about 15-20 rods send signals to a rod bipolar cell, and about 26 rod bipolar cells send signals to an amacrine cell. So the perceived size of a single detected photon covers a territory of about 500 cells, or a line of about 22 rods. The neural size of a star should thus be about 22/200 of the distance to the next one, which seems plausible in a perfectly dark night sky. Its faint light, focused on a single point, is actually sufficient to set off a rod cell over and over again* to produce the image seen. Wnt (talk) 13:44, 6 September 2010 (UTC)

* - as explained above,[2] it takes about 9 detected photons to perceive the light consciously, or 90 photons reaching the eye. The figure above that stars can be measured to 1/100 of a magnitude is interesting, though, because magnitudes differ by a factor of 2.512, and the 100th root of this is 1.00925, so a 1% difference in brightness is visible. So if that number extends to the dimmest visible star, that would mean that a one-photon difference in brightness can be seen! But it would be nice to see the source for this, to see whether it applies to very dim stars. Wnt (talk) 19:28, 6 September 2010 (UTC)

Looking at Fundamentals analytically

Can one define a fundamental concept analytically, or will this always lead to a circular definition?Smallman12q (talk) 23:24, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

I don't understand the question. Do you mean defining the term fundamental concept, or do you mean defining particular fundamental concepts such as energy? And what do you mean by "analytically"? Looie496 (talk) 23:57, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

I mean fundamental concepts such as though pertaining to Quantum mechanics and classical mechanics. By analytically, I mean separating into relevant constituent parts.Smallman12q (talk) 00:03, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

Well, I'm not a philosopher, or a scientist. But it's of note that some of the definitions of fundamental concepts have definitely led to potentially productive circular definitions. I'm thinking of Einstein's basic work in redefining things like "distance" (what a ruler measures) and "time" (what a clock measures). Those are superficially pretty unsatisfying definitions, but the point is to refocus attention less on metaphysical definitions and more on practical definitions, and from there, a very useful theory falls out rather nicely. Anyway, I don't think this resolves your question, but I offer it up as a possible contribution in thinking this through. --Mr.98 (talk) 00:46, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

Relevent related information to this question would be the idea of the axiom, that is a concept which is taken as absolutely true but unproven (or unprovable), and Axiomatic system, which are the backbone set of axioms (fundemental concepts) of a system. Also the theorems of Kurt Gödel, which are closer related to mathematics but still germaine to the OP's question, especially Gödel's incompleteness theorems, and the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, dealing with the relationship between language and reality. --Jayron32 02:45, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

Wittgenstein -- meh. He may have had something useful to say on something; I've never read him closely enough to be sure. But when he wrote on mathematical logic, specifically on Goedel (and Cantor) he made absolutely elementary errors. The word crackpot is not too strong for his take on these things. --Trovatore (talk) 23:43, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

Yes - Axioms are the key here. Mathematically, one can take a set of arbitary axioms (which may or may not be "true" - in the sense of them being a true representation of the real world) and make some deductions from that - perhaps even prove some interesting theorem or other. But when you do that, you are always saying: "This thing that I've proved is 'true' providing that the axioms that I started with are 'true' - otherwise, all bets are off".

In the world of science, things are a little different. Rather than taking 'axioms', you'll generally be taking observations of experiments or of nature. You may go through the same process of logic, mathematics, reasoning - and you'll come up with some result. Then you can say "on the basis of this pile of observations - I deduce the following". The observations are kinda like axioms in mathematics in that your conclusion is only valid so long as those observations are correct. What Einstein did was a little different. He noted the results of some experimental observation - things like the Principle of Invariant Light Speed which had been established by the Michelson–Morley experiment and others. But he also picked some axioms (in the mathematical sense). He supposed things like "The Principle of relativity" - which is (roughly) that the laws of nature are the same over all time that they are the same regardless of the person experiencing them. His subsequent deduction of the Theory of Special Relativity is rock solid - but only if the laws of nature are the same everywhere and only if Michelson-Morley (et al) didn't screw up their experiments. But if either of those two things are untrue - then all bets are off. SteveBaker (talk) 04:59, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

Axiom is the term I was looking for. ThanksSmallman12q (talk) 22:49, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

It is of note that there is considerable scholarly debate as to whether Einstein cared much about experimental results when establishing his theory. The work of Gerald Holton in particular argues against this. By contrast, the work of Peter Galison emphasizes the importance of the technological-cultural-philosophical context of Einstein's work at the patent office. Anyway, I'm just putting out there that the "Einstein saw an experimental result and ran with it" theory is not actually held by most historians of physics. It's more like, "Einstein had a number of reasons for believing in the invariance of light, and didn't totally trust experimenters anyway, and ran with his theory because it aligned with his Machian positivist inclinations, and seemed like the only intuitive way out of the complicated aether theories," and so on. --Mr.98 (talk) 14:23, 5 September 2010 (UTC)

Blow hole flap?

Is there an anatomical name for the flap that covers a cetacean's blow hole? - or does it just clench shut? Adambrowne666 (talk) 23:41, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

My understanding is that it doesn't have a cover. It is surrounded by a ridge called the "rostrum" that acts as a splash guard, but it closes by squeezing shut. Looie496 (talk) 00:02, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

I'm not so sure about that. Sources say 'rostrum' apparently refer to the animals snout! See Rostrum (anatomy), also see the diagram here, which is supposed to be sourced from Seaworld. From the Seaworld website here under HEAD, 2. "In front of the melon, a bottlenose dolphin has a well-defined rostrum (snoutlike projection)." I can't find a specific name for a flap over the blowhole.
• A search on Wikipedai for "blowhole flap" give only one result at Bottlenose dolphin, which is referenced back to the same page on Seaworld as above. "6. A single blowhole, located on the dorsal surface of the head, is covered by a muscular flap. The flap provides a water-tight seal." 220.101 talk^\Contribs 11:38, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

This Scientific American article [3] describes the blowhole as a muscular flap, which is normally closed unless contracted. Perhaps the right analogy to make is to the anus or urethra - there might not be a separate (scientific...) word for the hole as opposed to the structure that defines the hole. But I know little of cetaceans... Wnt (talk) 07:44, 6 September 2010 (UTC)