Posts tagged physics
Living in space can be boring. What are some good home games for people living and working in free fall? I thought of a few - Bocce : in this variant the size of the jack and the player balls i...
Low gravity golf was invented by Alan Shepard in 1971 when he hit two golf balls 40 yards on the moon. Surprisingly, this version of the sport with little atmosphere and much lower gravity, is the...
How would competitive wrestling change in a microgravity environment?
Theory If I am understanding this history of this correctly, in the 1920s the mathematical process of converting measurements with a certain amount of measurement error into numbers, then doing yo...
Utility fog is a swarm robotics concept in which a mesh of robots barely larger than a grain of pollen (5 micrometer ( $10^{-6} $ m ) bodies and 50 micrometer arms) are dodecahedrons (12 sided pol...
So, Second Earth had/has a firearm problem. Since my magic is really just advanced science, I can't create firearm-disabling fields, so instead, I created a spell that should be able to ruin firear...
Quantum Computers are considered a more powerful type of computer than so called 'classical' computers. While a typical classical computer could be considered as a black box that can solve Polynomi...
As far as we know Earth and every other planet in the solar system rotate around their axes. Whether it be Uranus which rotates on its side or Mercury which rotates perfectly straight, all planets ...
The shell variant of a Dyson sphere consists of an artificially-made shell of material about 1 AU in radius encircling a star. The sphere captures most of the star's energy and stores it for future...
Neutrinos have extremely low masses, and it's quite easy for them to reach high energies and speeds. As such, it almost always makes sense to treat a neutrino as being relativistic. I've been doing...
Background: So this Kurzgesagt video talks about quark stars, and how two of them colliding could send strangelets flying towards Earth or the Sun. Now it's been said that since, theoretically (as...
The known charge-conserving decay modes of free neutrons all involve the production of a proton, an electron and an electron antineutrino: $$n\to p^++e^-+\bar{\nu}_{e}$$ This beta decay is why, out...
How can a character explain baryon asymmetry (there is more matter than antimatter) by the universe being a simulation with a slightly imbalanced random number generator being employed at the point...
In this question I asked about the possibilities of what a boundary might be like, with emphasis on the storytelling. Now I'd like to investigate what a hard boundary would mean in quantum mechani...
I was thinking of a parallel universe in which the Planck constant has an exact value of zero. How would this effect the physics of that universe and how would it effect the development of that un...
First of all, in no way do I have advanced knowledge of particle physics, quantum mechanics, or any other necessary scientific concept for a full understanding of this question. Secondly, this is p...
The Solar System has entered a region of space where the laws of nature are slightly different. It will experience different physics for 3 years, then things will return to what we know now. Which...
In my setting, one of the fallouts due to interstellar war between civilisations is that a planet's gravity can be removed. This capability is part of the setting's hyperspace mechanics so the exac...
I'm writing a sci-fi world where, if you put it in simple words, a small percentage of population can manipulate the matter. I'm not going to dive into specifics, because I'm still working on WHY a...
Assume my kaiju is around 200 feet tall, weighs around 4,000 US tonnes and resembles a large lobster with two giant claws for its front legs and long spindly limbs with tiny pincers on the ends for...
This was an idea for a flashback as I pick up my story around 100 trillions years from now at the point where star formation is ceasing and the red dwarf and stellar remnant era begins. Now living ...
Recently I've been looking into Metallic Hydrogen as a fuel for the vehicles of my fictional future world. The only issue is that I'm uncertain if the blasted stuff is metastable. And while I kno...
I'm working on a military sci-fi piece that involves a lot of exo-skeleton enhanced, well, parkour -- for lack of a better term -- and was wondering how to deal with descents from great heights. ...
Could a life form that uses superfluids as part of its biology exist? I've read in places that the issue for life outside of Earth and especially the theorised silicon lifeforms is that the existe...
This is a mixed physics and conceptual exercise: In my story, we are aboard a multi-generational mission to resettle Humanity on a new planet in our galaxy. In the internal life of the ship inhabi...
Imagine a spacecraft travelling at very high speeds, say 0.3c. While a crew member could theoretically suit up and perform spacewalking maintenance on the outer body of the ship, will they be expos...
Many planets out there will be water worlds. Those generally come in two flavors: either the oceans are so deep that the water turns into high-pressure ices like ice-six, -seven, -ten and -eleven o...
Many alien worlds will most likely be water worlds. I was wondering what the deepest possible global ocean dept is where land is still possible. I think that volcanic islands will still have a chan...
Assuming all the primary hurdles in building a space elevator are overcome, would it be structurally feasible to attach intermediate stops along the length of the tether (between the planet and GSO...
In world building it is often interesting to consider extreme landscapes "“ how tall can a mountain be on Earth for example. But what is the tallest mountain possible in any gravitational environme...
In many sci fi universes that don't have handheld energy weapons, they instead use solid projectiles that either go big (Warhammer 40k) or really small (Mass Effect). The former I have a pretty go...
I once before asked a question on how to quickly submerge a large landmass/continent. The answers there basically concluded that literally ''Sinking'' (a la Atlantis) is pretty much impossible to...
I'm writing a novel set in a post post-apocalyptic world, where society on Earth collapsed a long time ago and has rebuilt itself by the time the novel starts. I need a reason to keep the people ...
Double or binary planets are a really cool science fiction idea. A second Earth hanging ominously in the sky. Co-orbital or trojan planets are also interesting in that you have them on more or less...
First question on stack exchange I've been lurking and learning for years and finally decided to pose a question for a novel I'm working on. Given the appropriate advances in material sciences an...
It's something that's been used several times as a plot device on Star Trek, notably in the TOS episode "The Tholian Web", and the TNG episodes "The Next Phase" and "The Pegasus". I'm certain it's ...
For my middle-grade science-fiction novel, I need to come up with an invention or chemical that could rapidly create icebergs to refreeze the Arctic and slow climate change. Kurt Vonnegut's Ice-9 i...
as the title, my question is how big a pelican like creature with its pouch mouth need to be in order to carry grown up human and still fly. since as far as i know hollow bone is to fragile for hu...
Imagine the ability to shoot long streams of hot fire like a USM2 flamethrower from the palms of your hands. or shooting them out of your feet so you can push yourself off of the floor. An answer w...
Background: We discover an artifact in the present day somewhere remote. This artifact is in the form of a small (approximately phone sized) sphere, and when researched, it is discovered to have th...
In my story Giants, humans, and a bunch of other fantasy races live along side each other and i'm curious as to what might be an effective mode of transportation for 10 foot tall Giants with Ancien...
I am wondering if it is possible for whales to fly. I'm considering two different cases. How could we alter earth conditions (thickness, gravity) so that whales could actively fly (without changi...
I'm trying to come up with idea's that have some plausibility of sending information FTL. So we can entangle particles together. When you measure them you influence them. If you measure one up the...
I'm curious what factors a terrestrial planet impacting the Earth would require for the impact to cause negligible damage to the larger planet, while destroying the Earth.
I am doing some hard sci-fi worldbuilding and really want to get as much correct as I can, but the effects of high sub-light speed travel on the travellers is doing my head in. I've pored literally...
So I remember reading a long time ago about how a theoretical "wave" could exist, as the laws of physics suddenly changed in one place and then this rippled across the universe, basically at the sp...
I want to know if a planet with an atmosphere identical to that of Earth could be big enough so that from no point in the lower atmosphere it would be possible to appreciate the curvature in relati...
My world is essentially a Neptune-sized gas planet that got seeded with life and its surface layer filled with oxygen, therefore gaining a sizeable layer with Earthlike conditions. Within this la...
This is a science fiction intelligent alien biology question. I'm imagining a race of large (around 2m in height) insect-like species on a distant planet who discovered astronomy VERY late in thei...
Fairly straightforward question. Imagine a gas giant planet, like the size of Jupiter, in orbit around a massive star. The star goes supernova. What happens to the planet? Is the energy of the su...
