Posts tagged physics
In my world some people can control wind, including its temperature. Would it be possible to freeze stuff solid immediately (I'm most interested in freezing people, but animals and inanimate obje...
When a grenade explodes in water, the shockwave does more damage to a human than when the same grenade explodes in air. I am aware that the incompressibility of water as compared to air plays a lar...
Compact, rapidly rotating astronomical objects (like neutron stars) are often observed to emit streams of high energy particle radiation along their poles. Near supermassive black holes in galactic...
Assume that Amazon has set up a processing station on the Moon for whatever motive as a way to ship things out to space (Mars, etc.) faster and more efficiently. How much time today and perhaps i...
I built a magic system that rationalized the creation of energy, so the energy source of magic is not a problem. (How this system works is not the main point of this question.) When people keep us...
Psychometry (from Greek: ψυχή, psukhÄ“, "spirit, soul" and μÎÏ„Ïον, metron, "measure"), also known as token-object reading, or psychoscopy, is a form of extrasensory perception characteriz...
I want to create a planet that has a frequency of two rotations per second, thus making a "Planet without Night". The planet will be like a flattened disc, due to inertia causing the planet to be a...
So I'm creating a character that is an extradimensional being that exists outside of time. If we experience time as a linear event, how would time be perceived if this being has the ability to see ...
I'm currently working on a Sci-Fi story. Many of the super-materials in my story are composed of "Neo-Matter". List of Neo-Matter particles: Up-Neotron, Down-Neotron Neo Matter is essentially lik...
When thinking about a potential answer to this question about preventing flight in a cyberpunk dystopia, I had an idea that I do no possess sufficient knowledge to prove/disprove. Thus you'll be t...
Entropy in a casual definition is the tendency of things to progress from order to disorder. There are a variety of specific definitions in different arenas of thought. For example, heat will diffu...
As in, could negative matter (N.B. not the same thing as antimatter) exist on the macro-scale as a solid, liquid or gas without the weird effects that cause it to repel normal matter and possibly v...
Simplifying a larger problem. Building a sci-fi text game and I don't want the science to be too wrong. Imagine I have two points in space which are 111,125 kilometers apart and it takes 17 minut...
Well, I ask the question because apparently I am going to aim for NaNoWriMo. I am calculating the density of a planet with 1.8 Earth masses and 0.9 Earth radii, but last I checked, the calculation...
[WARNING] Approximate physics incoming A few months ago I was looking for a way to get to Gliese 581 within 100 years. So I've been reading a lot from Wikipedia and other sites about different pro...
I have a super luxury space hotel. It has artificial gravity in the living and shopping area and 0g in some parts of the recreational area. There is a 0g pool available for the guests. I want it ...
In my universe, gravity varies with the inverse of the distance (instead of the inverse square of the distance). I already know that this means that all circular orbits around the same object will ...
Some more-than-usually clever boffins have knocked up a system that allows them to form portals into a region where the laws of physics are rather...different. An object that is fired through one ...
Someone invents a portable, incredibly high-powered laser or similar energy weapon. The mechanism of energy production can be hand-waved away. In other words, it will heat up. Lots. Gigawatts lots,...
Would it be possible to somehow inject astronauts cells with safe amounts of magnetic metals, or use some sort of magnetic properties, to hold them down to a space station floor with magnets?
If there existed a planet that was made completely of liquid water, no solid matter at all, what would the core of such a planet be like? Let's assume that this planet has conditions similar to ear...
A non-inertial frame, such as a planet that does not have constant velocity in its orbit, would change the laws of physics in many ways. For example, if you stood on the surface of the planet as i...
So I was building my world with underwater civilizations and someone raised a question (see here) that I thought was interesting related to trade aspect: how would we have a standardized measuremen...
On Earth, the presence of tides due to the Sun and Moon influence certain currents and other movements of water. This in turn leads to different forms of erosion, which can transform a landscape. ...
This question on Physics.SE asks whether other colors are possible for the sky. I would like my planet to be inhabitable by normal humans. It has 768 days and they are living in a temperate/Medite...
Imagine that God has many universes to deal with or just needs a break sometimes. He has a pause control. What plausible mechanism does God use to perform the pause without breaking the laws of ph...
I have a metallic alloy called "Attrahite" in my world that conducts gravity the way that copper conducts electricity. Currently in the world, passing an electric charge through Attrahite "activate...
What circumstances would be required for a world in which human emotions directly affected the physical world. For example, if a person grew angry, releasing a burst of electrical energy which woul...
Lets say I have this nice gun which can shoot a certain amount of antimatter. After hearing answers about why that won't work, I added a magical coating to the projectile making sure the antimatter...
Let's imagine a race of Giants, with an average height three times that of a normal human being. Let's also imagine that these Giants are completely identical to humans, proportionately speaking......
I am currently orbiting Jupiter, the rent is pretty cheap and the view is magnificent. However, my former electricity provider refuses to connect me to earth's grid for petty reasons like "are you...
Would it be possible to produce a pair of human brains that are connected by a wormhole that has each end inside one of the brains? What I had in mind is that the wormhole would have neurons insid...
At the center of my small (one million star maximum) galaxy, there is an incredibly enormous light pillar, originated from a ridiculously huge super-construction. The stars orbit around the giant o...
I am working on a project (The Longest Day), and I'm sure some people here have the necessary knowledge to give me some more usefull info. OK, here it is: Lets say that Earth's spinning speed dim...
As we all know, Santa loads his sleigh with gifts for millions of children around the world and sets about distributing them during the night of December 24/25. To make them all fit in his stylish ...
Antimatter annihilation is the best source of energy per weight. However, antimatter is not readily available anywhere within reachable distance, it's insanely difficult to produce and contain. Ho...
I'm trying to build a semi-plausible world where there is native flora and fauna, but the world is subtly not quite right for human habitation. I thought that having significant amounts of copper i...
Is it possible to contain similarly charged particles in a magnetic field or traps, in generally large scale (say, all of them have positive charge), and could be utilized as power reserves quite e...
Cube worlds are cool and many people like them but unfortunately, they are less than feasible. Does this have to be this way though? What factors could lead to the creation of a roughly cube shape...
Specifically, will ferrofluid at the bottom or on the sides of a shot glass perturb the fluid above it to any significant degree? I want a character of mine who is a sort of Bill Nye/Neil DeGrasse ...
My world is based on the concept of afterlife, with a twist: people who died in other worlds are resurrecting in mine. Once in the afterlife world if they suffer another lethal injury or condition ...
As anyone who has watched the Jurassic Park series knows, Hollywood likes to exaggerate a bit when it comes to dinosaurs and their scientific accuracy. Many facts are fairly easy to prove right or ...
My premise involves a habitable planet with a dual core: it has two masses similar in composition to Earth's core, which revolve around each other over the course of hundreds of thousands of years...
What would happen if all dark energy (cosmological constant) instantly converted to radiation due to vacuum metastability event, while otherwise vacuum properties remain the same? Dark energy dens...
The primary armament of the space warships of a race I am building use an armament that consists of explosive shells that have a rocket engine in them. The idea is that they are fired from the shi...
Gravity is the weakest of the fundamental forces of universe but along with electromagnetism tends to dominate most of the macro world phenomenon. But what would happen if the force of gravitatio...
I wanna have a scene where the protagonists see the gray goo excreting human skeletons because they can't use the calcium in them for anything. But is this true? Would a self-replicating machine re...
I am writing up a system of wormhole-based gates to allow "fast travel" in a far-future setting. My description is an extrapolation of the way I understand a flatlander's experience of the followin...
Flux pinning (also known as quantum locking): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flux_pinning This technique has been discussed on this site before as a method for creating nearly indestructible supe...
I'm really excited that this topic actually exists here. For the past weeks I've been thinking about creating my own fantasy world - because there are not quite enough yet. My primary aim is to mak...
