Posts tagged physics
In my world, electricity has not yet been discovered, but they have somehow still managed to attain a technological advancement similar to modern times. I am currently trying to tackle the problem...
Picture a band of happy campers, literal campers, sitting around some fires. Suddenly they feel their inner-ear "filling up" and after mere instants the ears begin popping, as if they were inside ...
So I have the following scenario for a story, and I want to know if it runs into any ridiculous no-nos from a scientific point of view: There is an earth-like world orbiting a red dwarf (similar t...
For a story I am drafting I would like to have droplets of fluid that form another shape than the regular domed droplets we usually see. Is there any other shape such as e.g. a doughnut-shape that ...
I'm worldbuilding a story, where a famous string theorist hires a student of mathematics to try construct a new theory. For better drama, my premise of the story is that the student never learned m...
This is a self-contained follow-up to a different previous question. Based on the answers I got there I've taken a different approach to my original idea, and now want to try using antigravity on ...
Is it possible for an Earth-like planet to exist where the light reflected by the moon is, not as powerful, but close in intensity to daylight? And if so, what would be necessary for it? A moon mu...
Generally, when someone uses telekinesis to fly, it's either by riding an object that can be levitated, or by applying the power to their body. Would there be any advantages to alternative techniqu...
I have the tables explaining time dilation for a single ship at different relativistic speeds, but am unsure how to modify that to work out for two ships at different velocities, and the two differ...
Warning lots of text ahead. The fluff: The story uses a Catastrophe Inhibitor (CatIn) to stop nukes, orbital bombardment and other such weapons from being the go-to method of defeating everything...
So I had this idea of a world with an ocean sized pool of super hard glass that formed millions of years ago on this planet. I started to think of the implications of something like that: In some...
If a human /human shaped creature were to have a horn, horns or crest on their head, what shape, positioning and number of horns would be the best for the most damage? The human will be very muscu...
Having read previous questions on radio wave communication on biological creatures would it make sense for race of alien creatures to have developed dish like bone structures for radio wave communi...
I've thought of a super-earth with 30% higher gravity, a denser atmosphere, which facilitate the willing suspension of belief for my giant fireflies that terrorize the local humanoids. Due to the h...
I was thinking of an alien humanoid charcter for my super powered beings story that would be completely black and faceless with similarities to venom and its strings of symbiotic goo but this chara...
Say you have some way of seeing somewhere between a microsecond to 0.1 seconds into the future, or at least the most likely future. Is it possible,through something like a flip-book effect or some ...
In my world, electricity has not yet been discovered, and many advancements in society progress on a purely chemical or mechanical basis. Lasers are incredibly useful and multifaceted tools, and I...
In my pre-electricity world, fast communication is achieved by means of lighthouses, each being able to direct strong and precise beams of light towards distantly visible lighthouses. However a pr...
I'm writing a sci-fi story with some fantasy elements, and I'm trying to keep even the most outrageous moments grounded in the laws of our universe. This is one of those moments. The Situation ...
The idea of a planet where ammonia replaces water as the dominant liquid in the environment is quite popular in science fiction. I tried to develop a scenario where these kind of oceans are plausib...
Thanks for taking a moment to help me understand the feasibility of this scenario. Essentially, what I am looking at is an Earth-like world that would be between 1.3x and 1.6x the mass of our own ...
I have only encountered the "Sonic Boom" a couple of times in my life, once when I was lucky enough to watch Concorde fly over my town in the late 70's. In a story I'm writing someone claims to ha...
I'm currently designing a world for a story that I'm writing that is based on a system of magic that deals with barriers, specifically domes. To get to the point one key characteristic is that thes...
Assume an Earth-Clone, that has an axial tilt of 90°. How would the circulation of the atmosphere look like? Would there still be three convection cells?
Making a semi-realistic Kirby Alternate Universe (AU) here. Popstar's shape is a result of a member of this powerful race using secret magics to alter reality in this AU. What would its day/night ...
Exactly what it says on the tin. Kleeber the warrior is wearing a gambeson and carrying the standard adventurer's gear (leather backpack, 100ft of hemp rope, bedroll, spare clothes, waterskin, dry ...
I want a character to get sucked into what she thinks is an FTL-wormhole-gate. While it turns out that the gate is indeed a traversable wormhole, it does not allow for FTL travel. The gate transpor...
I intend to write a character that has the ability to turn nearby gasses into plasma for combat and utility purposes. However, I've been studying how plasma works and (as someone who is not as savv...
Inspired from people walking on water using cornstarch plus myths such as monkey king, several gods in heaven/celestial palace, and other fiction works. (image from Dragon Ball by Akira Toriyama) ...
I'm conceiving of a world where humans can readily terraform worlds that were once considered "dead" due to the planet's magnetic field being long gone. In such a situation, what could humans do t...
What I'm using your information for: My planet is small, has a thicker atmosphere than earth and it's orbiting a white dwarf. The main reason I chose it to be a white dwarf is that I read somewher...
The Scenario: Airships are awesome, but in the real world airship design is greatly constrained by the problem of lift. It seems like this, above all else, is what makes the elegant and compact s...
I'm building the world of my story for my comics and I've come to a bit of a standstill with a particular idea. Assuming there were no other planets in our universe, just a single planet Earth. ...
In my novel, my main character has come from earth to a fantasy world. She has been reborn on an island of giants (10-meter tall humanoids) where everything is scaled up to match what they would lo...
If a planet had such a large imbalance of protons and electrons that it possessed a net negative or positive charge what would happen to it and its solar system? First, could it be stable, or woul...
Consider a planet $P$ of radius $r$ larger than Earth, whose mass is $r^3$. By the square"“cube law, this planet will have the same density as the Earth... assuming that the gravitational compressi...
On a planet with Earth-like attributes in every way, including physics and geography, what repercussions would there be for a relatively deep 'dent' in one quadrant of the spherical body? This is o...
Hypothetically speaking, if there was a substance you could drink/inhale (in an alternate reality) with superconducting properties, how would it influence the brain and the body? The superconduct...
Could 2 moons that orbit same terrestrial planet never see each other if they orbit the planet at same time? Moons have different mass and gravity.
A whale, lets say a humpback (~40 tons) has to be pulled about 250 m from the port to the town square. The road is classic cobblestone. People put hooks into the whale meat with ropes attached and...
Suppose we have a planet whose atmosphere has roughly the same gaseous proportions as Earth, but helium replaces nitrogen, and has a strong hydrogen presence in the upper atmosphere; has a gravitat...
Consider a planet very similar to Earth, with the same radius and the same mass. In a very simplified model of its interior, 70 % of its mass is magnesium silicate and the remaining 30 % is iron. T...
I'm not a professional at world building or character building, still starting out, but I do want to make an attempt at having my fantasy character be somewhat realistic. He's 11 years old, 4.8 f...
I understand an interstellar dust cloud as "an accumulation of gas, plasma, and dust in our and other galaxies. Put differently, an interstellar cloud is a denser-than-average region of the interst...
Currently writing a scifi novel and am trying to do the math to establish time frame of the lore. The main points are that in 2068 CE Earth sent a generation ship to colonize Proxima Centauri. They...
Imagine a habitable, water covered, small earth-like orb in space. Let's call it P. From its surface, you see 2 large glowing masses, different sizes, in the sky, let's call them Bs. They are not s...
The universe so far: If charged lepton fields are eliminated from the universe, charged pions become stable (having no decay path that preserves charge), replacing electrons to form bound "atomic"...
Writing about suspended cities within a planet's atmosphere! The story itself focuses on the air forces that fight for each of the hundreds of floating city states living in the sky, but that's her...
I had a vision of a creature that touched things, and wherever it touched, it left a mark opposite to the original colour. For example when it walked across the grass the grass had red footprints,...
In this question, I asked about a universe with (amongst other things) 4 large spatial dimensions. In 3 dimensions, we have the familiar periodic table with its familiar arrangement of atoms in th...
