Newest Questions
5,197 questions
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Are there documented pre-1800 examples of modern-style (pyramid) mechanical metronomes using BPM and the term “metronome”?
I am inviting others to help locate direct archival evidence that modern-shape mechanical metronomes existed prior to 1800 and were used by ordinary people, evaluated in the strictest modern sense.
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What factors contributed to the renaissance of number theory in the 1970s?
I'm interested in the factors (no pun intended) that contributed to the renaissance of number theory in the 1970s. I'm looking at quite a few classic papers where I don't see equivalent work in the ...
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How did Newton correctly estimate the Earth's mean density without knowing $G$?
In the Principia (Book III, Proposition X, Theorem X, in the 1846 Motte translation), Newton estimated the mean density of the Earth to be about
5-6 times that of water, remarkably close to the modern ...
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How were trig tables calculated, historically?
how were trig tables calculated, prior to electronics? Prior to calculus?
Is there an algorithm, like with roots?
Googling online, I see talk about either using Taylor series or some tricks with half ...
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Greek Measurement of Earth's Circumference, how did they synchronize time? [duplicate]
I understand the ancient Greeks approximated the circumference of Earth using geometry, a shadow cast on Earth from a stick, distance between two cities (~500 mi) and sighting a shadow on noon of the ...
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Did von Neumann have similar ideas to the Many-Worlds intepretation?
I would like to ask a question about this work (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/31226579_That_von_Neumann_Did_Not_Believe_in_a_Physical_Collapse) which was cited in this encyclopedia on Many-...
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Gnomon's shadow at local noon [closed]
Maybe a simple question, but I want to be sure. At local noon, north of the Tropic of Cancer, will a gnomon's shadow always point north?
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Clarification on the location of "the" Scotch Tape dispenser used in the winning of the Nobel Prize in Physics for graphene discovery
The 2010 Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded "for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene". While previous low-dimensional carbon allotropes (fullerenes, ...
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The first time the time-dependent Schrödinger equation was written
I am going through Erwin Schrödinger's original papers Quantisation as a Problem of Proper Values I.-IV. (QPPV) (albeit in English) and I am curious about when the actual date was the time-dependent ...
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Was there a MIX (assembly language) user group
I recently spent some time studying Volume 1 of Donald Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming series. I only have access to the second edition, which was published in 1973, but I noticed an ...
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Was computational physics the first application of modern computers in science?
The Wikipedia page of Computational physics claims that:
Historically, computational physics was the first application of modern computers in science
This sentence has no citation. The next sentence ...
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When and in what context did numerical notation begin to explicitly include measurement units (e.g. “3 ft”, “2 miles”)?
In modern scientific and technical notation, numerical values are routinely written together with explicit abbreviated unit symbols (for example, 3 ft, 2 mi, 5 lb), forming a single semantic object ...
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Where was Gosper's approximation for the factorial first published?
The following approximation to the factorial, which is derivative of Stirling's formula but more accurate, is commonly (e.g. by MathWorld) attributed to Bill Gosper:
$$ n! \approx \left(\frac{n}{e}\...
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Cavendish Gravity Experiments: "Experiments to Determine the Density of the Earth" 1798?
Does anyone know where to find the article by Henry Cavendish "Experiments to Determine the Density of the Earth” 1798 from Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society?
I think it's around 50 ...
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Has physicist Yakir Aharonov ever accepted the Many Worlds interpretation as plausible or interesting throughout his career?
I am making a biography of well renowned physicists and their views in some of the problems in theoretical physics
Israeli physicist Yakir Aharonov is one of them and concerning the many worlds ...
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