I have neglected Andart II for some time, partly for the good reason of work (The Book is growing!), partly because I got a new addiction: answering (and asking) questions on Physics and Astronomy StackExchange. Very addictive, but also very educational. Here are links to some of the stuff I have been adding, which might be of interest to some readers.
- What are the limiting abundances of the elements at the end of the stelliferous era?
- Could life survive on a planet orbiting a neutron star?
- Are there places in space completely devoid of light? (I was surprised by this result, I thought there would always be galaxies visible to the naked eye)
- What will the last day of humanity look like?
- What is the radiative cooling rate at extremely low temperatures?
- Dielectric film statite: optimal mirroring for blackbody spectrum? (I think one can do better than my sketch)
- What is the theoretical efficiency of fusion? (Still, given the mass-energy conversion in accretion disks maybe we can skip it)
- Does accelerating cosmological expansion increase beam spread? (A problem for remote supercivilisations)
- What is the simplest way of measuring the thickness of a soap bubble? (It was very fun making the graph, but my attempts at making a more spectrally true one failed in Matlab)
- Isoperimetric inequality and mass
- Temperature of an object placed half way between sun and earth
- How were atoms able to form after the Big Bang?
- Why must Debye cooling eventually slow down? (Cooling of ultra-cold objects is weird)
- Is there an entropy cost for moving an object?
- Is the average temperature of a big accretion disk colder than a small one?
- Have we found all stable nuclear isomers? (Do you have a favourite nuclear isomer?)
- Why are there no ellipsoidal drums?
- Electric lamp and City electricity frequency
- Can one determine the speed of the rain from the shape of the rainbow? (Surprisingly, almost yes)
- How does the Venus flytrap count?
- Putting grams of antimatter in the atmosphere
- What angle gives the longest path for a projectile? (Simple question, tricky answer)
- Painting with a Pendulum: Would it be possible to graph the pattern?
- Where will the Goldilocks zone be when the Sun becomes a red giant?
- Position of neutral points (Modelling the field of a bar magnet is more complex than expected)
- Ways to make a star go supernova?
- When must an alien civilization send off a signal that can reach us today?
- Determining the value of Pi empirically
- Possible for bacteria to burst container?
- How would kinetic bombardment look like on impact to an observer on Earth’s surface? (I am so much going to use this in some roleplaying game scenario, despite my critique of the scheme)
- Why does the moon appear fairly flat to a naked eye?
- Is it possible to evaporate a gram of a transuranic element and if so how much energy would it take? (A bit of overview of strong heating)
- Why doesn’t paper tear into 3 pieces?
- How many times should an experiment be repeated?
- Asteroid hopping (It takes a lot of skill)
- Strange ice found in my garden (this one and the next one gave me a surprising number of points and badges)
- Frost bubble formation
- How were atoms able to form after the big bang? (I was surprised by my equilibration time estimate being about two weeks)