*ban
New Physicist
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tW2O-feuZM

An engineer wakes in the night and finds his waste basket on fire. He grabs the biggest bucket he can, fills it with water, and dumps it on the fire. He makes a mess. The fire is out.

A physicist wakes in the night and finds his waste basket on fire. He does a quick calculation of how much water is required, measures it approximately, and dumps it on the fire. He's pretty neat. The fire might be out.

A mathematician wakes in the night and finds his waste basket on fire. He grabs a pencil and paper, satisfies himself that a solution exists, throws the paper in the basket, and goes peacefully back to sleep.

There are some places that do use the clear boards, but I agree they are pretty impractical IRL.
And why wouldn't an accountant just be using Excel (or similar), instead of writing columns of numbers on a board? Even if this savant character never makes a math error, it takes way longer just writing everything down rather than keying it in.
A physicist or mathematician solving very long equations makes sense to use whiteboard or chalkboard, but not an accountant.

Here's a hilarious bit of news you might enjoy.....

LONDON (The Borowitz Report)—The theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking angered supporters of Donald J. Trump on Monday by responding to a question about the billionaire with a baffling array of long words.

Speaking to a television interviewer in London, Hawking called Trump “a demagogue who seems to appeal to the lowest common denominator,” a statement that many Trump supporters believed was intentionally designed to confuse them.

Moments after Hawking made the remark, Google reported a sharp increase in searches for the terms “demagogue,” “denominator,” and “Stephen Hawking.”

“For a so-called genius, this was an epic fail,” Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, said. “If Professor Hawking wants to do some damage, maybe he should try talking in English next time.”

Later in the day, Hawking attempted to clarify his remark about the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee, telling a reporter, “Trump bad man. Real bad man.”

If I'm doing the math correctly, the universe is expanding at around 46 miles per second, which is around 165,000 mph. Is there some reason why humans could not overcome this speed limit? It doesn't seem that exceptionally fast (no where near as fast as the speed of light), and if you accelerate slowly to it, like over several days or weeks, the g-forces involved wouldn't be that extreme, would they? The video didn't really explain why we could never go fast enough to overcome the expansion rate.

Also, I thought most theortical physicists like Stephen Hawking believe that in the future technology could advance enough to allow us bend space-time and hence travel "faster than the speed of light" without actually travelling faster than the speed of light, basically like folding a piece of paper and sticking a pin through both sides. When you lay the paper down flat, the two holes will seem quite far away from each other, but when you fold the paper, the holes are right next to each other. Our current understanding of physics doesn't rule out the possibility (at least from a mathematical perspective) although generating the energy necessary to perform such a feat would of course be problematic.

I seriously doubt most nuclear physicists in Iran thinks that they're in a fight with anything. They're probably just doing research.

Despite what western media might want to portray, Iran has not been developing nuclear weapons.

Ask a cute physicist.

First of all, those are two completely different questions. What happens (presumably you mean after death?) doesn't necessarily have anything to do with why we are here.

It could be that nothing happens after death, but there is still some grand purpose to existence. Or it could be that there's an afterlife, but the universe itself is meaningless.

As to what do I really know? The answer is, of course, nothing. No-one can really know anything about what happens outside of our existence and anyone who tells you they do is either lying or delusional.

However we can make an educated guess (and not even a "so called" one, a real one based on centuries learning about the universe we inhabit) Every time we make a new discovery, it has turned out to have a natural explanation. As we learn more, the "god of the gaps" has grown smaller and smaller, to the point where we know that even if there is some mystical force underlying the universe, it has no measurable effect on it.

*related=http://videosift.com/video/Physicist-Sean-Carroll-refutes-supernatural-beliefs

If our consciousness really does continue after our physical bodies die, there has to be a mechanism for it, and there is zero evidence of any such mechanism.

It could be that we simply lack the tools or the understanding to detect this, but there isn't even anything leading us to ask the question (e.g. an unexplained phenomena that would prompt us to investigate a hypothesis that might lead to a theory).

As to why we are here? From a scientific point of view, there's no evidence to suggest there is a reason to anything. The universe just is. From a philosophical point of view, I've always liked Carl Sagan's idea that "we are a way for the cosmos to know itself".

TL;DR We really know nothing, but it's pretty unlikely that anything happens after death or that there is a reason we are here.

Physicist Sean Carroll refutes supernatural beliefs has been added as a related post - related requested by ChaosEngine.

As I understand it, there were actually quite a number of female programmers in the 60's and into the 70's particularly at NASA and in the defense industry. The work started off as converting mathematical equations to machine instructions and then encoding them on punch cards, and this was seen as sort of 'secretarial' work so there wasn't a lot of objection to women doing it (they typically were well educated and had degrees in mathematics, but this was as far as they could go professionally). The mathematical equations were written by physicists and mechanical engineers ("men's work"), but it was the people doing the encoding who where the first proper computer programmers as this became a profession unto itself.

I like the idea of a bunch of physicists sitting around drinking beer and saying "dude what if there were like a million universes". I would predict however it wasn't beer they were drinking...it was instead pot they were smoking. Seems more reasonable to my personal understanding of weed and alcohol.

I'm quite enjoying this conversation.

NOMA as in how Dawkins criticises NOMA?

I think there's a subtle distinction between what NDGT is saying and NOMA, which is that i don't think he suggested that any religion should be given the position to present what they know as fact. He seemed to suggest that the American physicists he knows, if they are shall we say 'spiritual' then they are spiritual in a more open sense than being classed as any particular religion. Perhaps in the sense that they see no reason for there NOT to be different realities or even that the universe is not a part of something else. In that way they may be open to spirituality even if just in a general well-being sense, and use religious texts as interesting moralistic tales. If you believe in the possibility of something greater than yourself and that it is abstract and unlike anything we can imagine, then you could use the christian god as a 'good enough' placeholder, even though you believe in the physical universe as being separate to 'god'.

At the end of the day, no matter how cutting Dawkins can be, he himself knows that you can't prove anything about this god or that god, and ultimately anything to do with why there is this reality nor what any alternative might be. He's just a guy with opinions about how this place works too, and he's certainly not the smartest of us to ever have been.

Might you be putting too much focus on the (i think facetious) comment that it teaches how to go to heaven not how the heavens go? I think, or rather hope, that he was trying to say that there's no way to tell one way or the other, but he can understand why people feel comforted by it, why some people are moved by their own unique experiences to feel that way. Also that you can say you subscribe to something even whilst you hold your own completely modified version of it according to what you experience in this reality!

I'm going to assume that this is the Lorentz force, because it's the principle that involves magnetic and electric fields. But there are setups that can use subtleties of magnetic and electric fields, it can be very complicated. Any physicist rather than astronomer might be able to explain this better... or spot subtleties.

If you notice, it only starts moving once the back magnet has touched the wire. Which i think means that the wire is used to carry the current from the battery, with the magnets providing the magnetic field for the Lorentz force to drive the train. Effectively the force is felt by the electrons travelling in the wire (F = q(E + v x B), x being vector product, cross product), but there is an equal and opposite force to be felt by the 'train'; so it travels along. If you watch, it does look like the wire is responding - i'm pretty sure the small track would have shot off to the right if he hadn't held it, and it moves as the train approaches in the longer track.

So, circuit is set up by the the wire contacting between battery terminals, current flows in a circular fashion (mostly, assuming adjacent loops don't short). Magnetic field will emanate out from the battery on average radially, i assume (this is a simplification but a reasonably safe one), so the resulting cross product - and therefore direction of the force - acts along the remaining perpendicular direction to those, ie. straight up or down the loop depending on which terminal is leading.

If you want to see how that works, you can use the right hand rule. First finger is the direction of the electron's velocity (which is traversing loops so constantly changing in a circular manner), middle finger the direction of magnetic field which always comes out radially from the middle of the coil or track, thumb F the resultant force always points along the loop - make your first finger point in all directions of a circle, keep your middle finger pointing radially out relative to your first finger, and you will notice your thumb always points the same way, no matter how v changes circularly.

It is reasonable to assume that other factors are involved, probably a current is induced into the coil as the battery moves - the battery carries a magnetic field cos of the magnets, so we then have a moving/changing magnetic field in the presence of a wire; it should induce a current which would create a magnetic field in opposition to the field of the magnets.. and so on. But i think the Lorentz force is what provides most of the motion.

Not a credentialed physicist, but I'll give it a shot.
The metallic magnets make contact with the positive and negative on the battery and feed electricity to the coil, that induces a magnetic field in the coil. With the magnets arranged properly, the field in the coil likely attracts the 'front' one and repels the 'rear' one, making the 'train' move, and taking the induced field with it.

(If I'm wrong, please correct me)