Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2016 November 2

= November 2 =

What could you drill into that would make sparks?
If you wanted to make sparks from a substrate while drilling into it with an ordinary metal or masonry drill bit, what could you choose to drill into? Flint stone? Fire steel? Seans Potato Business 12:11, 2 November 2016 (UTC)
 * Flint will do it. The sparks you see are tiny bits of burning steel from the drill. There are not many things you could drill into with a masonry drill that will provide sparks of themselves, because few such things hard and resistant enough to generate the heat will then burn.
 * Drilling wood can often give a fire. Produce easily flammable thin shavings as tinder, then either frictional heating (especially with a blunt drill) or friction heating against a screw or nail hidden in the wood can cause a fire, if not sparks.
 * There are a few metals which are sufficiently close to being pyrophoric in powders or thin sections that just drilling them can give a risk of fire, from hot swarf igniting itself. Andy Dingley (talk) 15:18, 2 November 2016 (UTC)


 * If you are interested in other easy ways to make a lot of sparks for show, demonstration or experimentation, an angle grinder is a common tool of choice, as in e.g. various "grinder girl" acts. SemanticMantis (talk) 15:59, 2 November 2016 (UTC)
 * An angle grinder isn't a drill. It has a hard, vitreous grit (thus an easy source of high temperature), often used on a metal. You're mostly seeing the metal burning, not the disc. If you grind the disc into stone you will see "sparks" too, but these are mostly incandescent stone grains (and dimmer) rather than grains that are actually burning, thus would be brighter.
 * I've made angle grinder underwear for stage use. It's thin titanium sheet over (wider) rubber, over underwear. Rubber, with canvas reinforcing as used for conveyor belts, is relatively grinder proof. Don't slip though.
 * Motorcycle "knee slider" pads are plastic (hockey puck material) pads to go on the knees of a racing suit. They can have titanium studs set into them, for extra sparkinesss. Andy Dingley (talk) 16:47, 2 November 2016 (UTC)

Human (How far can a human eye see?)
How far can a human eye see — Preceding unsigned comment added by Orochiha (talk • contribs) 14:24, 2 November 2016 (UTC)
 * The Andromeda Galaxy is visible to most people. It is 2.5 million light-years away.  -- Jayron 32 14:55, 2 November 2016 (UTC)


 * Expanding on the answer above, there is no real distance limit to human vision (only the observable universe), only a brightness limit. Things aren't too far away, they're too dim. We can see galaxies from millions of lightyears away, but in a completely unlit room, you can't see something even if it's right in front of your eye. In the atmosphere, things like haze and other atmospheric disturbances don't help either. The human eye is pretty remarkable, it can detect a single photon, and will signal after only a few of them in succession. (Convinced I posted this before, but seems to have disappeared...) Fgf10 (talk) 16:06, 2 November 2016 (UTC)
 * The other thing to remember is that vision also involves the brain. Because of the process our brains do known as Neural adaptation, vision adjusts based on the environment, not just on the specific stimulus.  The classic example is olfactory fatigue, where you stop "smelling" an odor after you've been accustomed to it.  Vision works the same way, as well: A tiny spark in a completely darkened room will appear brighter than the same spark in a well-lit room.  Even if the same number of photons strike your retina as a result of that same spark in both sets of conditions; you will register them as being of different brightness because of the environment that they are in.  The limits of human perception and senses are highly contextual, and not based solely on absolutes.  -- Jayron 32 17:26, 2 November 2016 (UTC)


 * As far as being able to spot a distant object, Brian Skiff has explained here how you can observe the galaxy Messier 81 at a distance of 11.8 million lightyears with the naked-eye. Now, as mentioned here people with very good night vision can see stars up to magnitude 8.5. Galaxies need to be a lot brighter than this to be spotted because they are extended objects. The most distant objects that are in theory visible to the naked eye are not galaxies, but gamma-ray bursts, the current record is held by GRB 080319B at a distance of 7.5 billion lightyears which was visible for 30 seconds if you happened to look in the right direction. The peak magnitude was 5.8, so in principle one can have even more distant naked-eye visible gamma-ray bursts. Count Iblis (talk) 18:33, 2 November 2016 (UTC)
 * Obscuration haze limits how far you can see to distant mountains. It's more noticeable if you are looking to the horizon. On that note, see horizon distance for how far the horizon is; its related to your distance above sea level. LongHairedFop (talk) 19:54, 2 November 2016 (UTC)


 * See visibility. It's an extrinsic limit, but still relevant, and much more of a life and death question than some other issues. :μηδείς (talk) 18:04, 3 November 2016 (UTC)


 * The question should be how far photons can travel. Hofhof (talk) 20:28, 3 November 2016 (UTC)


 * Wrong. The visible universe is much smaller than the entire universe, and photons can travel where we cannot see them. μηδείς (talk) 03:19, 4 November 2016 (UTC)
 * Technically, there are only two places in the entire cosmos where you can see a photon. :) Wnt (talk) 12:34, 5 November 2016 (UTC)


 * Not wrong. That does not change the potential top distance we can see. It's just that we are not exploiting all our potential. Hofhof (talk) 00:34, 8 November 2016 (UTC)

Feynman Lectures. Lecture 32. Ch. 32-4, 32-5
"32–4Independent sources ... Another case in which the interference averages out is that in which, instead of having only two sources, we have many. In this case, we would write the expression for A2R as the sum of a whole lot of amplitudes, complex numbers, squared, and we would get the square of each one, all added together, plus cross terms between every pair, and if the circumstances are such that the latter average out, then there will be no effects of interference. It may be that the various sources are located in such random positions that, although the phase difference between A2 and A3 is also definite, it is very different from that between A1 and A2, etc. So we would get a whole lot of cosines, many plus, many minus, all averaging out. So it is that in many circumstances we do not see the effects of interference, but see only a collective, total intensity equal to the sum of all the intensities. 32–5Scattering of light The above leads us to an effect which occurs in air as a consequence of the irregular positions of the atoms. When we were discussing the index of refraction, we saw that an incoming beam of light will make the atoms radiate again. The electric field of the incoming beam drives the electrons up and down, and they radiate because of their acceleration. This scattered radiation combines to give a beam in the same direction as the incoming beam, but of somewhat different phase, and this is the origin of the index of refraction. But what can we say about the amount of re-radiated light in some other direction? Ordinarily, if the atoms are very beautifully located in a nice pattern, it is easy to show that we get nothing in other directions, because we are adding a lot of vectors with their phases always changing, and the result comes to zero. But if the objects are randomly located, then the total intensity in any direction is the sum of the intensities that are scattered by each atom, as we have just discussed. Furthermore, the atoms in a gas are in actual motion, so that although the relative phase of two atoms is a definite amount now, later the phase would be quite different, and therefore each cosine term will average out. Therefore, to find out how much light is scattered in a given direction by a gas, we merely study the effects of one atom and multiply the intensity it radiates by the number of atoms."

Explain, please, why if atoms are randomly located only cosines average out?? If phase differences are not definite, phases are also all different. So whole vectors (Fig. 29–9) must average out. In Ch. 32-5 Feynman says that vectors can average out, but only in solids with beautiful pattern. But in beautiful pattern (say cubic lattice) all phase differences of adjacent layers are constant and phases of single layer atoms' oscillations are also constant.
 * In Ch. 32-4 does Feynman mean that phases of vectors are constant in time?Username160611000000 (talk) 15:57, 2 November 2016 (UTC)
 * I don't see him saying the light is scattered non-uniformly there - he gets to the blue sky on the basis that light at different frequencies is scattered by different degrees. The bluer light moves the electrons in any given atom around more (per unit energy) than the redder light; therefore, it is scattered more.  I think.
 * There's actually something more intriguing in this chapter - the statement in 32-1 that it is unknown what the force from an electron pushes against when it resists acceleration due to its electromagnetic radiation. I find myself wondering if it might push against the same thing an Emdrive pushes against. Wnt (talk) 21:43, 2 November 2016 (UTC)
 * But what can we say about the amount of re-radiated light in some other direction? Ordinarily, if the atoms are very beautifully located in a nice pattern, it is easy to show that we get nothing in other directions, because we are adding a lot of vectors with their phases always changing, and the result comes to zero. - It seems some materials can absorb radiation from side face of crystal, I'm not sure. But I still don't understand in case of sky (where atoms are randomly located), why does not initial phase of atoms average out? If atoms are located randomly, then incident light reaches each atom in different time, so drives electrons with different initial phase(actually initial phase is same as initial phase of incident wave but at any moment of time every atom will have absolutely random total phase as function of its random position). Then according to Fig. 29–9 we should add all vectors. Each vector has random angle from 0 to 360°. When cosines average out, then we get (Total Intensity) = (Intensity from one atom)•(Number of atoms) or AR2=A12+A22+...=A2 • N . So the resultant sum vector must have length √(Number of atoms). Is there some rule that adding many vectors of equal length (say 1 unit) with random angles, sum-vector's length must be √(Number of vectors) units?? Maybe, random walk could be applied? Username160611000000 (talk) 06:44, 3 November 2016 (UTC)
 * Oh boy, that's a tough one after all. I mean, the spots on a piece of film used for crystallography are not mathematical points - there's some fuzziness about it, and I was thinking that meant it wasn't truly zero when misaligned, but a source like  does very little to encourage such thinking.  Intuitively, I'd think that if you take a crystal and smash it into a bunch of little pieces before you do the crystallography, you have the little dots scattered out all over the film with the limit case of a universal low background of scattering.  But why would the phases in a misaligned crystal be more random and cancel out better than the phases in a smashed crystal?  I wonder if it has to do with them not being random - in the misaligned crystal you have atoms in a neat series, with every phase represented equally, whereas in a gas I suppose by chance you might have more at one phase than another.  But that's probably not it... hmmm... Wnt (talk) 01:04, 4 November 2016 (UTC)