Physics/maths Question

Arcade Fire said:
It's probably worth pointing out that a centimetre isn't a unit of area either. ;)
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I KNEW someone was going to say that, i just didn't bother cluttering it up with ^2 at the end of every measurement
 
Arcade Fire said:
It's probably worth pointing out that a centimetre isn't a unit of area either. ;)
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...and also that the word is hypothetical, not "hyperthetical". I wouldn't want to allow the proliferation of such an error, so feel obliged to point this out
 
Grrrrr said:
It's probably worth pointing out to half the people in this thread that an atom isn't a unit of area.

Taking the perfect hyperthetical (impossible) scenario the OP stated. From a small distance you could say: the sphere is touching less than 1cm of the surface, so you look a little closer and see it is actually touching less than 1mm of the surface, so you look a little closer and see it touching less that 1nanometre of the surface, no matter how close you keep looking is will always be touching less than a certain area, i.e. it's tending to 0. So i guess you could argue they arent touching at all!
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I like this one the best. Leave it to OcUK to demonstrate that spheres hover by nature. :D


1) 0.9 = 1
2) Two sandwiches
3) Spheres hover naturally

Next!
 
They wouldn't touch at all, for the same reason that they cannot pass through each other. The atoms would remain a set distance apart, obviously depending on the materials involved.
 
SpeedFreak said:
They wouldn't touch at all, for the same reason that they cannot pass through each other. The atoms would remain a set distance apart, obviously depending on the materials involved.
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You're missing the point:
Inquisitor said:
You can't work on the assumption that the ball is made up of particles; if it is, then it's not a perfect sphere by definition. The only way it can be a perfect sphere is if it is a perfect solid (which doesn't really make a huge amount of sense). If the ball is perfectly spherical, then there'd be 0 (or infinitessimal) area of the ball in contact with the surface. Of course, this makes no sense in reality, but then, the neither does the question ;).
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Arcade Fire said:
For an absolutely perfect sphere resting on an absolutely smooth plane, the answer is that the area of the sphere touching the plane is zero, no matter how big the sphere is.

It's a stupid answer, but then it's a stupid question. ;)
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;)
 
the main problem with the question is that your asking to throw away so many basic laws of physics and reality that you could pretty much make up any answer = and thus my new answer is pineapple :)
 
SiD the Turtle said:
Uh, aren't they both? (Particle wave duality?)
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Good memory. ;)

I prefer to think of them as neither - they just have some particle-like properties and some wave-like properties. Given that 'particles' and 'waves' are just mathematical idealisations, it seems a bit silly to talk about fundamental particles, atoms etc. as 'being' particles or waves. They are what they are - quantum objects. It's just that occasionally we find a particle description or a wave description helps us to talk about them and model them. Sometimes neither description is good enough, which is when we need the quantum description.

Blurble...
 
R B CUSTOMS said:
this one has been bugging me for years and none of my teachers at school seemed to know.
here goes :)

Hyperthetically speaking: ( ideal situation)

if you had a perfectly FLAT, SMOOTH surface

and an absolutly PERFECT sphere / ball of about 10 CM in diametre

you rest the ball onto the perfect surface. how much of the ball is touchign the surface?


__ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __

Part 2

if you had the same scenario as above, but this time the ball was say 100CM in diameter.
how much of the ball would be touching? would it be more than that of the smaller ball ?
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Seeing as there have been only a limited number of variables defined and it is
incorrect to place assumptions into the equation (We all know what they say about assumptions), from where I am sitting it is an impossible question to answer similar to "how long is a piece of string".

It does introduce a more interesting question, one that inevitably ends up in an argument of semantics, but does anything actually touch?
 
Nelson said:
Doesn't particle-wave duality only apply to light, ie photons?
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IIRC it includes all objects. i.e. all matter and light exhibits both wave and particle properties although only at an atomic scale with 'solid' matter.
 
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