Stephen Wolfram's advice to students is shocking: don't major in computer science.

He thinks it's a huge mistake.

CS departments have become trade schools for low-level programming. You're learning the modern equivalent of Assembly Language—skills that will be totally automated away.

The real intellectual frontier isn't learning to code, it's learning to think computationally.

Wolfram's advice: major in "Computational X".

Take any field—biology, archaeology, linguistics—and apply the computational paradigm to it. That's where all the low-hanging fruit and genuinely new discoveries are.

If you just want a degree that exports well to any field, his pick is even more surprising: Physics.

Why? Because it teaches a general, quantitative methodology for modeling the world. It’s a framework for thinking, not a temporary skill.

📽️ Full interview here: link.

What do you think? Is he right — is CS already outdated? Should more students be learning to think computationally instead of just learning to code?

I've been reading around the subject and get the impression that there is doubt over whether nuclear bombs (or any other cause of massive firestorms) actually could/would cause a nuclear winter. Is there consensus among scientists?

I am building a mini (tabletop size) cold frame in my back yard to grow a few seedlings for houseplants. Some people recommend putting jugs of water inside to help it stay warmer at night when it gets cold out. Apparently this has something to do with the specific heat of water.

My question is: is water the best material for this purpose or are there other materials that have even higher specific heat that would be more efficient?

Thanks!

puzzle about impulse symmetry in moving frames" Imagine two identical masses launched in opposite directions on a platform moving at velocity V relative to the CMB. Each enters an EM accelerator that applies force F over distance d.
In the rest frame, one mass has speed V+u, the other V−u → different Δt → different impulse J=FΔt.
But in the platform frame, symmetry suggests equal impulses and no net recoil.
How does Newtonian or relativistic mechanics ensure the net force on the platform is zero? Is there a transformation I’m missing

Physics is difficult for me. I know space is cold as heck. But my partner said something about a video that he watched that was about why you can't use a submarine in space, and it was because you would end up dying from overheating if you lived long enough. How would that happen? How can it be hot and cold in space? Am i misunderstanding? Thank you!

Lately I‘ve been wondering about the relativity of speed while traveling near-lightspeed. What gets repeated quite often is how time is different for both observer and traveller but that would mean that the speed is as well. I am guessing acceleration would be as well (if the traveller is accelerating) at the moment.

So let‘s say someone is traveling at 0.999 light speed (from the point of observer) but since time passes differently for him and the distance stays the same (i hope this is not the part where I am missing something) that would mean that the traveller would actually experience completely different speed from his PoV, right?

How far away would you have to be for Earth like gravity? At what distance would it kill you? What would its mass be?

What would happen to the energy if you shot a laser beam into it?

What would happen if you shot huge amounts of antimatter into it?

I've learnt that when light of some frequency Higher than threshold frequency is incident on cathode plate (in discharge tube setup), photoelectrons are ejected and photo current flows. If the intensity in increased, current will also increase. But if we increase frequency, then will current increase or not? I've tried asking Google, but most answers say saturation current is independent of frequency (which I know why) or that increasing frequency doesn't do anything, since 1 photon only ejects one electron. But, shouldn't the kinetic energy of photoelectrons increase by increasing frequency? So, more electrons can paas the space charge and reach anode, this generating more current?

I’ve read that 7mA across the heart is enough to kill. Also, the internal resistance not including skin can be as low as 300 ohms. So calculating the voltage that could kill would be .007 * 300 =2.1 volts. So does this mean a standard 1.5V battery is nearly enough to kill you if you somehow happened to touch both ends to a wound on each hand, bypassing the skin’s resistance?

So I've read alot of the other posts on this topic and they did answer alot of the more basic questions I had, thanks! But there's one thing I'm still confused about. The supposed solution to the twin paradox where both clocks would "appear slower" from the others POV, is that one accelerated to get up to speed, and that is absolute, not relative, since it's experiencing a force (which is equivalent to gravity), but if this is the case, how come the dilation effect doesn't just apply to the accelerating/deceleration portion of the trip? For example the Voyager 1 probe has experienced something like a good 2 full seconds of time dilation compared to Earth since it's launch, due to all that time traveling despite the speed itself being small compared to c. But if acceleration is the absolute factor that causes the dilation for one object and not the other, why would all those years at a constant speed then add up to those couple seconds? I feel like I'm missing something obvious here but can't figure it out lol.

2nd question, since acceleration/speed, gravity, and even rotation all add a time dilating effect on an object, what happens if you combine all 3? Say you send a probe at near the speed of light in an extremely close orbit near the event horizon of a black hole, and then somehow have it spin as fast as a pulsar or something. So that you nearly max out all 3 gravity effects at once (acceleration/speed, high gravitational field, and rotation), would these add up to something more than c, or would it not be possible to max out all 3 forces like that in the first place due to the combined vectors exceeding the equivalent of c? Thanks!

I am asking here because I want a simpler explanation than what I am finding online. If you have a regular tetrahedron uniform in density and the density is less than the liquid, say water, then will it float with one vertex down and three above the surface? One vertex above the surface and three down? What is the orientation it will take on? Edge up? Help please and thank you!

I used to believe that plasma would allow current to flow at a super low resistance but I made a different post here yesterday, and the answers made it seem like that isn’t the case.

Air is less dense than a copper wire, so I’d imagine there’d be comparatively less charge carriers along an electrical arc, limiting the current somewhat.

I know that the electrons in copper are delocalized and provide a much better path to conduct electricity than air. My understanding is that plasma is somewhat similar in terms of delocalized charge carriers.

I think that my understanding of electrical resistance is underdeveloped. I learned it was compatible to a flow constriction (like in the classic comparison of current and voltage to water pressure and volume moved respectively). I love heuristics but I know they limit the depth of the real phenomenon. Based on that I viewed resistance as a limitation of how many electrons can flow through a conductor, limiting current.

This doesn’t account for the heat generation though, perhaps collisions of electrons and cations?

My background relies on electrostatics for biomolecule interactions so when electrons move I am in the dark.

So gravity is acceleration.

If you are in a rotating body. Like scifi does for artificial gravity in space craft. Do the forces amplify if you near a large mass? Or is "Gravity literally so weak" that it does not matter past a certain point. **see footnote.

If so what is that point? Would think this is already done as it would kind of have to do with how much force an astronaut can take right? First for escaping orbit and then transorbital.

I think there is a number... and depending on the question I bet in Newtonian math it comes around .65

**(i)I got so mad at my physics teacher when he called gravity the weakest force in the universe. Enough of it messes with light and time, both of which are immutable.(/i)

edited to hopefully be a bit more concise, plus I understand it now, thank you all

So you have a train parallel to a platform/ground, and the train (which observer O' sits) in passes by the platform (which observer O is on) at a fast speed to the right.

At the instant O' passes by O, 2 lightning bolts strike the front and back of the train. The event in which one bolt strikes the front of the train is A. The event in which the other bolt strikes the back of the train is B.

From the platform, O will obviously see both flashes travel at speed c over the same distance from the same initial time, so O will say "I saw A and B at the same time." From the frame of O however, they think "The train O' is on is speeding into flash A, so they must see flash A before B."

However, this cannot be the truth for O'*. In the frame of O', the speed of light from both A and B must be c. To O on the platform, O' on the train appears to be speeding into flash A and away from flash B--but for O', the speeds of flashes of light A and B cannot be different than c. So what does O' see?** Does O' say they saw A and B simultaneously?** Do the flashes from A and B travel equal distances in the frame of O'?***

* So I learned that this can be the truth for O', but it's just that in their frame, A and B weren't simultaneously occurring. Thanks for the help!

** O' indeed observes that A arrives before B. O measures that flashes from B will be seen by O' before A. For O' to have the same measurement, flash A must begin BEFORE flash B in the first place. Whereas in frame O where A and B occur simultaneously, frame O' will have A occur before B.

*** I meant to ask if they travel equal distances to REACH the observer O', as measured by O'. This is true. They just start at different times as I said

Hi! I currently learned in my chemistry course a bit about radioactive decay, including beta+ decay when a proton decays into a neutron, positron, and an electron neutrino (if I'm not mistaken. Correct me if I did a mistake). But a proton has a lower mass than a neutron, so how can it decay into a neutron, and positron, if mass cannot be created?

I understand the premise that as objects increase in speed relative to a stationary observer, the slower time passes for the moving object.

But, I'm confused about how "moving" and "stationary" are established if all motion is relative.

I guess that may sound like a dumb question, so, maybe I'm just missing a key concept.

If motion is relative, then, to the "moving observer", they are not really moving, everything else is moving, right? The moving observer perceives that they are stationary, just as the "stationary observer" perceives that they are stationary (even though they may be moving on a rotating planet orbiting a star rotating around a galactic center.)

So, why does the "moving observer" see a "stationary object" experience time speeding up, when to the "moving observer" the "stationary object" is actually the "moving object" from their frame, just as the "stationary observer" sees the "moving object" experience time slowing down?

I'm sorry if this is convoluted. I think I'm just suddenly unsure of how relative motion really works. It seems there is objective or absolute motion, since, the thing actually moving is the thing that experiences the time dilation.

Does it have to do with a "universal frame"?

edit: Thank you everyone for the responses. I think I get my misunderstanding - I wasn't understanding acceleration correctly. I'll look more into it to try to understand (and come back if I'm still confused.) Thank you all again!

Electrons are treated like point particles, but if an electron was too small, wouldn't it go under the Schwarzschild radius for its mass and collapse into a black hole?

I'm just a layman enthusiast. So, I've heard it mentioned several times that, in essence the singularity at the centre of a black hole would take you to the end of time. That is, the notion that as you get closer and closer to the black hole, and after entering it towards the singularity, the outside world, relative to you, moves faster and faster, decade, centuries, millennia, billions of years passing "outside" in the blink of your eye and that the singularity represents a kind of infinite relative speed.

However, as I think about this I have to wonder, black holes do not exist indefinitely, they evaporate over time, so would the singularity, instead of taking you to "the end of time", not just instantly take you to the moment of its complete evaporation?

(Obviously, I realise you'd be dead and turned into particles long before any of this, I'm talking in the hypothetical magically invincible observer way.)

Hi all. I was thinking about perpetual motion machines. Why wouldn't this one work? Imagine a ball encased into a tube. Ball falls down due to gravitational force, and a magnet "strikes" the ball up with enough strength to get to the original point + enough to overcome the friction and other forms of energy loss in the process. Then the ball sets in the original position, and cycle repeats.

I'm trying to figure out why it wouldn't work perpetually, can you help me? Thanks!

Im in 12th, preparing for neet(an entrance exam for med school), didn’t study enough in 11th, even a single physics chapter is not fully completed. Give me tips on how to make approach in the question. Shall i practice more questions or something else?

Hello,

Like the title says, I'm trying to learn circuits on my own right now. I've actually taken some college physics (but I was a civil engineering major so outside of the basic courses, which I barely passed due to being 18 and stupid, I mainly took statics). I am now applying to grad schools with the goal of working in an animal lab, and most of the faculty that I've contacted or looked into seem to make their own operant chambers and code them themselves.

My reason for studying this is pretty specific to that (although maybe I am also using it as an excuse to just learn more physics, with a more matured attitude and newfound obsession than when I was a teenager lol).

I'm using my old college physics textbook as my main resource (a 1000+-paged tome - Douglas C. Giancoli's 7th edition of: Physics), but would especially like some sort of lab-manual or lab exercises that I could do to practice. Thank you!

Let's imagine you are bicycling and that you can't see or hear anything. Would you be able to tell the difference between bicycling fast or bicycling slowly into a strong wind? Assuming the wind is perfectly steady.

I have an interest in scientific visualization and the kinds of intuition it can provide. For instance molecular orbitals are now a common way to visually explain chemical bonds and chemistry software has trivialized their calculation and visualization. For the past few years i occasionally do a cursory search for something similar that could elucidate nuclear structure but it seems the only visualization coming up is Leinweber's from circa 2004. So, I have two questions. One given that over the past 20 years computational power and simulation algorithms in many domains have improved, is there some newer material that you would suggest looking at?

And if so is there something equivalent to molecular orbitals that can better communicate the structure of the nucleus. For example if we have a deuterium nucleus is there an orbital like function for the proton and neutron positions, are there any spatial symmetries or structures or is it a chaotic jiggling mess of quarks / gluons ?

I’m trying to think of a way to emit light from a moving object traveling at relativistic speeds. I am working with a sort of room-scale streak camera that can already observe light moving, and I’d love to be able to do a demo demonstrating time dilation/length contraction in some way, but that requires more than a light blinking on and off - that requires an actual THING moving.

The most obvious solution that comes to mind is to use a charged particle as the object, which would be repeatable so it could be filmed many many times by the streak camera, but also easily acceleratable with an electron gun or ion gun.

However, I can’t think of a way to reliably get a particle to emit light itself. I think if I just shot electrons through rarefied gas, it’d be the gas that glowed, not the electron, so you wouldn’t receive Doppler shifted light and the “time dilation” demo would be meaningless.

Does anybody have any fun ideas, extremely light (accelerable) and excitable molecules that emit in the optical?