this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2025
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Science Memes

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

Lol this one was great, thanks for sharing. My partner teaches physics and I do EE on the side, I like rubbing these in her face sometimes.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago

That's revolting.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Love how there are so many actual solutions in The comments

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago

Bet they're all engineers.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago

But not really. At this level of precision, the heat from electricity passing through it would throw off the actual resistance value.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago
[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 weeks ago

This implies a physicist would do anything practical ever

[–] [email protected] 23 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Simple, all you need is a 6 ohm resistor and a 0.18457216 ohm resistor in series.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago

No just get a bunch in parallel!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago

And no spherical cows either??

[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

A 11.8 and a 13 in parallel is 6.1854838709677 which is 0.01% off from that resistance. Of course even using matched 1% would screw you as soon as someone opens the door.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

You could get exactly 6.1854838709677 for an instantaneous moment by heating up a 6ohm resistor.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago

So you just need to figure out the precise amount of prewarming, then subsequently cooling in coordination with the circuit's load to make sure it stays at the right temperature?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

miyazaki-laugh just now realizing that I missed this comm actually

[–] [email protected] 29 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (4 children)

I used to make shunt resistors out of a pencil and a piece of paper. Rub pencil all over paper, cut strips to size of required resistance.

EDIT: I mean megaohm resistors not shunt resistors. 20MOhm for DIY theramin.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago

That's cool, could you share some photos? The theramin I mean

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago

This is exactly how high precision resistors are calibrated. A laser is usually used to notch out bits of the resistor to tune it after it's made.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I made a potentiometer with paper and graphite clay once

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

Confuses me that anybody would downvote you for this. I've made makeshift capacitors out of rolled aluminum foil. It's dumb, but it worked for what I wanted (triggering a trackpad via stepper motors for testing microcontroller code.) Plus I just wanted to see if it even worked. Life = science experiments.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 weeks ago

I admire it but also...wtf lol

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

A 6.2R in parallel with a 2.5K is pretty close.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 weeks ago

Add in a 400k and you're better than most tolerances you can find

[–] [email protected] 66 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

First of all, why are they in the chip aisle looking for resistors? Everybody knows they're in the bread aisle...

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

He's going to make potato chip resistors to get the right number of course.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago

Careful, capacitors reduce ripples

[–] [email protected] 33 points 3 weeks ago

If you're breadboarding this, you've already lost

[–] [email protected] 27 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

What's the significance of that number? It's less than 0.1 away from tau, but somehow I doubt that's it...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I can't be arsed to check but I think it's 2 pi which is useful when dealing with sine waves.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

2 pi is tau, which is what I said it's less than 0.1 away from, but still not equal to.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

For me, it was this video. It came out shortly after I graduated high school, and though I was pretty good at maths, I struggled to really conceptualise the fundamental intuition behind trigonometric functions and the (polar) complex plane. Instead, I was relying on brute memorisation of the unit triangles. Learning about tau and how it relates just instantly caused everything to click with me.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

That's a fantastic video. I follow Numberphile but never saw this one, thanks for sharing.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I assumed the number is not significant, figure it's just supposed to mock the idea that physicists don't know what tolerances are.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago

An experimental physicist should know as far as I know meanwhile a real (theoretical) physicist would probably not even touch numbers that have those scary decimals.

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