Talk:669: Experiment

I'm a science grad student, so these kinds of comics in particular I'm having fun writing for... (now if only I were writing my dissertation instead...) Bplimley (talk) 10:18, 7 April 2013 (UTC)

You're turning these out really quickly. This is good stuff! Davidy²²[talk] 10:19, 7 April 2013 (UTC)

One can throw something to change one's motion in a frictionless vacuum.Username2 (talk) 00:40, 27 July 2020 (UTC) If the black hat REALLY cared about physics, he would have put a spherical cow inside the frictionless vacuum room. 172.68.138.178 20:43, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

the infinite plane of uniform density might be a reference to Nerd Sniping - Bb777 (talk) 23:05, 2 March 2025 (UTC)

356: Nerd Sniping - Bb777 (talk) 23:06, 2 March 2025 (UTC)

I have a question about this comic. Correct me if I'm wrong, but friction isn't affected (or effected, see xkcd 326: Effect an Effect) by the presence of air, so wouldn't the physicist still be able to walk? He still would die, though, because you can only stay conscious in a vacuum for 10-15 seconds, and it would be nearly impossible to open the door in the vacuum. CKcoolidge (talk) 03:22, 5 April 2025 (UTC)CKcoolidge

It's basically a shortcut for "on a frictionless surface in a vacuum" (with possibly some other caveats, in some scenarios, depending upon exactly what's being modeled and why). If you think about it, the vacuum can't ever really have a friction at all (at least this side of some fairly exotic reactionless propulsion ideas), so best treat that interpretation as a tautology.

That said, there are worse understandings. Like vacuum==weoghtlessness, or at least lunar-strength gravity, but the moment you're inside the airlock you have full 1G of gravity. A cinematic convention, of course, where you handwave the less SFX-based 'indoor' scenes, or handwave some gravity-plate dookickey, or the hard-SF ones lampshade with magnetic/velcro footwear (the 'badly hard-'SF ones might even grant things in earthbound vacuum chambers an undue weightlessness, with nary the briefest of nods to anti-gravity generators somehow being coupled to the airlessness).

Which of course makes a layman confused over what's realistic and what isn't. I suppose you could argue that Randall's choice of words could be better, but it ought to be a "YKWIM" situation for those like us who perhaps see what trope he's invoking, and shouldn't bother those who take the handwaving at first value without staring too deeply into that particular abyss. 172.70.86.115 15:13, 5 April 2025 (UTC)