The delicate task of measuring the standard speed for emptying one's bladder and the near-impossible procedure for partially unboiling a boiled egg are just two of the research discoveries to be honoured in this year's Ig Nobel Prizes.
While the sizes of the culverts and openings govern the speed of filling or emptying the chamber, the number and location of the openings determine the extent of the water disturbance in the chamber: the design must be directed toward obtaining a maximum speed of operation with minimum turbulence.
Not a time, because time was undeterminable except in relation to another time, and not a rigid three-dimensional object or frame of reference either, because that would only be "unchangeable" in its own boundaries, but the unique speed of light in empty space, the top speed possible for the transmission of information about clock times and changes.
There is good reason to look for ultimate answers in alpha, which is actually an amalgam of three constants so basic they pervade physics and cosmology: the charge of the electron; the speed of light in empty space; and Planck's constant, the most important number in quantum mechanics, the theory that governs subatomic behavior.
Some have found that alcoholic beverages speed the emptying of food from the stomach and stimulate gastric acid, while others maintain there is little effect.
Electromagnetic radiation is, classically speaking, a wave of electric and magnetic fields propagating at the speed of light c through empty space.
The package offers tools to (i) estimate metapopulation parameters from empirical data, (ii) to predict variation in patch occupancy over time in static and dynamic landscapes, either real or virtual, and (iii) to quantify the patterns and speed of metapopulation expansion into empty landscapes.
The magnets will propel two beams of particles around the ring at 99.99% of the speed of light through a vacuum emptier than anywhere in the solar system.
The electricity in wires and the laser light in an AT&T fiber travel at more or less the same speed, about two-thirds the speed of a moonbeam going through empty space.
