Anyone know a good on-line video on Chaos and Complexity suitable for general education course at the college level?

A good documentary presentation would be great. Ideally about 40-45 minutes in length.

I found vimeo.com/98032407 . Haven't watched it yet, though.

@dmckee I do pA collisions, but the question is asking about AA... totally out of my field :-P

@UserAnonymous I'll try to bring it to the attention of people I "know" from e.g. Twitter who do AA collisions.

But part of the problem is that, at least in pA, there isn't any well-known good reference, except the occasional review paper which pops up on arXiv. It's an awfully specific area.

@DavidZ OK. Thanks.

So, there are occasional review articles.

@UserAnonymous There are occasional review articles on anything at all that hasn't literally just been discovered. I can't think of one offhand for heavy ion collisions, thouhg.

In other news, it makes me sad to see how many questions we have titled nothing but "Newton's third law" or "Newton's third law question" or "Confused about Newton's third law" or the like

@ChrisWhite That's pretty cool of him

@DavidZ : Ditto that. More generally, OPs (and potential editors) are encouraged to come up with descriptive, illuminating, and concise titles, so that readers don't have to read the whole post to find out whether they wanted to read it in the first place. See also this and this meta posts.

I've got a question

are first-order (in time) differential equations generically acausal?

(I'm adding 'generically' to allow for spinorial things)

(this question was inspired by another question on the causality violation of the heat equation, and particularly the answer by josh)

Hey guys, this is fairly generally related to physic but I was hoping maybe somebody could help me out. I'm looking for something to "project" rainbow colours onto things. The way a light prism does or how a CD's reflection does. Are glass light prisms generally able to create a large rainbow refraction on a wall about 10 or 15 feet away? Are there other materials I can buy that refract light when reflected the way a CD does? Also, do prisms work with flashlights or do they need sunlight?

@Danu What is your notion of causality for a DE? (Not that I could answer the question even if I knew...)

@ACuriousMind that all solutions are local

@VianEsterhuizen Prisms simply split the light of different colors based on the frequency dependence of index of refraction. To produce a rainbow, you need 'white light' that contains all colors

@Danu Is the "white light" from flashlights the same as the "white light" from the sun though? Could I shine a flashlight through a triangular prism and create rainbow? If so that could be what I'm looking for as it would allow me to create the rainbow in a dark room and I could control the angles and so on

@VianEsterhuizen I'd think flashlights generally only contain yellow-ish frequencies, but I'm not sure.

Why don't you give it a try though?

I don't have a prims @danu

And me buying one is sort of dependent on where it will work or not.

Your question boils down to finding out the emitted frequencies of a flash light. You can probably find this online, and it's more of an engineering question anyways

...maybe it's even indicated on your flash light?

Thanks. Is there another term for "white light" that might be used?

Not really. Note that 'white' here does not refer to what the light source looks like, but rather the distribution of frequencies emitted being roughly uniform over the visible part of the EM spectrum

Yeah I understand that much :P It's why I was looking for another term to Google because most result think I'm referring to the latter. I did just find this though "White LED devices have a mixture of the frequencies 474 Terra-Hertz, 535 Terra-Hertz and 638 Terra-Hertz"

Thanks for the help