this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2025
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Science Memes

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top 32 comments
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[–] [email protected] 21 points 3 days 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 days ago

No just get a bunch in parallel!

[–] [email protected] 59 points 4 days 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] 33 points 4 days ago

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

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 days ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 days ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

Careful, capacitors reduce ripples

[–] [email protected] 28 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days 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] 9 points 4 days ago

I admire it but also...wtf lol

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

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days 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] 3 points 4 days ago

I made a potentiometer with paper and graphite clay once

[–] [email protected] 26 points 4 days 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] 31 points 4 days 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 days 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days 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] 1 points 1 day ago

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

[–] JohnDClay 25 points 4 days ago (2 children)

There is if you have a potentiometer and a steady enough hand!

[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 days ago

U probably need a climate controlled box as well.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Can you even measure that accurately? Like is it physically possible?

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

Based on some rough calculations... no. A precision of 0.0000000000001 ohms is 1000x less than the resistance of 1um of copper with a diameter of 1cm (A piece of wire 10,000x wider than it is long). I'm sure a few molecules of air between your contact points would cause more noise in the measurement.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I thought it had to do with physicists working off theoretical calculations finding precise values for the circuit and not realizing that components come in discrete values.

[–] anomnom 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Yeah, but they could just calculate the right mix of parallel and series discrete resistors to get there.

It’s gonna make a long BOM though.

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

Lol, I was actually going to add that but decided it would be too pedantic if I said it myself.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Fixed resistors
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistor
The TCR of foil resistors is extremely low, and has been further improved over the years. One range of ultra-precision foil resistors offers a TCR of 0.14 ppm/°C, tolerance ±0.005%, long-term stability (1 year) 25 ppm, (3 years) 50 ppm (further improved 5-fold by hermetic sealing), stability under load (2000 hours) 0.03%, thermal EMF 0.1 μV/°C, noise −42 dB, voltage coefficient 0.1 ppm/V, inductance 0.08 μH, capacitance 0.5 pF.

Quantum based resistors :
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Hall_effect
Quantum Hall effect →
Applications →
Electrical resistance standards :

(...) Later, the 2019 revision of the SI fixed exact values of h and e, resulting in an exact
R~K~ = h/e^2^ = 25812.80745... Ω.

(this is precise to at least 10 significant digits)

Quantum Ampere Standard
https://www.nist.gov/noac/technology/current-and-voltage/quantum-ampere-standard
.
https://www.nist.gov/noac/technology/current-and-voltage

(...) Quantum-based measurements for voltage and current are moving toward greater miniaturization (...)

(there also been research for defining a quantum based volt standard)

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 days ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 days ago

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago
[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Love how there are so many actual solutions in The comments

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

Bet they're all engineers.

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

That's revolting.