this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2025
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Science Memes

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top 31 comments
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[–] skisnow@lemmy.ca 17 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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

[–] Spacehooks@reddthat.com 3 points 20 hours ago

No just get a bunch in parallel!

[–] Spacehooks@reddthat.com 3 points 20 hours ago (2 children)

Love how there are so many actual solutions in The comments

[–] realitista@lemm.ee 2 points 18 hours ago

Bet they're all engineers.

[–] frezik@midwest.social 2 points 19 hours ago

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

[–] murd0x@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 day ago
[–] Corno@lemm.ee 1 points 19 hours ago

That's revolting.

[–] friendly_ghost@beehaw.org 5 points 1 day ago

And no spherical cows either??

[–] NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world 61 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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

[–] Tolookah@discuss.tchncs.de 32 points 1 day ago

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

[–] Routhinator@startrek.website 12 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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

[–] Blum0108@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Careful, capacitors reduce ripples

[–] yucandu@lemmy.world 27 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day 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.

[–] RogueBanana@lemmy.zip 2 points 18 hours ago

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

[–] SupaTuba@lemm.ee 9 points 1 day ago

I admire it but also...wtf lol

[–] xthexder@l.sw0.com 2 points 1 day 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.

[–] jerkface@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 day ago

I made a potentiometer with paper and graphite clay once

[–] Zagorath@aussie.zone 25 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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

[–] easily3667@lemmus.org 32 points 1 day 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.

[–] Ziglin@lemmy.world 1 points 22 hours 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.

[–] JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works 25 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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

[–] muntedcrocodile@lemm.ee 17 points 1 day ago

U probably need a climate controlled box as well.

[–] SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org 3 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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

[–] xthexder@l.sw0.com 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day 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.

[–] Adalast@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day 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@sh.itjust.works 1 points 18 hours 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.

[–] Adalast@lemmy.world 1 points 16 hours ago

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

[–] A_A@lemmy.world 18 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day 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)

[–] Naich@lemmings.world 12 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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

[–] Tolookah@discuss.tchncs.de 9 points 1 day ago

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