Sir Isaac Newton and Three Law Of Motion

-Resume of Newton’s life and my point of view about the three law of motion

Jermaine R. Williams Fargas

Sir Isaac Newton, born  in 4 January 1643 and died in  31 March 1727 [OS: 25 December 1642 – 20 March 1727]) was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian. For me he was one of the most influential men in human history and his invents and discoveries will be remembered forever. Sir Isaac is the author of one of one of the most influential book in the history, history of science. This book was published in 1687 and contents the basic concepts of universal gravitation and the three law of motion.This three law of motion describe totality any possible motion of anything. Newton’s laws of motion are studied for many peoples in many fields for example physic. This three law are Inertia law, the relation between force and chance in momentum and action and reaction law. Newton's First Law (also known as the Law of Inertia) states that an object at rest tends to stay at rest and that an object in uniform motion tends to stay in uniform motion unless acted upon by a net external force. Newton's Second Law states that an applied force, on an object equals the rate of change of its momentum, with time. Newton's Third Law states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. This means that any force exerted onto an object has a counterpart force that is exerted in the opposite direction back onto the first object. For me is so interesting to learn more about this law because knowing it I can understand better many thing in my life.

 

Based in the history, Newton was a very controversial person. That is because he was a person decided in his beliefs and opinions. From 1670 to 1672, Newton lectured on optics. During this period he investigated the refraction of light, demonstrating that a prism could decompose white light into a spectrum of colors, and that a lens and a second prism could recompose the multicolored spectrum into white light. He also invented a reflecting telescope that he presented to the Royal Society in 1672. This telescope was created to check his concept about refraction of light.

Sir Isaac Newton was an exceptional human being that helps to improve the knowledge in many areas science, physic, astronomy etc. His discoveries are studied and analyze even today, 2009. For many scientific his most important discovery was the three law of motion. This three law was the base of many fields like physic and dynamic. For nobody was a surprise that Sir Isaac Newton was, being and will be an important person in the history and his legacy will remain forever. 

James Clerk Maxwell 

Jose Antonio Alvarez Rivera

      James Clerk Maxwell was a scottish mathematician and physicist who published physical and mathematical theories of the electromagnetic field. He was born in 13 June 1831 and died in 5 November 1879. His best achievement was the development of the classical electromagnetic theory synthesizing all previous unrelated observations, experiments and equations of electricity and magnetism. His mother help him since he was a little boy and took responsibility of his education. He was really fascinated by geometry and most of his great talent went unnoticed. For his first scientific work he wrote a paper describing a mechanical means of drawing mathematical curves with a piece of twine and the properties of elloipses and curves with more than two foci. He presented his work with the help of his professor James forbes of natural philosophy at the royal society of Edinburgh. When he was eighteenth years old he contributed two papers for the transactions of the royal society of Edinburgh. One was the Equilibrium of Elastic Solids and the other was of the rolling curves.  

Maxwell graduated from trinity in 1854 with a degree in mathematics. He manage to score second highest in the final examination behind Edward Routh and then he earn himself the title of second wrangler.  

The nature and perception of colour was one of his greatest interests and he began at Edinburgh University while he was a student of Forbes. He took the coloured spinning tops invented by Forbes and was able to demostrade that white light would result from a mixture of red, green and blue light. His paper of experiment on colour laid out the principles of colour combination and he presented it at the royal society of Edinburgh in March 1855. Immediately he was made a fellow of trinity on 10 October of 1855 and was asked to prepare lectures on hydrostatics and optics and to set examination papers. Then he was awarded the Royal Society’s Rumford medal in 1860 for his work on colour and elected to the society itself in 1861. He resigned the chair at king’s college London and returned to Glendair  in  1865. Then he wrote a textbook of the theory of heat in 1871 and an elementary treatise on matter and motion in 1876. And also he was the first to make explicit use of dimensional analysis in 1871.  

Maxwell became the first Cavendish professor of physics at Cambridge in 1871 and was put in charge of the development of the Cavendish laboratory. Maxwell is considered one of the greatest scientific in our time, too bad he died young. He’s work in electromagtetism has been called “the second great unification in physics” after the first one carried out by Isaac Newton. He demonstrated that electric and magnetic fields travel through space in the form of waves and at the constant speed of light. Einstein describe he’s work as “the most profound and the most fruitful that physics has experienced since the time of Newton. Einstein kept a photograph of him on his study wall with pictures of Michael Faraday and Newton. He died in Cambridge of abdominal cancer on 5 November 1879 at the age of 48. 

 

 

Socrates and the earliest philosophers

Carlos M. Sierra Molina

      Socrates (469B.C. - 399B.C.)  He is known has the first important Athenian philosopher. He was born in Athens in 469 B.C. His father was a stone-carver and his mother was a mid-wife. He served with some distinction as a soldier at Delium and Amphipolis during the Peloponnesian War. After war he worked has a stone-craver, not good at all, then he receives a modest fortune from his father; enough to give full-time attention to inventing the practice of philosophical dialogue.

      Besides, Socrates didn’t leave any writes; he is considerate one of the most important philosophers in history. Socrates was a Greek philosopher that uses his knowledge to interrogate normal people and make them reach the answers to his questions, by themselves. He always said: “I only know, that I know nothing” to be humble; and he like to confuse some of the sophist that think that they know everything, making them to contradict and recognize that their ideas were wrong.

      The information we know about Socrates is thanks to: the historian Xenophon, the comedian Aristophanes and his disciple Plato. The last one, talks about Socrates in his famous writes “The Plato’s Dialogues”. The Socrates that Xenophon describes in his stories is very different from the Plato’s. It is so ordinary that is difficult to imagine.  By the other hand, Aristophanes' play The Clouds portrays Socrates as a clown who teaches his students how to bamboozle their way out of debt. Most of Aristophanes' works, however, function as parodies. Thus, it is presumed this characterization was also not literal.

      Socrates was accused of being a bad influence for the young Greeks; some people say. But, he was really judge because of his social and moral critics, and for trying to improve the Greeks sense of justice. In his judgment he defends himself, unsuccessfully, and was condemned to death. In 399 B.C Socrates drank a mortal drink called “cicuta”, and died defending his believing.

      Why I choose Socrates? The article was supposed to be about physics, Socrates was a philosopher, but I think he was the motor of the study and the creation of sciences. May I explain myself,  Plato was his disciple he almost follows the same steps of Socrates, his main interests were Rhetoric, Art, Literature, Epistemology, Justice, Virtue, Politics, Education, Family, Militarism. But Plato’s student Aristotle has other interests like, Physics, Metaphysics, Poetry, Theatre, Music, Rhetoric, Politics, Government, Ethics, Biology, Zoology. There are changes, he wanted to study the nature and his components, and how it works.

      In conclusion, Socrates with his dialogue and teaching techniques influence the people to learn by themselves and to be skeptic. Thanks to his behavior and curiosity for knowledge, and his will to share his knowledge, others persons do the same and gave birth to what I consider the first scientists; like Aristotle.  

Bibliography:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socrates

http://www.biografiasyvidas.com/biografia/s/socrates.htm

http://www.philosophypages.com/ph/socr.htm

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/socrates/

http://www.historyforkids.org/learn/greeks/philosophy/socrates.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotle

Physics in Everyday Life

Ambar Rodriguez

      For years, many students have asked themselves why I have to study physics, why does everyone says it is so important when it doesn’t have anything to do with what I’m studying.  They do not recognize it but physics is a part of our everyday life.  Physics is one of the most important lessons we get in high school and college.

      Everyday we do things that we can observe the principles and laws of physics.  For example, if we slide a box through a surface, there are several forces acting upon it, like friction, weight, the normal force and the applied force by us. When we are driving our car, the car has torque, friction, applied force, rotational energy, and many other concepts learned in the study of physics.  I read in an article the importance of studying the route that a force in an object that is being design has, which is a great example of the applications of physics in our careers.  The article explained that by studying or visualizing the load path in a design the designer can view areas that can be improved. 

      Another article that exposed the physics point of view in normal life was “What if two people stumbled into quicksand: Would the heavier person sink faster?”  In this article, a geologist explained that quicksand is regular soil with reduced friction between the particles.  As learned in the physics course, an object with less friction than the normal friction of the object can move easier than objects with the correspondent friction.  The Doppler Effect, which has to do with the movement of wave through space and how humans detect it, can be appreciated when we hear the siren of a passing ambulance.  People perceive the sound of a siren of a moving ambulance differently because the wavelength differs depending on the position of the person. 

      We can also see how physics works in music instruments, especially in pianos and guitars.  Guitars produce sound when the player pulls or agitates the strings, which produces standing waves.  The sound depends on the thickness of the string.  Wave motion can also be observed when we throw a rock into a lake.  These waves are produced by the oscillation of the water. 

      Physics is very important to understand some of the mysteries of the world and the universe.  Physics studies the universe.  We can use physics to explain motion of different maters, how an object will work, and how to prevent an accident. Without physics many of the sciences and even calculus wouldn’t have been invented. 

References

Skakoon, J. G. (2008). “The route that forces take”.  Mechanical Engineering: The Magazine of ASME, (130, 39-42). 

Bonsor, Kevin, and Katherine Neer.  "What if two people stumbled into quicksand: Would the heavier person sink faster?."  28 November 2007.  HowStuffWorks.com.  12 May 2009.

Giancoli, D. C. (2008). Physics for scientists and engineers with modern physics. New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall.

Space Dust: Interesting Facts

      Yanna Borbon Cueto 

      A couple of days ago I was watching a fiction movie called Stardust. The movie is about a young man who promises his girlfriend that he will venture into a magical world to retrieve a fallen star for her. Lovely story! But what really caught my attention about the movie was the fallen star; I know that probably is impossible for a star to fall on Earth but how about stardust or space dust? What is space dust? Is it possible that space dust falls on Earth even though is travelling or moving in space? How does space dust affect Earth? Does space dust settle on space shuttles? There were many things I didn’t understand so I decided to do a little research on the topic.

      Space dust or cosmic dust is a type of dust in space that is composed by small particles from asteroids or comets. It is just a few molecules to 0.1mm in size and covers the solar system in a thin cloud. Apparently, this dust bothered the astronomers just as dust bothers us here on Earth since it obscured the objects they wanted to observe. When infrared astronomy was developed the astronomers realized that the dust particles that used to bother them were “vital components of astrophysical processes”. For example, cosmic dust plays an important role on star formation; stars are made (“born”) on giant clouds of dust and gas. Infrared light can penetrate the cosmic dust clouds which allow astronomers to see into regions of star formation and the centers of galaxies. In our solar system this dust also plays an important role in zodiacal light, which is produced by the sunlight reflecting off dust particles. Even though cosmic dust is travelling in space, it falls settling through the atmosphere and onto the Earth’s surface. An average of 40 tons per day falls on Earth. These particles are collected in the Earth’s atmosphere using plate collectors that are placed under the wings of stratospheric-flying NASA airplanes and are collected from surface deposits in Antarctica and Greenland. Scientists found that collecting and studying cosmic dust is important in order to understand the origins of the solar system, also their mineral content records the conditions under which comet, planets and asteroids were formed. According to Dr Mathew Genge, from Imperial College London's Department of Earth Science and Engineering, “There are hundreds of billions of extraterrestrial dust particles falling though our skies. This abundant resource is important since these tiny pieces of rock allow us to study distant objects in our solar system without the multi-billion dollar price tag of expensive missions."

      Going back to one of my first questions, does space dust affect Earth in any way? According to Donald Brownlee astronomer at the University of Washington in Seattle, “the dust grains pose no serious threat to the planets. But they could chip away at the solar panels on spacecraft, causing a gradual loss of power, and knock particles off asteroids, filling the solar system with even more dust”. How can tiny particles chip away at the solar panels on spacecrafts? I’ll answer this question by answering one of my first questions: Does space dust settle on a space shuttle that is orbiting the Earth just like dust settles on a table or a moving car? The answer is no. Even though a shuttle orbiting the Earth is in free fall it never reaches the Earth because is moving sideways really fast. Well, because they are above the atmosphere where there is no air the dust particles also fall freely, these particles have great horizontal speeds and orbit the Earth just like small space shuttles.  According to Louis A. Bloomfield author of “How Everything Woks: The Physics of Everyday Life” “The relative speed between a dust particle and the shuttle can easily exceed 10,000 mph” when this little particle hits the space shuttle it collides with the shuttle’s surface instead of settling, so these violent collisions are what cheap away at the solar panels. 

      Unlike the dust we find in a tabletop or in our night stand, cosmic dust is very important. As I mentioned before, this dust particles are “vital components of astrophysical processes”. According to Dr Mathew Genge “The answer to so many important questions, such as why we are here and are we alone in the universe, may well lie inside a cosmic dust particle. Since they are everywhere, even inside our homes, we don't necessarily have to blast off the Earth to find those answers. Perhaps they are already next to you, right here and right now." 

      References:

http://www.scienceray.com/Astronomy/Space-Dust.281487

http://www.astrobio.net/news/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2864&theme=Printer

http://www.howeverythingworks.org/HTW4eBI.html

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/08/0827_030827_spacedust.html 

Sharp Object’s and why are we afraid of them  

Steven A Sosa Alvarado           

     In an article that I found of physics it talks about how sharp objects can cut, pierce, and penetrate much more easily than others blunt objects even if the force is the applied is the same. This article interest me because at first I thought that force could have something to do with it but as it turns out the article says that it has to do with precision, pressure(force in which it acts upon) since the force applied on the objects is distribute among it but when it has to do with a sharp or pointy object the force is applied to the tip or sharp edge. The article gives an example with a needle and a nail. Even though the same amount of force is applied in both cases the needle has more precision then the nail and this is because of the force distribution mention earlier. This article made me think if an object was sharp and pointy enough could it be able to penetrate concrete or even steel or iron with very least force? Well with the information provided from the article I could say it could but it could have its exception depending on the size and force applied to the object. Similarly does the action of a force depend on whether it is distributed over a square centimeter or concentrated on the hundredth of a millimeter? The article also mentions that Skies easily take us across fresh snow; without them we fall through. Why? On skies the weight of your body is distributed over a much greater area. The article says that For the same reason horses used in marshlands are shod in a special fashion giving them a wider supporting area and lessening the pressure exerted per square centimeter. For the same reason people take similar precautions when they want to cross a bog or thin ice, often crawling to distribute their weight over a greater area. Finally, the article says that tanks and caterpillars tractors don’t get stuck in loose ground, although they are very heavy, again because their weight is distributed over a rather great supporting area. An eight-ton tractor exerts a pressure of only 600 grams per square centimeter. There are caterpillars, which exert a pressure of only 160 grams per cm square despite a two-ton load, which makes for the easy crossing of peat bogs and sand-beaches. Here it is a large supporting area, which gives the advantage, whereas in the case of the needle it is the other way round.  This all shows that a sharpened edge pierces things only because it has a very minute area for the force to act upon. This is why a sharp knife cuts better than a blunt one; the force is concentrated on a smaller area of the knife edge. To sum up: sharp objects prick and cut well, because much pressure is concentrated on their points and edges. Now thanks to this article I understand much better how force works on sharp objects. Also understand how sharp objects work on other objects.

The Origins of Nanotechnology

Luis Gonzalez

Even though nanotechnology is a relatively new topic in today’s world, the development of it dates back to times we weren’t even born.

In 1965 Gordon Moore, one of the founding fathers of Intel Corporation, predicted that the number of transistors will double up every 18 months for every ten years. Today, this is called the Moore’s law, because this phenomenon happened, and it’s still happening until this day. Just to watch how fast its increasing, an example: in 1974 computer processors had 4004 transistors, now in the Core 2 Duo processors that most computers runs now they have around 700 million transistors. That means that 35 years have passed, and the number of transistors have more than duplicated, we can almost say that it has increased exponentially decade after decade. And because transistors have increased, the numbers of individual electronic elements have decreased, going from millimeters in the 1960’s to nanometers in modern circuitry.

• Historical Background of Nanotechnology:

For thousands of years, we humans have used nanotechnology for over a thousand years, unwittingly. Make steel, paintings and vulcanizing rubber are just some examples of our uses of nanotechnology. Each of these processes rely on the properties of stochastically-formed atomic ensembles mere nanometers in size, and are distinguished from chemistry in that they don't rely on the properties of individual molecules. But the development of the body of concepts now subsumed under the term nanotechnology has been slower.

The first mention of some of the distinguishing concepts in nanotechnology was in 1867 by James Clerk Maxwell when he proposed as a thought experiment a tiny entity known as Maxwell's Demon able to handle individual molecules. The first observations and size measurements of nano-particles was made during first decade of 20th century. They are mostly associated with Richard Adolf Zsigmondy who made detail study of gold sols and other nanomaterials with sizes down to 10 nm and less. He published a book in 1914. He used an ultra microscope that employs dark field method for seeing particles with sizes much less than light wavelength. Zsigmondy was also the first who used nanometer explicitly for characterizing particle size. He determined it as   part of a millimeter. He developed a first system classification based on particle size in nanometer range.

• Conceptual origins of Nanotechnology:

The topic of nanotechnology was again touched upon by "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom," a talk given by physicist Richard Feynman at an American Physical Society meeting at Caltech on December 29, 1959. Feynman described a process by which the ability to manipulate individual atoms and molecules might be developed, using one set of precise tools to build and operate another proportionally smaller set, so on down to the needed scale. In the course of this, he noted, scaling issues would arise from the changing magnitude of various physical phenomena: gravity would become less important, surface tension and Van der Waals attraction would become more important. This basic idea appears feasible, and exponential assembly enhances it with parallelism to produce a useful quantity of end products. At the meeting, Feynman announced two challenges, and he offered a prize of $1000 for the first individuals to solve each one. The first challenge involved the construction of a nanomotor, which, to Feynman's surprise, was achieved by November of 1960 by William McLellan. The second challenge involved the possibility of scaling down letters small enough so as to be able to fit the entire Encyclopedia Britannica on the head of a pin; this prize was claimed in 1985 by Tom Newman. 

• Experimental advances:

Nanotechnology and nanoscience got a boost in the early 1980s with two major developments: the birth of cluster science and the invention of the scanning tunneling microscope (STM). This development led to the discovery of fullerenes in 1985 and the structural assignment of carbon nanotubes a few years later. In another development, the synthesis and properties of semiconductor nanocrystals were studied. This led to a fast increasing number of semiconductor nanoparticles of quantum dots.

At present in 2007 the practice of nanotechnology embraces both stochastic approaches are manipulated on substrate surfaces by deterministic methods comprising nudging them with STM or AFM probes and causing simple binding or cleavage reactions to occur. The dream of a complex, deterministic molecular nanotechnology remains elusive. Since the mid 1990s, thousands of surface scientists and thin film technocrats have latched on to the nanotechnology bandwagon and redefined their disciplines as nanotechnology. This has caused much confusion in the field and has spawned thousands of "nano"-papers on the peer reviewed literature. Most of these reports are extensions of the more ordinary research done in the parent fields.

For the future, some means has to be found for MNT design evolution at the nanoscale which mimics the process of biological evolution at the molecular scale. Biological evolution proceeds by random variation in ensemble averages of organisms combined with culling of the less-successful variants and reproduction of the more-successful variants, and macroscale engineering design also proceeds by a process of design evolution from simplicity to complexity as set forth somewhat satirically by John Gall: "A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. . . . A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over, beginning with a system that works." A breakthrough in MNT is needed which proceeds from the simple atomic ensembles which can be built with, e.g., an STM to complex MNT systems via a process of design evolution. A handicap in this process is the difficulty of seeing and manipulation at the nanoscale compared to the macroscale which makes deterministic selection of successful trials difficult; in contrast biological evolution proceeds via action of what Richard Dawkins has called the "blind watchmaker" comprising random molecular variation and deterministic reproduction/extinction.

References:

1. Indian craftsmen, artisans used nanotech 2000 years ago

2. Zsigmondy, R. "Colloids and the Ultra microscope", J.Wiley and Sons, NY, (1914)

3. Derjaguin, B.V. Discuss. Faraday Soc., No. 18, 24-27, 182-187, 198, 211, 215-219 (1954)

4. Efremov, I.F. "Periodic Colloidal Structures", in "Surface and Colloid Science", vol. 8, Wiley, NY (1975)

5. Lyklema, J. "Fundamentals of Interface and Colloid Science", vol.1-5 Academic Press, (1995-2000)

6. Gribbin, John. "Richard Feynman: A Life in Science" Dutton 1997, pg 170.

7. Norio Taniguchi, "On the Basic Concept of 'Nano-Technology'," Proc. Intl. Conf. Prod. Eng. Tokyo, Part II, Japan Society of Precision Engineering, 1974.

8. Gall, John, (1986) Systemantics: How Systems Really Work and How They Fail, 2nd ed. Ann Arbor, MI : The General Systemantics Press.

9. Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design, W. W. Norton; Reissue edition (September 19, 1996)

The Large Hadron Collider 

Elí S. Sánchez Virella

      The Large Hadron Collider, also known as the LHC, was completed on September 10, 2008. Its location is on the border of France and Switzerland or more specifically, the edge of Geneva, Switzerland. With over one-thousand five-hundred superconducting electromagnets guiding particle beams in a large circle at about 99.999991% the speed of light over the distance of twenty-seven kilometers, the LHC is the by far largest particle accelerator known man and the most powerful. It was activated for the first time on the 19th of the month, firing its first beams and smashing its first particles. Due to fault in one of the magnets though, further projects have been postponed and will return again in spring of 2009. Because of this, and prior to this, people have feared its activation saying that it could bestow doomsday situations or nuclear destruction upon us. Some have even brought into theory the threat of the Earth’s destruction by the universe’s ultimate maelstrom, the black hole.

      The LHC will be used for various purposes. It will lead the scientists to answer their doubts of how the universe works. It will demonstrate the existence of a particle called the Higgs boson, which have stood unobserved. Also it will help to demonstrate if electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force are just different manifestations of a single unified force. Currently is unknown the reason why the gravitational force is a lot weaker than the other three fundamental forces; this LHC will also answer that mystery. The dark matter and dark energy which tries to explain the expansion of the universe will be studied and wil lead scientist to know how they behave. The LHC will answer these mysteries and more when it starts in full functioning.

      This LHC is contained in a circular tunnel with a circumference of 27 km and is at a depth ranging from 50 to 175 m under the surface. It has a 3.8 m wide concrete tunnel used to house another masterpiece of the science, the Large Electro-Positron Collider. It takes less than 90 microseconds to give one revolution to the main ring; that’s about 11,000 rev/sec. This project has an expected cost of US$8.7 billion. Most of the money has been spent on various accidents and delays due to faulty parts and engineering difficulties.

      Like its said before, people is afraid that the LHC will lead us to doomsday because it involves the production of microscopic black holes or the creation of particles called strangelets. Experts at the LHC have made the pertinent studies and they concluded that the LHC is completely safe and propones no danger to anyone. Personally I don’t think this will cause a catastrophe because what the hundreds of scientist and engineers are doing is enriching humanity, not in the least way putting it at risk. First off, protons hold a small amount of mass, but from the bomb droppings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we’ve learned that a small amount of mass can be converted into a massive amount of energy. When a particle smashes into another, the chances of them splitting is a million to one. It occurs naturally in the cosmos, but to no ill effect or something visible in the sky. Even if it were to happen, nothing negative could come of it because it’s so far underground. Therefore, one shouldn’t say that could happen.

Invisibility Cloak 

Brian M. Santiago Busutil

A group f investigators in Berkeley have achieved partial success in what is being called an “invisibility cloak”. The team leader, Xiang Zhang, is also the director of UC Berkeley’s Nano-scale Science and Engineering Center. He has been able to create what he calls a “carpet cloak” from nanostructered silicon that hides any object from visual detection. Even though the “carpet” can be seen, the object that lies under it disappears from sight. Zhang mentions that this discovery presents a new solution towards developing invisibility based on the use of “dielectric (nonconducting) materials”. This discovery  represents a huge step forward and the hope that true invisibility is at our grasp.

This is not the only device that Zhang and his teams have developed. They also created a “fishnet” of alternating layers made out of silver and magnesium floride, and another device constructed out of silver and nanowires grown inside porous aluminum oxide. The true success of this research is that the group was able to manipulate light and make it “bounce back”. This was not successful before because metals absorb too much light, but these new materials work in a differenty way. The device functions  by bending light waves so they curve around the object and then “reconnect”, making it seem like it is unaltered.  This light-bending effect is based on reversing refraction, similar to the effect that makes a straw placed in water appear bent.

The developed device was able to cover an area of 3.8 microns by 400 nanometers and it was able to demonstrate invisibility at several angles. At its current stage, it operates for light between 1,400 and 1,800 nanometers in wavelength, one that is far longer than humans can see. These wavelengths are the ones used around the telecommunications industry, which are near to the visible part of the spectrum. Even though the device at its current stage is on a nano scale, the team hopes that in the future it can be large enough to work on bigger objects including humans

Even more impressive is the fact that this cloak is easy to fabricate.  Zhang mentions that after using a refined and more precise fabrication, they should be able to develop a material that can be truly invisible to the human eye. Professor Ortwin Hess, of the Advanced Technology Institute at the University of Surrey says that there could be immediate applications for the cloaking device in telecommunications. This research also benefits other areas of interest, including transformation optics, light manipulation, powerful and new microscopes and faster computers.

This discovery might remind us of the movie “Harry Potter”, in which the main character has a cloak which renders him completely invisible to the human eye.  Even though this is fiction, Zhang and his team have proved that the development of a similar device might just be something real. Proffessor Hess said, “In order to have the ‘Harry Potter’ effect, you just need to find the right materials for the visible wavelengths”.  It’s just a matter of time until we bridge the gap between fiction and reality.

“A time will come when men will stretch out their eyes. 

They should see planets like our Earth.” 

Christopher Wren

Charles Messier, an Outer Space Contribution

Jorge A. Chu Joy Davila

Astronomy, according to NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) is the scientific study of objects beyond earth such as planets, stars, comets, interplanetary dust, and forward to new discoveries. This branch of science is known to be the most ancient of them all; it has existed since the daybreak of civilization. Much of the earliest celestial body knowledge recorded is credited to Babylonians. Greeks later made influential cosmological ideas, including theories of the Earth reaction to the rest of the universe. Throughout history there have been many significant discoveries that have affected in a positive way the further discoveries, such as: Ptolemy, Nicolaus Copernicus, assigned central position to the Sun in the Copernicus System, Johannes Kepler, established the Principles of Planetary Motion, Galileo Galilei contribution with the telescope and Sir Isaac Newton with the laws of motion and gravitation. Furthermore Sir Charles Messier made incredible discoveries which we now can see through spectroscopy.

Charles Messier was born in Badonvillier, Lorraine, France, as the 10th of 12 children, and grew up in humble conditions. In 1741, when Charles was 11, his father died, and he had to finish his school education, and the family had even less opportunity for any betterment. Charles got interested in astronomy when he was 14 years old, and a great 6-tailed comet appeared. This interest was further stimulated by an annular Solar eclipse which was visible from his hometown on July 25, 1748. Charles first employment was by a navy astronomer in 1751. Sometime in 1757, Charles Messier started looking for comet Halley. His first reported observation of M32, a companion of the Andromeda galaxy, took place in the same year 1757. Comet Halley was expected to return in 1758, which, at that time, was a scientific hypothesis. Delisle himself had calculated an apparent path where he expected comet Halley to appear, and Messier created a fine star chart of this path. Evidently it turned out that this patch was not moving, and was thus indeed not a comet, but a nebula. He measured its position on September 12, 1758, and it later became the first entry, M1, in his famous catalog -- this object later turned out to be one of the most interesting objects in the sky, the remnant of the supernova 1054, now commonly called the Crab nebula. […]In 1815, Messier suffered a stroke which left him partially paralyzed. After partial recovery, he attended one or two more academy meetings, but his everyday life became more and more difficult. In the night of April 11-12, 1817, Charles Messier passed away in his 87th year, in his home in Paris. In his lifetime Sir Messier discovered at least 110 objects (stars, galaxies, nebulas, clusters, and comets). Messier discoveries are currently standards in astronomy studies, such as the eagle nebula, crab nebula, dwarf elliptical galaxy, supernovas, Eye of God (nebula) planetary galaxy, globular clusters, Andromeda Galaxy, and so on. Messier’s discoveries are found in a list called Messier catalog, which contains all of his discoveries and important dates. Most of these discoveries are picture viewable thanks to the contribution of spectroscopy.

Bibliography

http://www.messiermarathon.com/about.htm

The First Real Time Machine

John Molina

Ronald L. Mallet, a physics professor at University of Connecticut, with an expertise in the one branch of physics which allows him to TINKER WITH TIME, has discovered a way to travel into the past and possibly into the future.

It all started with the death of his father at an early age, Prof. Mallett was left with an intense feeling of wanting to change the past, a feeling so strong that lead him to become the professor that he is today with a natural ability to understand the part of physics that involves time travel. With modern technology, Mallett believes that time travel is finally possible and with his immense knowledge of the properties of time he is duty-bound to create the first real time machine. The plan is to use a circulating beam of light to create a rotating region of space as though you were stirring at a cup of coffee, also in addition to twisting space, in Einstein’s theory space and time are linked, so you would cause a twisting of time as well, so if you think of lime as a line; from the past to the present to the future; if the line can be closed as a loop, we could go from the future back into the past. The machine would be a stack of lasers creating layers of circulating light around which the predicted loop in time should occur. Like it was said in the olden times, one way to go back into the past, it is to exceed the speed of light.

Another way to explain how the machine would work is through one of Einstein’s lesser known ideas called FRAME DRAGGING. Imagine that space is the coffee inside a cup. As you stir the coffee inside the cup it swirls around due to the motion of the spoon and suppose that you drop an object into the coffee such as a coffee bean, what would happen is that the coffee which the bean is moving in would move the bean around. This rotating space would apply the boost that is needed to allow an object to break the light speed barrier without breaking the laws of physics. Within that rotating region of space you can travel with speeds up to the speed of light but for someone who is standing outside you would seem like you are traveling FASTER than the speed of light and for them you will disappear from site as you are traveling back into the past. But one of the things that are much more effective than anything at twisting space and time is light itself. What would be needed is a machine with enough laser power to twist space and time; by firing lasers through a corkscrew shaped path would create a tunnel in which particles could be sent to the past.

One strong theory is that once the machine is turned on, particles would simply appear, even though nothing was put in the machine in the present. These particles would be experiments that Dr. Mallett is performing one day, one week or even a year from now or in other words FROM THE FUTURE. 

 

Bibliography (References)  

A five part documentary in Youtube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLQAx-sw0zI&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Cn3RfZOoU0&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uy-EGulgNM8&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pk2MZtYKv-Y&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWTThCbvpFY&feature=related

The Mayor Finding in the Physics History

Irmary Ortiz Carlo 

          If you ask to different physicians the same question: Which was the mayor finding in the physics history? Everybody will give you a different answer. Everyone has a different point of view of what was the best contribution of the physics to the science.  But a lot of scientists and physicians think that the best finding in the physics history was the Universal Law of Gravitation, of Isaac Newton. In 1687, Sir Isaac Newton in his work Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica formulated the three principles of the movement, and the fourth, The Universal Law of Gravitation, that transformed the physical world completely. All the phenomena could be seen in a mechanical way. This law states that all the objects are attracted with others with a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance that separates its centers. When putting under a single mathematical law the more important physical phenomena of the observable universe, Newton demonstrated that the terrestrial physics and the celestial physics are a same thing. The gravitation concept obtained of a single blow:

Reveal the physical meaning of the three laws of Kepler about the planetary movement.

Solve the intricate problem of the origin of the tides.

Give to account of the peculiar and inexplicable observation of Galileo Galilei of which the movement of an object in free fall is independent of its weight.

        Newton compares the centripetal acceleration of the Moon, with the gravity acceleration. In the physics previous to Newton, an apple falls vertically towards the Earth in a rectilinear trajectory, whereas the Moon describes an almost circular orbit, which is a closed trajectory.  How these two categories of movements can be related?  If the apple that fell vertically is pushed by the force of the air, its trajectory no longer will be rectilinear but the arc of one curve. For example a projectile shot from a tube describes a parabolic trajectory as it was observed in the century XVII in which Newton lived. The conceptual jump that carried out Newton was the one to imagine that the projectiles could be shot from the stop of a mountain describing elliptical trajectories (being the parabola an approach of the ellipse). Therefore, the apple and the Moon are falling. The difference is that the Moon has a movement of permanent fall, whereas the apple hits the Earth surface. A same cause produces, therefore, the movements of the celestial and terrestrial bodies.

    Maybe, it can be hard to choose between all the fantastic findings that the physics history has. But the reality is that the Newton’s Universal Law of Gravitation changes the physics history forever.  

 

Bibliography:

http://www.sc.ehu.es/sbweb/fisica/celeste/kepler4/kepler4.html

Hydrogen in cars: another alternative of energy

Bethlyemid Guzman Ocasio

      Hydrogen is a chemical element that at standard temperature and pressure is a colorless, odorless, non-metallic, tasteless and highly flammable diatomic gas. It is the most abundant element on the Earth. It can be produced industrially mainly from hydrocarbons such as methane or also may be produced from water by electrolysis, at substantially greater cost than production from natural gas.

      A hydrogen vehicle uses hydrogen as its main fuel for motive power. The term may refer to an automobile or any other vehicle that uses hydrogen as fuel, such as an aircraft. The power plants of these vehicles convert the chemical energy produced by the hydrogen into mechanical energy. There are two types of mechanical energy: combustion or electrochemical conversion using a fuel-cell.

      There are many types of transportation that already run on hydrogen at a great expense. NASA uses hydrogen to launch space shuttles. There is a toy model car that uses a solar energy, storing hydrogen and oxygen gas, using a regenerative fuel cell, which can convert the fuel back to water and release the solar energy. Many companies are still researching the feasibility of building hydrogen cars, and most of them have started to develop them, although most of them are still on test stage.

      A hydrogen internal combustion vehicle is different from a fuel cell vehicle. The hydrogen internal combustion vehicle is a slightly modified version of the traditional gasoline vehicle. The hydrogen engines burn fuel in the same manner that gasoline engines do. But the most effective use of hydrogen fuel is on a fuel cell vehicle because hydrogen reacts with oxygen inside the fuel cell, which produces electricity to run the motor of the vehicle.

      The development of such technology would mean a great impact on our economy. It may be expensive at the beginning of the development until new discoveries are made but the impact on the long run would be great. If the technology can be made in such a way that, when hydrogen reacts, would only produce water, that would mean a great downsize of the contamination in the planet. Using hydrogen as an alternative source of energy can give us an option and hope of another type of fuel and we would not have to depend on petroleum or other sources of fuel that keep coming to an end over each passing year.

      There are actually people who are making modifications to their cars so they can run both on hydrogen and gasoline. With $600 dollars more or less for the modification, what they are actually saving on fuel each year is a whole lot more. On top of that, we would be minimisizing the use of petroleum.

      The hydrogen technology not only opens up it usage on cars but it can be a subtle change on our dependence of non-renewable energy. It can stimulate the development of other types of renewable energy like solar, hydropower or wind power; even though there are people who use them it is a minority. Eco-friendly energy, if developed fully, may help to maintain a better place for all of us to live.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_vehicle

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_internal_combustion_engine_vehicle 

Newton's laws of motion

Hecny Perez Candelario 

      Newton's laws of motion are three physical laws that form the basis for classical mechanics, directly relating the forces acting on a body to the motion of the body. They were first compiled by Isaac Newton in his work Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, . Newton used them to explain and investigate the motion of many physical objects and systems.

      Here is a brief introduction of the three laws of motion:

First law

      There exists a set of inertial reference frames relative to which all particles with no net force acting on them will move without change in their velocity. This law is often simplified as "A body persists its state of rest or of uniform motion unless acted upon by an external unbalanced force." Newton's first law is often referred to as the law of inertia. 

Second law

      Observed from an inertial reference frame, the net force on a particle of constant mass is proportional to the time rate of change of its linear momentum: F = d(mv)/dt. When the mass is constant, this law is often stated as, "Force equals mass times acceleration (F = ma)": the net force on an object is equal to the mass of the object multiplied by its acceleration. 

Third law

      Whenever a particle A exerts a force on another particle B, B simultaneously exerts a force on A with the same magnitude in the opposite direction. The strong form of the law further postulates that these two forces act along the same line. This law is often simplified into the sentence, "To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction."

      In the given interpretation mass, acceleration, momentum, and (most importantly) force are assumed to be externally defined quantities. This is the most common, but not the only interpretation: one can consider the laws to be a definition of these quantities. Notice that the second law only holds when the observation is made from an inertial reference frame, and since an inertial reference frame is defined by the first law, asking a proof of the first law from the second law is a logical fallacy. At speeds approaching the speed of light the effects of special relativity must be taken into account. 

 

 

The complete explanation of the three laws of motion:

Newton's first law: law of inertia

      Newton's first law is also called the law of inertia. In a simplified form, it states that if the vector sum of all forces (also known as the net force) acting on an object is zero, then the state of motion of the object does not change. In particular: Newton's first law: An object at rest remains at rest and an object in motion will remain in motion unless acted on by an unbalanced force.

•An object that is not moving will not move until a net force acts upon it. 

•An object that is moving will not change its velocity (accelerate) until a net force acts upon it.

      The first point needs no comment, but the second seems to violate everyday experience. A hockey puck sliding along a table doesn't move forever; rather, it slows and eventually comes to a stop. According to Newton's laws, though, the hockey puck does not stop of its own accord, but because of a force applied in the opposite direction to the direction of motion. That force is easily identified as a frictional force between the table and the puck. In the absence of such a force, as approximated by an air hockey table or ice rink, the puck's motion would not slow.

      There are no perfect demonstrations of the law, as friction usually causes a force to act on a moving body, and even in outer space gravitational forces act and cannot be shielded against, but the law serves to emphasize the elementary causes of changes in an object's state of motion.

      The above treatment of Newton's first law is an over-simplification, though. A more sophisticated approach to the law of inertia is given by:

      There is a class of frames of reference (called inertial frames) relative to which the motion of a particle not subject to forces is a straight line.

      Newton placed the law of inertia first to establish frames of reference for which the other laws are applicable. Such frames are called inertial frames. 

Newton's second law

       The alteration of motion is ever proportional to the motive force impressed; and is made in the direction of the right line in which that force is impressed. — If a force generates a motion, a double force will generate double the motion, a triple force triple the motion, whether that force be impressed altogether and at once, or gradually and successively. And this motion (being always directed the same way with the generating force), if the body moved before, is added to or subtracted from the former motion, according as they directly conspire with or are directly contrary to each other; or obliquely joined, when they are oblique, so as to produce a new motion compounded from the determination of both. 

Using modern symbolic notation, Newton's second law can be written as a vector differential equation: 

 

where F is the force vector, m is the mass of the body, v is the velocity vector and t is time.

      The product of the mass and velocity is the momentum of the object (which Newton himself called "quantity of motion"). Therefore, this equation expresses the physical relationship between force and momentum for systems of constant relativistic mass. The equation implies that, under zero net force, the momentum of a system is constant; however, any mass that enters or leaves the system will cause a change in system momentum that is not the result of an external force. This equation does not hold in such cases.

Newton's third law: law of reciprocal actions

       To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction: or the mutual actions of two bodies upon each other are always equal, and directed to contrary parts. — Whatever draws or presses another is as much drawn or pressed by that other. If you press a stone with your finger, the finger is also pressed by the stone. If a horse draws a stone tied to a rope, the horse (if I may so say) will be equally drawn back towards the stone: for the distended rope, by the same endeavour to relax or unbend itself, will draw the horse as much towards the stone, as it does the stone towards the horse, and will obstruct the progress of the one as much as it advances that of the other. If a body impinges upon another, and by its force changes the motion of the other, that body also (because of the equality of the mutual pressure) will undergo an equal change, in its own motion, toward the contrary part. The changes made by these actions are equal, not in the velocities but in the motions of the bodies; that is to say, if the bodies are not hindered by any other impediments. For, as the motions are equally changed, the changes of the velocities made toward contrary parts are reciprocally proportional to the bodies. This law takes place also in attractions, as will be proved in the next scholium.

      In the above, as usual, motion is Newton's name for momentum, hence his careful distinction between motion and velocity.

      The Third Law means that all forces are interactions, and thus that there is no such thing as a unidirectional force. If body A exerts a force on body B, simultaneously, body B exerts a force of the same magnitude body A, both forces acting along the same line. As shown in the diagram opposite, the skaters' forces on each other are equal in magnitude, but act in opposite directions. Although the forces are equal, the accelerations are not: the less massive skater will have a greater acceleration due to Newton's second law. It is important to note that the action and reaction act on different objects and do not cancel each other out. The two forces in Newton's third law are of the same type (e.g., if the road exerts a forward frictional force on an accelerating car's tires, then it is also a frictional force that Newton's third law predicts for the tires pushing backward on the road).

      Newton used the third law to derive the law of conservation of momentum;[19] however from a deeper perspective, conservation of momentum is the more fundamental idea (derived via Noether's theorem from Galilean invariance), and holds in cases where Newton's third law appears to fail, for instance when force fields as well as particles carry momentum, and in quantum mechanics. 

      Bibliografy

      http://en.wikipedia.org/

      http://www.newton.ac.uk/newtlife.html

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton

Aristotle

Viviana I. Chaparro Barriera

The word physics comes from the word phusis that is nature. For Aristotle phusis is the internal activity that makes anything what it is. Aristotle held that the universe was divided into two parts, the terrestrial region and the celestial region. In the realm of Earth, all bodies were made out of combinations of four substances, earth, fire, air, and water. The fundamental assumption in Aristotelian physics was that the natural state of sublunary matter is rest. Earth, air, and water must seek their natural place at rest in the center of Earth unless stopped by an impenetrable surface like the ground or a table. The natural place of rest of the element fire is somewhere above us. The air we see around us is a mixture of the elements air and fire, so its behavior is complicated by the competition between the tendency for fire to rise and air to fall. Except in very complicated situations such as when air and fire were mixed together, motion was not a natural state of affairs.       

Aristotle was born in the small Greek town of Stagiros. His father, Nicomachus, was a physician who had important social connections, and Aristotle's interest in science was inspired by his father's work. His first’s years are not clear, but at the age of 17 Aristotle joined Plato's circle at the Academy in Athens and stay there for 20 years. On Plato's death in 348-347 B.C. Aristotle left for Assos in Mysia. Aristotle married Pythias. He traveled to Mytilene and stay there for 2 years. Aristotle returned to Athens in 335-334. He established a philosophical school of his own. Members of this school took meals in common, and formalities were established to the members. The lectures on the school were divided into morning and afternoon sessions, the more difficult ones given in the morning and the easier and more popular ones in the afternoon. After ledding the school he went to Chalcis, where he died the following year of a gastric ailment.

 

Aristotle is the author of a great number of writings, but only few have been recognized. His earliest writings were produced under the influence of Plato and the Academy. Most of these are lost but these were exoteric works written for the public, and they deal with popular philosophical themes. The dialogues of Plato were the inspiration for some of them. 

Aristotle's model provided a simple, compelling explanation for falling rocks, rising flames, and the circulation of the air. However, it was less successful in explaining "violent motion" such as when an object is hurled from a catapult. Their theories are simplified in two laws: 

1. The speed of falling is proportional to the weight of the object.

2. The speed by which an object falls depends inversely on the density of the medium it is falling through. 

The Aristotelian theory of gravity was a theory that stated that all bodies move towards their natural place. For some objects, Aristotle claimed the natural place to be the center of the earth, wherefore they fall towards it. For other objects, the natural place is the heavenly spheres, wherefore gases, steam for example, move away from the centre of the earth and towards heaven and to the moon. The speed of this motion was thought to be proportional to the mass of the object.

The Physics

Juan A. Ortiz Horrach

The physics is a natural, theoretical and experimental science that studies the properties of the space, time, the matter and energy, like its interactions. The physical word comes from the Greek word physique whose meaning is nature.

Like all science, it looks for that their conclusions can be verifiable by means of experiments and that the theory can realize predictions of future experiments. The Physics is made up of different fields such as: Acoustics. It studies the properties of the sound. Atomic physics, it studies the structure and the properties of the atom. Cryogenics, it studies the behavior of the matter to extremely low temperatures. Electromagnetism. It studies the electric fields and magnetic, and the electrical charges generate that them. Particle physics. It is dedicated to the investigation of elementary particles. Dynamics of fluids. It examines the behavior of the liquids and gases in movement. Geophysical. Application from the physics to the Earth study. It includes the fields of the hydrology, meteorology, oceanography, the seismologic and volcanologist. Mathematical physics. It studies the mathematics in relation to the natural phenomena. Mechanics. It studies the movement of the material objects submissive the combat operation. Molecular physics. It studies the properties and molecular structure. Nuclear physics. It analyzes the properties and it structures of the atomic nucleus, the nuclear reactions and their application. Optics. It studies the propagation and the behavior of the light. Plasma physics. It studies the behavior of gases highly ionized (with electrical charge). Quantum physics. It studies the behavior of extremely small systems and the Franck-Hertz experiment. Physics of the condensate matter. It studies the physical properties of solids and the liquids. Statistical mechanics. It applies statistical principles to predict and to describe the behavior of systems composed of multiple particles. Thermodynamics. It studies the heat and the conversion of the energy from a form to another one. The Physics has undergone a great development thanks to the effort of scientific notables and investigating, who when inventing and perfecting instruments, apparatuses and equipment have obtained that the man worsens his senses when detecting, observing and to analyze phenomena

Many of the scientists that are outstanding in the physics are it: Galileo Galilei, was born the 15 from February of 1564 in Pisa, Italy. Galileo initiated " scientific method experimental" , and it was first in using a telescope that refracted to make astronomical discoveries important, Albert Einstein, the physicist German-American Albert Einstein, born in Ulm, Germany, March 14, 1879, died in Princeton, N.J., April 18, 1955, contributed more than any other scientist to the vision of the physical reality of century 20. In the beginning of World War I, the theories of Einstein --mainly its theory of relativity-- it seemed to him to many people, pointed at a pure quality of thought the human being. Rarely a scientist receives such attention of the public but he received it to Einstein by to have cultivated the fruit of pure learning, Isaac Newton, I stand out in the binomial of Newton and the elements of the differential calculus that called fluxions. Shortly after it said that " it had found the inverse method of fluxiones" , that is to say, integral calculus and e method to calculate the surfaces locked up in curves like hyperbole, and the volumes and of solids. Years later, when their findings were published, there was certain doubt about if the German mathematician Leibnitz he were considered the creator of the differential calculus. Both, apparently independent and almost simultaneously, made this remarkable discovery. 

Its second great discovery was related to the Theory of the Gravitation. 

The third concerted effort, corresponded to the sphere of the optics and the refraction of the light, Aristotle Was creative of the formal, precursory logic of the anatomy and Biology and a creator of the taxonomy (the father of zoology is considered). The Physics start  contributing to knowledge of forces, movements and soon start to study the magnetic field, the statics, the electricity and of in future start to contribute to studies to engineering , all these there has been very valuable contributions for the world and thanks to these studies it is that the world has evolved. The Physics is one of natural sciences that have more contributed to the development and well-being of the man, because thanks to his study and investigation it has been possible to find in many cases, a clear and useful explanation to the phenomena that appear in our daily life. 

The physics has been of great importance for me in my studies engineering, since I have been able to understand and comp to render many of the great discoveries of the world and as each of them has benefitted to our newspaper to live.

 

http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%ADsica

http://html.rincondelvago.com/historia-de-la-fisica_1.html

http://www.monografias.com/trabajos14/fisicos-notabl/fisicos-notabl.shtml

Women in physics: Maria Sklodowska-Curie’s Contribution

Jorlys I. Alvarado Morales

Physics is the most fundamental of the natural science.  As mentioned in the article, “The Role of Physics in Science”, its goal is to use the results of several experiments to formulate scientific laws, usually expressed in the language of mathematics, which can then be used to predict other phenomena. In the past, while this science was emerging existed many scientific as Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein and James Maxwell whose advances are the fundamental base in this science.  On the other hand women were not considered to practice science because societies were thinking that they were not capable. Maria Sklodowska Curies change the vision of the women of her time showing that with passion and determination everyone has the power to contribute and improve things that can resolve everyday problems.

According to the article, “Nobel Prize: Marie Sklodowska Curie”, Curie was born in Warsaw on November 7, 1867. She was the daughter of a secondary-school teacher and received a general education in local schools and some scientific training from her father. She became involved in a students' revolutionary organization and found it prudent to leave Warsaw, then in the part of Poland dominated by Russia, for Cracow, which at that time was under Austrian rule. As mentioned in the article, in 1891, she went to Paris to continue her studies at the Sorbonne where she obtained Licentiateships in Physics and the Mathematical Sciences. In 1894, she met Pierre Curie, professor in the School of Physics and in the following year, 1985, they got married. “She succeeded her husband as Head of the Physics Laboratory at the Sorbonne, gained her Doctor of Science degree in 1903, and following the tragic death of Pierre Curie in 1906, she took his place as Professor of General Physics in the Faculty of Sciences, the first time a woman had held this position”. She was also appointed Director of the Curie Laboratory in the Radium Institute of the University of Paris, founded in 1914.

Marie Curie’s researches, also with her husband, were practiced under difficult conditions, at that time, laboratory arrangements were poor and both had to undertake much teaching to earn a livelihood. The article points out that the discovery of radioactivity by Henri Becquerel in 1896 inspired the Curies in their brilliant researches and analyses which led to the isolation of polonium, named after the country of Marie's birth, and radium. “Curie developed methods for the separation of radium from radioactive residues in sufficient quantities to allow for its characterization and the careful study of its properties, therapeutic properties in particular”.

Curie and her husband studied radioactive materials, particularly the uranium ore pitchblende, which had the curious property of being more radioactive than the uranium extracted from it. According to the article by 1898 they deduced a logical explanation: that the pitchblende contained traces of some unknown radioactive component which was far more radioactive than uranium; thus on December 26th Marie Curie announced the existence of this new substance. As Marie Curie wrote;

“My experiments proved that the radiation of uranium compounds can be measured with precision under determined conditions, and that this radiation is an atomic property of the element of uranium. Its intensity is proportional to the quantity of uranium contained in the compound, and depends neither on conditions of chemical combination, nor on external circumstances, such as light or temperature. I undertook next to discover if there were other elements possessing the same property, and with this aim I examined all the elements then known, either in their pure state or in compounds. I found that among these bodies, thorium compounds are the only ones which emit rays similar to those of uranium. During the course of my research, I had had occasion to examine not only simple compounds, salts and oxides, but also a great number of minerals. Certain ones proved radioactive; these were those containing uranium and thorium; but their radioactivity seemed abnormal, for it was much greater than the amount I had found in uranium and thorium had led me to expect. This abnormality greatly surprised us. When I had assured myself that it was not due to an error in the experiment, it became necessary to find an explanation. I then made the hypothesis that the ores uranium and thorium contain in small quantity a substance much more strongly radioactive than either uranium or thorium. This substance could not be one of the known elements, because these had already been examined; it must, therefore, be a new chemical element. I had a passionate desire to verify this hypothesis as rapidly as possible. And Pierre Curie, keenly interested in the question, abandoned his work on crystals (provisionally, he thought) to join me in the search for this unknown substance. We chose, for our work, the ore pitchblende, a uranium ore, which in its pure state is about four times more active than oxide of uranium. Since the composition of this ore was known through very careful chemical analysis, we could expect to find, at a maximum, 1 per cent of new substance. The result of our experiment proved that there were in reality new radioactive elements in pitchblende, but that their proportion did not reach even a millionth per cent! (Marie Curie, from Pierre Curie pp. 96-98)”

His work is reflected in the numerous awards bestowed on her. She received many honorary science, medicine and law degrees and honorary memberships of learned societies throughout the world. Together, with her husband, was awarded half of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903, for their study into the spontaneous radiation discovered by Becquerel, who was awarded the other half of the Prize. In 1911 she received a second Nobel Prize, this time in Chemistry, in recognition of her work in radioactivity. As mentioned in the article, Curie and Henri Becquerel, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, 1903: "in recognition of the extraordinary services they have rendered by their joint researches on the radiation phenomena discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel". She was the first woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize. Marie Curie also received, with her husband, the Davy Medal of the Royal Society in 1903 and, in 1921, President Harding of the United States, on behalf of the women of America, presented her with one gram of radium in recognition of her service to science. 

According to the article “Biography of Madame Marie Curie: First Woman to win Noble Prize”, in 1921, Marie Curie toured the United States, where she was welcomed triumphantly, to raise funds for research on radium. “She returned with a gram of radium - only a speck, but so fiercely radioactive that it could fuel thousands of experiments - as well as expensive equipment and cash for the Radium Institute”. There, she was disappointed by the myriad of physicians and makers of cosmetics who used radioactive material without health precautions. Her death near Sallanches, France in 1934 was from anemia, almost certainly due to her massive exposure to radiation in her work. The author mentioned that her elder daughter, Irène Joliot-Curie, won a Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1935, the year after Marie Curie's death.

As we can see Madame Marie Curie was an intelligent strong woman who changes the “women vision” of her epoch. One day she said: “I have no dress except the one I wear every day. If you are going to be kind enough to give me one, please let it be practical and dark so that I can put it on afterwards to go to the laboratory”. That’s prove that science was her passion and she leaved many things that women in that epoch do to be a great scientific. She proves that women are capable to practice science and do amazing advances that can improve our life. As I mentioned Curie was the first women who won Noble Prize. For all the contributions and advances that Curie do I think that she is one of the most important women of the history.

“Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something and that this thing must be attained”

Marie Curie

.Bibliography:

“Physics: Marie Curie Summary of Madame Marie Curie's contribution to Science. Biography, Quotes, Photographs” > http://www.spaceandmotion.com/physics-marie-curie-biography.htm<

“The Role of Physic in Science” >http://physics.about.com/od/ physics101thebasics/ f/Whatis Physics.htm<

Nobel Lectures, Physics 1901-1921, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1967 > http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1903/marie-curie-bio.html,

>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HventDFyXKg<

K. Eric Drexler 

Deborah Marty Flores

 

      Born April 25, 1955 in Oakland, California; K. Eric Drexler is best known for popularizing the potential of molecular nanotechnology from the 1970s to the 1980s. His 1991 doctoral thesis at MIT was published as the book, “Nanosystems Molecular Machinery Manufacturing & Computation,” and received the award for Best computer science book of 1992. Drexler also coined the term “grey goo,” which means an end-of-the-world scenario involving molecular nanotechnology in which out-of-control self- replicating robots consume all matter on earth while building more of themselves- a scenario also called ecophagy, which is eating the environment.

      K. Eric Drexler was strongly influences by ideas on limits to growth in the early 1970s, which made him seek out someone who was working on extraterrestrial resources. He found Dr. Gerard K. O’Neil of Princeton University, a physicist famous for a strong focus on particle accelerators and his landmark work on the concepts of space colonization. Drexler worked the summers for O’Neil on building mass drivers prototypes, vapor phase fabrication and space radiators. During the late 70s he began developing ideas about molecular nanotechnology. The term nanotechnology was coined by the Tokyo Science University Professor Norio Taniguchi in 1974 to describe the precise manufacture of materials with nanometer tolerances, and was unknowingly appropriated by Drexler in his book, “Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology.” It was in that book that he proposed the idea of nanoscale “assembler” which would be able to build a copy of itself and if other items of arbitrary complexity. And he also published the term “grey goo” to describe what might happen if a hypothetical self-replicating molecular nanotechnology went out of control.

      Drexler holds three degrees from MIT, received his S.B. in Interdisciplinary Sciences in 1977 and his S.M. in 1979 in Astro/Aerospace engineering with a Master’s thesis titled, “Design of a High Performance And Solar Sail System. In 1991 he earned his first doctoral degree on the topic of molecular nanotechnology and his thesis, “Molecular Machinery & Manufacturing with Applications to Computation.” Which may sound familiar since it was published under “Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing and Computation” in 1992. He also founded alongside his wife, the Foresight Institute in 1986 which he is no longer part of since he and his wife got divorced on 2002. In august of 2005 Drexler joined Nanorex, a molecular engineering software company based in mivhegan to serve as the company’s Chief Technical Advisor. This software was reportedly able to stimulate a hypothetical differential gear design in “a snap” which is an open source molecular design program and is currently set for release in Fall 2007.

      Drexler's work on nanotechnology was criticized as naive by Nobel Prize winner Richard Smalley in 2001 during the Scientific American article.  He argued that nanomachines would have to resemble chemical enzymes more than Drexler's assemblers and could only work in water. Drexler maintained that both were weak arguments. In December of 2003 Smalley and Drexler held a debate to argue their points.

      One of the barriers to achieving molecular nanotechnology is the lack of an efficient way to create machines on a molecular/atomic scale. One of Drexler's early ideas was an "assembler," a nanomachine that would comprise an arm and a computer that could be programmed to build more nanomachines. If an assembler could be built, it might then build a copy of itself, and thus potentially be useful for efficient mass production of nanomachines. But the lack of a way to first build an assembler remains the sine qua non, a condition without which it could not be, an obstacle to achieving this vision. A second difficulty in reaching molecular nanotechnology is design. Hand design of a gear or bearing at the level of atoms is a difficult task. While Drexler and Ralph C. Merkle and others have created a few designs of simple parts, no comprehensive design effort for anything approaching the complexity of a Model T Ford has been attempted. A third difficulty in achieving molecular technology is separating successful trials from failures, and elucidating the failure mechanisms of the failures.  Deliberate design and building of nanoscale mechanisms requires a means other than reproduction/extinction to winnow successes from failures. Such means are difficult to provide (and presently non-existent) for anything other than small assemblages of atoms viewable by an AFM or STM.

      There are a lot of obstacles to make nanotechnology work but I’m confident that in a few years from now someone will come and add to the Drexler’s theory and perfect it. I decided this topic since I find it extremely interested and I like to know what new things are being discovered every day in science. Also nanotechnology is just another way to discover new, better ways to make out way of life better, safer and environment healthy. I do not agree the concept of just replacing manual manufacturing completely and trust and let machines run everything. But I do believe that nanotechnology is our way of saying that new things are discovered daily and that we have the knowledge and the power to make a change, if we put our hearts and mind into it, anything is possible.

The Life of Nikola Tesla

Frank Johnson

Nikola Tesla is one of the most brilliant men to have ever lived. He was an electrical and mechanical engineer and has also contributed considerably to some studies of physics (such as electricity and magnetism). He was also a brilliant inventor having created AC electricity (alternating current), neon lights, radio transmission, the modern electric motor, wireless electricity transfer, remote control, hydraulics, robotics, x-rays, lasers, radars and much more things.

He was born in July 9, 1856 in what is considered today Croatia to Serbian parents. According to local legend he was born at midnight during a thunderstorm. Tesla's childhood was filled with unconventional schemes and experimental gadgetry. For his education he went to polytechnic institution at Graz, specializing in physics and mathematics as a young adult. His pastimes included reading many books, supposedly even memorizing many of them he is said to have been gifted with a photographic memory. He was even able to speak in 7 different languages.

His ability to think in pictures (in which he envisioned every single detail of a device) helped him construct many of his inventions. A year after his graduation he created his first invention which he called the “telephone repeater”, which magnified the voice of a person who spoke into it. Soon after in February 1882 discovered the rotating magnetic field which is a fundamental principle of physics and the foundation of practically every device using alternating current.

With his new found invention he went to Budapest and then to Paris to find an investor or support for his alternating-current power system but found no such opportunity. That’s when was invited to come to New York and work for the Edison Company and redesign some of Edison's machines. He then took a ship to America to start his work there. Before getting on the ship he was robbed of all his belongings. But he still managed to get on the ship and arrived in America four cents in his pocket, a book of his own poems, a scientific article and a package of calculations for his plans for a flying machine.

Edison started making him work the next morning, seven days a week. Even though Tesla did not believe in Edison's direct current motors (knowing that his alternating current motors where more efficient) he still worked hard to improve them. Edison told him if he could do that he would give him a bonus of $50,000. Tesla worked day and night because the $50,000 would let him set up his own lab and work on his inventions. He came up with twenty-four new designs to replace the old ones of Edison's. Edison was overjoyed with the results but did not pay Tesla the $50,000 he had promised. When Tesla finally asked him about it, it is said that Edison told him, "Tesla, you don't understand our American humor." That is when Tesla left the Edison Company and they became rivals.

After leaving the Edison Co. he met the manager of Western Union Telegraph Company, A.K. Brown. Who believed that Tesla's concept of alternating current was a better system than Edison's. They formed the Tesla Electric Company specifically to develop an alternating current motor. This is when Edison got wind of what Tesla was doing, and then the struggle started to see which form of electrical distribution was the best.

In 1887 George Westinghouse personally wanted to meet Tesla, interested in the AC technology. Westinghouse was a competitor of Edison who owned most of the electric companies. Tesla sold his patents to Westinghouse for $60,000 and decided to work for Westinghouse. He was also supposed to get $2.50 for every horsepower of electricity sold. If that had happened he would have become a billionaire!  

In 1893 Tesla and Westinghouse got the contract to install all the electrical and lighting systems for the Chicago World's Fair. This was the first World's Fair with electricity and proved to be a great success. This event showed that alternating current was the electrical system of the future.

After he had won the war of the currents, he continued to invent more things to benefit mankind, but by making financial mistakes he died with significant debt. Tesla was a man who dedicated most of his life trying to uplift the condition of humankind. Hopefully I’ve interested you enough as to learn more about Tesla a truly underappreciated scientist.

 

References:

• “The People's Almanac”, David Wallechinsky & Irving Wallace, 1975
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla
• "Tesla, Master of Lightning", Margaret Cheney, Robert Uth, and Jim Glenn, 1999
• “The man who invented the 20^th century”, Robert Lomas, Lecture
• “Nikola Tesla: The Lost Wizard”, Video on Youtube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSBEYs0rjac&feature=related

 

“Let the future tell the truth and evaluate each one according to his work and accomplishments, the present is theirs, the future for which I have really worked, is mine.”

Nikola Tesla 1856-1943