Wireless energy

Francisco Cruz

In my physics class I have learned about alternating currents. We learned about this sort of things thanks to great scientists like Nikola Tesla. Nikola Tesla was an inventor, a mechanical and electrical engineer. His theoretical work formed the basis of modern alternating current (AC) electric power systems. He had many revolutionary developments in the field of electromagnetism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Tesla contributed a lot to the second industrial revolution and also he is frequently cited as one of the most important contributors to the birth of commercial electricity. Tesla is best known for his many Tesla's patents.

When Nikola Tesla discovered alternating current electricity, he had many troubles convincing men of his time to believe in it. George Westinghouse (industrial manager, who promoted the use of electricity for power and transportation) was convinced and bought his alternating current patent and this way Tesla acquired funds for his other inventions. One of his big inventions was wireless energy. His big efforts culminated in a major breakthrough in 1899 at Colorado Springs were he performed an example of wireless energy.

Tesla grasps my attention with his amazing project of wireless energy. I believe that his performance was very ahead of his times. In Colorado Springs he transmitted 100 million volts of high-frequency electric power wirelessly over a distance of 26 miles at which he lit up a bank of 200 light bulbs and also ran one electric motor. In order to make the light bulbs and motor received energy he used one of his other great inventions the Tesla coil. A Tesla coil is a special transformer that can take volt electricity and convert it rapidly to great amounts of high-voltage, high-frequency, and low-amperage power. For example the high-frequency output of even a small Tesla coil can light up fluorescent tubes held several feet away without any wire connections. With his Tesla coil, he claimed that only 5% of the transmitted energy was lost. To me that’s very efficient for that kind of technological advancement in those times. He also had another similar project but in a much bigger scale. This one consisted of broadcasting electric power in almost unlimited amounts to any point in the world. To make this project possible he would have to employ the earth's own Tesla coil, with its specific vibration frequency to conduct alternating current electricity with a large electric oscillator. This project couldn’t be performed because he stopped receiving the money for the construction of the tower.

These types of technology are the things that we see in some sci-fi movies, and some people don’t even know that it has been already tried since the 19th century. We can see how Tesla’s mind was so advanced and had ideas that people in those times thought that were crazy. I think that some people from this time will believe that wireless energy is crazy. But Nikola Tesla can prove them wrong with his demonstration. Thanks to scientist like Tesla we have lots of out breaking technological advances. Imagine if we had put more interest in things like this, in physics, who knows how far ahead we would already been.

Kepler’s contribution to Physics

Karla Ramos Calixto

Johannes Kepler was born in Weilder Stadt, Germany on December 27, 1571 and died in Ratisbona, Germany on November 15, 1630. He was an astronomer and mathematician. Kepler dedicated a great part of his life trying to understand and explain the movement of the planets. Most of Kepler's enthusiasm for the Copernican system was based on his theological convictions of the connection between the physical and the spiritual things. “The universe itself was an image of God, with the Sun corresponding to the Father, the stellar sphere to the Son, and the intervening space between to the Holy Spirit”. His first writing of Mysterium contained an extensive part that relates the heliocentrism to the Biblical passages that apparently supported the geocentrism.

At the beginning of his research, Kepler thought that the movement of the planets was based on the pitagorical laws of harmony and that the distance of the planets in relation to the sun were given by the spheres within the interior of the perfect polyhedrons. In the year 1600, he began collaboration with astronomer Tycho Brahe, which had the best astronomy observation center at the time. Kepler was unable to access the data and observations made by Tycho because they did not trust each other. Kepler was able to study the data after Tycho’s death in 1620. Kepler was able to discover that the planets movements could not be defined by the polyhedrons and harmony model, Based on the ideas that the planets were simple geometrical figures, he decided to experiment with combinations of circles and ovals, He saw that it was impossible with circles. Without any other options, he decided to use eclipses and had a breakthrough. Based on this data, he then developed the three laws that describe the movement of the planets. They were published in his book Nova Astronomy in the year 1609.

These laws were: First Law (1609): All planets move around the sun showing elliptical orbits, being the sun within its focus. The Second Law (1609): The radio vector that joins the planet and the sun covers the same areas within the same time range. The laws of area are equivalent to the constancy of the angular moment, when the planet is further from the sun (aphelion) its velocity is less than it is when it is nearer to the sun (perihelion). At the aphelion and the perihelion, the angular moment L is the product of the planets mass, speed and distance to the center of the sun. Third law (1618): For any given planet, the cube of its orbital period (the time that the planets take to circle once around the sun) is directly proportionate to the cube of the media distance with the sun. These laws permitted Kepler to be classified as the greatest astronomer of his time.

Three centuries later, his intuition about the planets being described as simple figures was confirmed by Einstein which was confirmed and proven with his Relativity Theory which demonstrated that the celestial bodies follow rectal lines.

Johann Karl Friedrich Gauss and the Gauss’s Law

José A. Rivera Ríos

Karl Friedrich Gauss, (30 April 1777 – 23 February 1855) born in Braunschweig Germany, was scientist and a mathematician who contributed considerably too many fields. Gauss had an amazing influence in many areas of science and mathematics and is ranked as one of history's most important mathematicians. Gauss was a child prodigy a person that from at an early age masters one or more skills at an adult level. There are many anecdotes pertaining to his precocity while a child and he made his first ground-breaking mathematical discoveries while still an adolescent. Gauss was a phenomenal mental calculator. He completed Disquisitiones Arithmeticae, his masterpiece, in 1798 at the age of 21, though it would not be published until 1801. This work was fundamental in consolidating number theory as a discipline and has shaped the field to the current day. He developed an important relation, no know as Gauss’s law, it is a mathematical statement of the relation between the amount of charge enclosed in a region of space and the total flux of the electric field over the surface enclosing that region of space. The total electric flux depends on the total charge enclosed and not how that charge is distributed. Understanding Gauss's law requires understanding the concepts of electric fields and electric flux. Electric charges exert forces on each other without physical contact because each charge causes an electric field and the electric fields exert forces on other charges. Electric fields are the intermediary causing electric charges to exert forces on each other.

The electric flux through an area is defined as the electric field multiplied by the area of the surface projected in a plane vertical to the field. It is an important tool since it permits the assessment of the amount of enclosed charge by mapping the field on a surface outside the charge distribution. For geometries of sufficient symmetry, it simplifies the calculation of the electric field. If the electric field is not perpendicular, then this product must also be multiplied by the cosine of the angle between the electric field direction and the outward pointing line perpendicular to the surface. This line perpendicular to the surface is called the normal. In terms of vector multiplication, this product is the scalar or dot product of the electric field vector and the area vector. Gauss' law is a powerful tool for the calculation of electric fields when they originate from charge distributions of sufficient symmetry to apply it. If the charge distribution lacks sufficient symmetry for the application of Gauss's law, then the field must be found by summing the point charge fields of individual charge elements. It also offers a simple way to determine the electric field when the charge distribution is simple and possesses a high degree of regularity. In 1831 Gauss developed a fruitful collaboration with the physics professor Wilhelm Weber, leading to new knowledge in magnetism, and the discovery of Kirchhoff's circuit laws in electricity. In my opinion Gauss is one of the greatest mathematics and scientist on the history of humanity and his inheritance will remain in world thru the ends of times.

The Grand Idea About The Universal Universe

Lianne S. Meléndez Cora

Sigbørn Hervik, one of the youngest professors of the youngest professors of mathematics at the University of Stavenger in Norway, together with professors A.A Coles from Dulhousie University, G.W. Gibbons from the University of Cambridge and C.N. Pope from Texas A&M University, came up with a new idea called “The Theory of Everything”. This new theory joins three of the most important theories of how the Universe came to be: Theory of Relativity, Theory of Quantum Mechanics and the young String Theory. Now let’s give a brief explanation of each of these theories.

The Theory of Relativity was proposed by the physicist Albert Einstein in 1915. This theory states that for objects traveling near the speed of light, objects will move slower and shorten in length from the point of view of an observer on Earth. He also derived the equation E=mc^2, which reveals the equivalence of mass and energy. Einstein also applied this theory to gravitational fields and he derived the “curved space time continuum”, which depicts the dimensions of space and time as a two-dimensional surface where massive objects create valleys and dips in the surface. The Theory of Relativity is divided into two parts. The first part is the Special theory of Relativity, which talks about whether rest and motion are relative or absolute. The other part is the General Theory of Relativity, which deals with the particles as they accelerate due to gravitation. This theory expands Newton’s theory, showing that objects continue to move in a straight line in space time, but we observe the motion as acceleration because of the curved nature of space-time.

The Quantum Theory deals with the tiniest things such as particles are made of. It was a collaboration of many physicists such as Neils Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger, Wolfgang Pauil and Max Planck. Planck is the originator of the Quantum Theory, while Heisenburg formulated the Uncertainty Principle. Planck found that energy is always emitted or absorbed in discrete units called quanta. He also developed the Planck constant h=6.62 x 〖10〗^(-34) Js. Niels Bohr contribution was his model of the atom that explains that electrons are held in their orbits through the electrical attraction between the positive nucleus and the negative electron.

In the String Theory the elementary particles we observe in particle accelerators could be thought of as the excitation modes of elementary strings. As in guitar playing, the stings must be stretched under tension in order to become excited. The strings are floating in space time and have tension. The average size of a string should be somewhere near the length scale of quantum gravity, called Planck length. This length is approximately 〖10〗^(-33)cm. Sting theories are classified accordingly to whether or not the strings are required to be closed loops and whether or not the particle spectrum includes fermions. Supersymmetry relates the particles that transmit forces to the particles that make up matter.

The Theory of Everything is based in all the theories just explained. Why? These theories don’t work properly if they are treated independently. One has something or explains a concept that the other doesn’t. With the Theory of Everything, the professors want “to construct curvature or projection operators that split geometry into small entities. It is a tool or a method based on mathematical formulas designed to find such operators”. Their method relies on linear algebra. “The quantum leap is that we relate the curvature of space to linear algebra in a special way”, Hervic says. This theory is obviously under investigation. The challenge this scientists are facing is that nobody has thought of their method before. So they need to discover consequences and find areas of application. I think that the contributions of all this great thinkers are a very important part of human kind. Without them, we will not be sitting in a classroom learning physics. Although sometimes it is a little hard for me to understand some concepts, I am more convinced that physics explain everything from the tiniest particles in an atom to the huge bodies that orbit our universe.

The electricity that began the science revolution

David Santiago-Bonilla

Throughout the ages there have been periods of time that it characterizes from the rest of the periods. Each new period of time represents mankind progress or deterioration in the fields of knowledge. The Sumerians with the writing, the Greeks and Romans philosophies, Mayan engineering, the dark era in Europe, and the discovery of the New World that ended the middle ages to the modern times. This period of new discoveries and knowledge was one of the reasons of thinking in a new form. A new way to see life and human knowledge emerged. Thus, the renaissance, with the knowledge of the old civilizations, re-appeared and foments new works of arts and engineering.

Although the Renaissance was primarily a new re-born of the arts, the culture that achieved this time of period made efforts to new studies, and the sciences made new discoveries that challenged the medieval-way of thinking. It began with Copernicus and in the 18^th century, began the Era of Enlightenment. This era is known for the belief of the reason and human knowledge as almighty and the traditions as a matter of the past. The science was at its peak of study activities.

One of the members of the era was the Italian scientist Alessandro Volta. He began to be self-taught and was a genius of electricity. He made various investigations like the electrical tension; invented the voltaic battery, and other instruments such as electrophorus, the electrical pistol, eudiometer and condenser. He was challenged by the church, even thought his family was devoted, but he still was interested in the philosophies of natural sciences. Other scientists, and even politicians, such as Benjamin Franklin, that is, perhaps, one of the symbols of the era. Everything that characterized the era, Franklin did it. Franklin is best known with the story of the “discovery of lighting electricity flying a kite in a storm”. Rather that is dangerous and is a myth (because he could be killed) he was a scientist in electricity. He made the theory of electricity, invented the lightning rod, and demonstrated that pure science can benefit the common people, and explain the phenomena of the electrostatic induction.

This events that changed the world, were all thanks to the electric scientist that, with no information and experimented themselves, made possible that the Era of Enlightenment could be a starting point to new discoveries. The novel Frankenstein, of Mary Shelley, is an example of the new discoveries in electricity, as the monster is given life with electricity. The concepts of the electromagnetism in studies jut year before inspired a well known world literature. The electricity studies also helped a new era, the Industrial Revolution, with science helping to produce more items and fomenting new discoveries. Thanks to the scientist and their researches, new and modern concepts have been developed, such as the electrical light, the modern inventions like the telegraph, telephones, radios and computers; and with the new technologies, new ideas, new fantasies and thoughts that inspire minds to create more and improve better in any field of study. We couldn’t gat this far without the help of the scientist, like Volta, Franklin, Ampere, etc. whose intellectual research in electricity took the physics to modern times.

Incredible physical: Michael Faraday

Henry Toro De León

Michael Faraday, (22 September 1791 – 25 August 1867) born in England, was one of the most important physicists of our contemporary era, this contributed to the field of electromagnetism and electrochemistry. Faraday studied the magnetic field around a conductor ( the conductor is the name for materials what having the capacity to carrying electricity) carrying a DC electric current, the study of magnetic field is important because this concept is use un many electronics devices, example: the alternator of our cars etc... He established the basis for the electromagnetic field concept in physics. He discovered the induction of electric current in a circuit and others electronics devices. He worked in diamagnetism (this concept is referred to the opposite to ferromagnetism), and laws of electrolysis. He discovered the effect of magnetism in rays of light and the relationship between the two phenomena. His inventions of electromagnetic devices formed the foundation of electric motor technology example the alternator in our cars and the starter, and it was largely due to his efforts that electricity became viable for use in technology. Faraday is most important person for his work with electricity and magnetism. In the first Faraday’s experiment he recorded the construction of a voltaic pile with seven halfpence pieces, stacked together with seven disks of sheet zinc, and six pieces of paper moistened with salt water. With this pile he decomposed sulphate of magnesia, soon after the Danish physicist and chemist; Hans Christian Ørsted discovered the phenomenon of electromagnetism. Faraday, having discussed the problem with the two men, went on to build two devices to produce what he called “electromagnetic rotation”: a continuous circular motion from the circular magnetic force around a wire and a wire extending into a pool of mercury with a magnet placed inside would rotate around the magnet if supplied with current from a chemical battery, this experiment was very important because it opened the doors for covert chemistry energy(work) in electric energy or electric work. The latter device is known as a polar motor. These inventions form the foundation of modern electromagnetic technology, this concept (modern electric technology is used in the industry, in our cars and in the electronic devices like a stove. In his excitement, Faraday was brave and strong man, because he published results without acknowledging his work with either comments of: Wollaston or Davy. Faraday continued his laboratory work exploring properties of materials and developing the requisite experience. Faraday briefly set up a circuit to study whether a magnetic field could regulate the flow, (this flow of current is just for enclosed areas) of a current in an adjacent wire, but could find no such relationship. This lab followed similar work with light and magnets three years earlier with identical results. During the next seven years, Faraday spent much of his time perfecting his recipe for optical quality (heavy) glass, which he used in his future studies connecting light with magnetism. In his spare time from this optics work, Faraday continued publishing his experimental work and conducted foreign correspondence with scientists he previously met on his journeys about Europe with Davy. When Davy passed away, Faraday began his great series of experiments in which he discovered electromagnetic induction. Joseph Henry likely discovered self-induction (this concept is referred to the property of self-inductance is a particular form of electromagnetic induction. Self inductance is defined as the induction of a voltage in a current-carrying wire when the current in the wire itself is changing. In the case of self-inductance, the magnetic field created by a changing current in the circuit itself induces a voltage in the same circuit. Therefore, the voltage is self-induced).A few months earlier Faraday used the principle to construct the electric dynamo, the ancestor of modern power generators. He completed a series of experiments aimed at investigating the fundamental nature of electricity. Faraday used "static", batteries, and "animal electricity" to produce the phenomena of electrostatic attraction, electrolysis, magnetism, etc. He concluded that, contrary to scientific opinion of the time, the divisions between the various "kinds" of electricity were illusory. Faraday instead proposed that only single "electricity" exists, and the changing values of quantity and intensity (current and voltage) would produce different groups of forms. Near the end of his career Faraday proposed that electromagnetic forces extended into the empty space around the conductor. This idea was rejected by his fellow scientists, and Faraday did not live to see this idea eventually accepted. Faraday's concept of lines of flux emanating from charged bodies and magnets provided a way to visualise electric and magnetic fields. Faraday, in my opinion, was one of the most important physics in our era, because without him the study of electrostatic or a different kind of electricity would not exists as it is.