True Education

Friends one of the most important thing that I noticed while creating scientific blogs is that when you work out an equation there the mere look of it turns people away , that's what probably explains the fear of math and physics in school. We need present mathematics in a different way we need to present physics in a different way so as  to make it interesting an cool. 

         When I was in collage , the Special Theory of Relativity was thought in such a boring fashion that one felt like running away from the class , this is a fact with the present day educational system teachers or professors are not their to impart knowledge but to somehow finish the allotted course material , conduct  exams and that's it game set and match. 

           The beauty and essence of science and maths is lost when teachers teach just to make money and work is far more than just mere making money. Education must fire up imagination and curiosity in kids willingness to know more , willingness to innovate and find new solutions to problems.


            So when one is teaching The Special Theory of Relativity one must give the young minds ideas about the Universe about space and time and how different it is from what we see , and what we see in the universe is but just a special case of what is really around for what one observer sees is not exactly the same seen by another observer. 

         While teaching science giving practical examples is a must students learn faster from practical examples than just theorising and imagining. 

       Today's educational system is based on fear, fear of clearing exams especially in the Indian context  where you would find that chapters may not be taught in school but directly questions are given even one would find that the teachers would give the answers from the textbook which the students are supposed to mug up and put down on exam paper thus making a mockery of education and knowledge.  

         The fear of exams must be removed and students must be made to embrace knowledge , the aim of education must be to build character in students and make  them great citizens of the future.

Rakesh

          

The Twin Paradox

     In the previous blog I have mentioned about the Special Theory of Relativity given by Albert Einstein and the various outcomes of the derived equations that gives results that can be astonish everyone.

          Remember the time equation 

Where T= time passed an inertial reference frame moving at velocity v

            Tr=time passed in an inertial reference frame which is at rest with the observer.

            c=velocity of light in vacuum

Now consider a situation where in a given moment two twins are born immediately after they are born one of them is taken to a space ship and the space ship is sent rocketing and it accelerates to it reaches speeds of 0.99c ie 99% of the velocity of  light in vacuum. 

            What are the outcomes ,after working out the equations the results are 

  T=0.0199Tr

We can round it up as 

T=0.012Tr so 1000T=12Tr

Which in other words mean that 1000 months on earth is equivalent to 12 months in the spaceship that is moving in a straight line at 99% of the speed of light so by the time the the baby on earth is 83 years and 4 months old the baby on the space ship is just 1 year old , now during this while if the spaceship stops and moves back in the opposite direction towards the earth accelerating quickly to a velocity of 0.99c . So making an assumption that the one the 1st birthday of the baby on spaceship it stops and moves back towards the earth , it would reach the earth on 2 nd birthday of the baby in spaceship, now by then the baby who was on earth is now an old man approximately 166 years old and most probably dead.

This is the twin paradox. This shows what we would observe when we are able to achieve relativistic speeds, at present with the technologies available it is not possible to accelerate a massive body like a spaceship to such high velocities but in the future this may be possible and when its possible happenings like the above example would be very normal.

We can actually send astronauts to planets that are many light years away. They won't get to old during the entire mission however when they come back the people with whom they would have to deal would be different since most of the people who were present at the time when the left earth would have died by then.  

Special Theory of Relativity

The Special  Theory of Relativity was given by Albert Einstein in which he showed how our ideas of space and time are but special cases and that with increase in velocity of an object up to a level when it approaches the speed of light the closer it gets to the velocity of light its mass increases , how a rod would contract in the direction of motion as its velocity approaches the speed of light and how time passes differently in two different reference frame depending on their relative speeds.

             First of all the Special Theory of Relativity is based on Two postulates 1) Physical processes are same in all inertial reference frames and 2) The velocity of light in vacuum is same in all inertial reference frames. The second postulate that there is limit to the velocity levels that anything in the universe can attain is a crucial factor, the speed of light is supposed to be the maximum velocity that can be attained in the universe.

           Now in this blog I am not going in to the mathematical details of deducing the equations but will give the equations directly and show you the essence and effect of it . Now the equations deduced from this two postulates making various assumptions are as follows.

       if Mo=the mass of an object at rest, M=mass of the object, c=velocity of light in vacuum, v=velocity of the body.

 

Which implies that as the velocity of a body increases the mass of the body also increases in normal cases as we see on earth as the velocity of a body goes up the mass of the body seems to be constant , because normally we don't see bodies attaining so much velocity to cause any significant difference , a body moving a even 1000 km per hour speed would hardly make any difference to the mass of the body since c the velocity of light is a very big number.

         Now if the velocity of a body is increased to a level so that it is 80% of the velocity of light in that situation the mass of the body would be 1.67times more than the velocity of of the body at rest , if the velocity of the body is increased to 99% of the velocity of light in vacuum the mass of the body goes up by 7.08 times and as the value of c increases it gets heavier and heavier if you are somehow able to equal the velocity of light , LOOK at the equation , what will happen? the mass of the body is infinite.

          Now consider a rod  moving in a horizontal direction,now from the Theory of Relativity we deduce an equation for length of a rod as follows.

Here l= length of the rod, lo=length of the rod at rest, v= velocity of the rod, c=velocity of light in vacuum

This implies as the velocity of the rod increases the rod contracts of course it is not visible in normal circumstances since the velocities achieved are too low for any visible changes to happen but at velocities close to the speed of light the change is apparent if the velocity of the body is 80% of the velocity of light in vacuum the length of the rod contract to 60% of the original length. 

Now the most exiting part ,Consider the equation of time where T=time in a reference frame whose velocity is v, Tr=time with respect to an inertial  reference frame at rest ,v= velocity of the reference frame and c=velocity of light in vacuum.

     Now again the same thing applies here for small values of v the change in time in two reference frames is is very very small however as the the speed approaches the velocity of light the changes become more apparent one can consider one observer in space and another observer in a spaceship. The spaceship is moving at 90% of the speed of light with respect to the first observer from this equation we deduce that the time passes much more slowly in the spaceship. In fact 100 days for the first observer is less than 44 days for the observer in space.

               (To be continued............................)

     

         

THINK DIFFERENT

What is the similarity between Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore and Steve Jobs ,three men who brought great changes in their respective fields.

             

             

Mahatma Gandhi was a barrister he could have lived a life of comfort made millions but he choose to follow his heart and give up everything and work for the sake of Indians in South Africa and then against the oppressive foreign rule in India and thereby playing a vital role in achieving India's independence his thoughts and his work had tremendous impact across the people of the world , Albert Einstein on Gandhi's death said “The future generations would find it hard to believe that such a man existed in flesh and bones”.The journey of Mahatma Gandhi from an ordinary barrister to one of the greatest man in the history of the world comes from the fact that he was deeply spiritual and that he dedicated his life to selfless service of the people of the country without worrying about personal wealth which most people would think is a foolish thing to do.

         

                     Rabindranath Tagore also known a kaviguru which means the teacher of all the poets had a total dislike for formal school education and that he was a nature lover and loved being close to nature. He followed his heart into becoming the greatest poet,music composer, short story writer of Bengali language, his works are so powerful and profound that the songs composed by him are still extremely popular among Bengalis , he received his Nobel Prize for his work geetanjali infact the english translation of geetanjali one can just understand this fact that the difference between his translated and original work is like the difference between kissing a girls photo and kissing the girl herself. Now he is another person who chose to follow his heart and do what he loved to rather than go the beaten path.

               

 Steve Jobs dropped out of his collage as he did not see any value in the course that he was pursuing.With his friend Steve Wozniack started APPLE COMPUTERS the worlds first microcomputer company together they came out with Apple 1 and Apple 2 computers and later on after a visit to Xerox he saw the first rough example of a GUI taking a cue from that he designed the first GUI of the Macintosh Computer now the GUI made it much more possible for the lay user to use the computer. The GUI made computing accessible to ordinary people who did not find it comfortable to type commands and get things done by the computer and not only that the GUI added a new dimension to computing that is elegance everyone wanted to work on a screen with a beautiful Graphical User Interface , also it so happened that Jobs himself was fired from the company he started. After that he started two new companies one was Nexxt and the other one was Pixar, NexT developed the computer which was used by Tim Berners Lee as the first World Wide Web server at CERN. Pixar ended up being the most succesful animation company in the world. When the Operating System of Apple was getting outdated it acquired NexT and Steve Jobs came back to APPLE as the CEO, Steve Jobs put the company back in profit with the iMac computer. It was then followed by iPod ( a digital music player), iPhone and iPad thus Apple become one of the most successful technology products company in the world that changed and improved the way people used technology in their day to day lives.

The one thing common among all three of them is that they are the ones who did not follow the beaten track but followed their own heart and intuition all of them were free thinkers and innovated in their own way , they showed us that there is something called innervoice that one needs to listen to . There is something more in conciousness than just mere logical thinking.

Parallella A Supercomputer For Everyone by Adapteva — Kickstarter

Single Board Computers

     Ever since Raspberry Pi was made the board computers have become a rage with many such board computers coming into the market the latest being Parallela the $99 supercomputer that promises to change the way computing is done the single board computers are much cheaper powerful and will get more powerful in course of time as the processing power increases

The cheapest of them being Raspberry PI priced only at $35 and $25 is an open source hardware that runs on Linux operating system the aim of designing the Raspberry Pi was to teach programming to kids however enthusiasts are coming out with new uses of the pi its as powerful as a full fledged computer 10 years ago and does all the things of a that a full fledged computer does for an ordinary user. Thus this little computer can be an excellent computer for kids across the world especially in developing nations its an opensource hardware so can be copied and improved on . The two RPis consume 3.5 and 2.5 watts of electricity.

Raspberry PI

A Korean company HardKernal has come out with this little board computer Odroid U3 .  It is quite powerful and runs on a quadcore 1.7 Ghz Exynos processor and has 2 Gb of RAM the great plus point is it cost $59 and consumes very little electricity. Its quite powerful and small.

Odroid U3

The real power of computing when it comes to SOCs is brought by the Parallella board

Parallella has two Zynq-7000 series Dual core ARM A-9 CPU along with 16 or a 64 core Epiphany Multicore Accelarator  with 1Gb of RAM the most amazing thing about the small single board computer is that the 66 core version can actually deliver a processing power of 90GigaFLOPS consuming around 5 Watts of power . Now that's the performance of a very powerful computer that would cost someone thousands of dollars.


                So the above three are the examples of things that are going to come in the world of technology computers will be cheaper much faster and more affordable to everyone . This being Free Hardware would help engineers study, copy , modify and build better single board computers anywhere in the world.

           Also in all three computers the processors that are used are ARM RISC processors which consume far lesser electricity and are much cheaper than x86 processors made by Intel or AMD.

       These computers being cheaper will make computing a reality in many parts of world like South Asia,Africa and parts of South America.

Energy from underwater winds

Tidal energy using underwater kites to harness the energy of the ocean tides can be great solution to world energy problems when the issues of cost and effect of salty water on underground kites are effectively addressed. The video link below shows an example of how tidal energy works.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qCDRj8TE9Y

     

                   Water being far more denser than air the tides in sea and ocean would produce lot more energy per square meter as compared to wind . Also the scope of the utilization of this energy source can be huge as  most of the earth is all ocean ,however this energy would be generated only upto a few hundread kilometer distance from land and going too far away from the land would add to costs. Looking at this it makes us think why in hell we are burning coal, natural gases etc when there is immense energy available from the sun, wind,hydel and tidal energy why didn't we tap these sources of energy first.

        Here in this video you will find another example of how tidal power can be used for producing energy and mind you 100% clean energy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9jGis5V5LE

      The unique feature of tidal energy is that it is the only source of energy that does not depend on the solar radiation for producing electricity. The tides in the ocean are produced by the gravitational effects of the sun and moon. This energy is enough to produce billions of watts of energy across the world.

         India would be highly benifitted by this source of energy since it has a very long costline and when we do have an honest and transparent govenrment  in place we can focus on R&D in this field and be totally free from using fossil fuels for energy needs, This would also save us from the pollution that may be produced when we use natural gas or coal for fuel.