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(HYDRO) ELECTRIC DREAM
A childhood dream fulfilled

It had been days since young Tesla first heard about the Niagara falls. Yet, images of huge curtains made of water continued to fill his mind. Standing on a nearby cliff, he would see rainbows glistening in the curtains. The sound of falling water would be deafening but also unexpectedly soothing. It would drown out all the other noise in life, leaving only what is in the present moment. But something was still amiss in the picture. Ever since he played with a mathematical model from his instructors, young Tesla had always fancied the idea of water turbines. And the falls was a perfect place to install one of these giant wheels. Although Tesla was still young and had not fully understood the significance of the water turbines, he told his uncle that he would one day go to America to build his wheels.​

Many years later, in 1890, Tesla’s childhood dream came true. Together with his employer, George Westinghouse, he had won a bid to construct a power plant in the Niagara falls with his plan of using Alternating Current to transport electricity over vast distances. Despite all the effort his rival, Thomas Edison, had put in to downplay the benefits and exaggerate the dangers of Alternating Current , the chairman of the investment board, Lord Kelvin, still had a sliver of faith in the adventurous idea. Back then, both AC current and hydroelectric dams were unproven technology, but Tesla’s proposals seemed nonetheless promising.

It took a whole six years for the power plant to be completed. Throughout this time, Tesla never visited the site once. He was kept busy with other projects, a big part of it included salvaging whatever was left of his work from his New York City laboratory, which had caught fire. In 1896, the power plant was finally done, but the most important question still remained, ‘Would it work?’ Everyone heaved a sigh of relief when the switch was turned. The generators had indeed produced 50000 horsepower, a tremendous amount of energy then. And it had sent the power all the way to Buffalo with minimal leakage, which was around 40 km away.

Soon after, many began to order electricity produced by the dam, and Tesla’s electricity was powering subways, street lights, and many other infrastructure. More generators soon followed and by 1925, hydroelectric dams supplied 25% of electricity usage in the US. Niagara Falls had ushered in a new era of Alternating Current. This was Tesla’s legacy, his triumph over his long-time competitor. But he regarded little of it, he was simply glad that his childhood dream had been fulfilled and most importantly, it had lit up the lives of many.

“We have many a monument of past ages; we have the palaces and pyramids, the temples of the Greek and the cathedrals of Christendom. In them is exemplified the power of men, the greatness of nations, the love of art and religious devotion. But the monument at Niagara has something of its own, more in accord with our present thoughts and tendencies. It is a monument worthy of our scientific age, a true monument of enlightenment and of peace. It signifies the subjugation of natural forces to the service of man, the discontinuance of barbarous methods, the relieving of millions from want and suffering.”

~ Nikola Tesla, 1896

Sources:

https://bigthink.com/paul-ratner/why-nikola-teslas-greatest-achievement-may-be-in-niagara-falls

https://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/famous-inventors/nikola-tesla2.htm

https://www.history.com/topics/inventions/nikola-tesla

A LIGHT-BENDING DISCOVERY

How an English astronomer propelled Einstein to stardom

Many people know 1905 as Einstein’s Miracle Year. Within a few months, Einstein published four scientific papers that would revolutionise how people saw the world, namely the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity and the mass-energy equivalence principle. But these did not propel him to superstardom. Instead, it was an extraordinary event that occurred in 1919.

From 1907-1915, Einstein developed his theory of General Relativity, which reimagined gravity as the warping of the space-time fabric instead of it as a force pulling objects together as proposed the Newtonian model. However, the theory remained unproven until May 29, 1919.

It was a hot day in the Island of Principe. Sir Arthur Eddington, director of Cambridge Observatory, was all prepared. His team had arrived early to prepare the site. He was going to observe the eclipse, and with any stroke of luck, use it to prove Einstein’s theory of General Relativity. There he stood, holding a copy of Einstein’s paper. He knew he was one of the only few Englishmen who understood it. And he truly believed in it, he believed in Einstein.

It was a difficult time to live in. Eddington had refused to fight in World War I because he, just like Einstein, believed in pacifism. This has caused some of his fellow countrymen to persecute him, but none of this deterred him from planning this expedition to prove Einstein’s theory. He had teamed up with Astronomer Royal Sir Frank Wilson Dyson in this endeavour. Knowing how difficult photographing an eclipse would be, Dyson would be leading another expedition in Sobral, Brazil.

It was hours before the eclipse, and Eddington and his team were ready to take the shots. He had even brought coelostats with him, mirrors specially used to observe the sun. He had come on this trip without the bulky mechanical devices that were used to turn the telescopes towards the sun as the Earth rotates, hence the coelostats were important to reflect light into the telescope. The mirrors also had motors for easy adjustment. He went through his plan many times. He was going to photograph the eclipse and compare the position of the Hyades cluster with its normal position in the night sky. If Einstein was right, the gravity of the sun would cause the cluster to be displaced from its usual position by about 1.75 arcseconds.

All of a sudden, storm clouds swarmed the area, enveloping the sun. Thunderstorms rolled in mercilessly, as though they were out to foil Eddington’s plan. Eddington was devastated. He knew that many others, like German astronomer Erwin Finlay-Freundlich, had failed before. Was it destined that the theory will not be proven? No! Eddington thought as he tried to find other ways to salvage the situation. Time was running out, the eclipse would occur in minutes, yet the rain had barely subsided.

Within the next few moments, the Earth plunged into darkness as the moon moved in front of the sun. Partially blocked from view by the clouds, the moon covered the sun perfectly for a few minutes. Eddington had made the call to persist and his team had managed to capture using ten or so photographic plates. As he awaited the plates to be developed, Eddington prayed for good results. It turned out that only two of the photographic plates were useful, showing the Hyades cluster. After much calculation, Eddington showed that the stars were displaced exactly as Einstein had predicted! Although Dyson’s main 16-inch telescope was out of focus, a 4-inch back-up telescope managed to produce results that agreed with that of Eddington’s, providing confirmation for Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

When results of the experiment were published, Einstein immediately became a global sensation. The Times of London published, “New Theory of the Universe: Newtonian Ideas Overthrown.” Einstein was hailed as a celebrity. His theories and views immediately flooded the media. Subsequent experiments continued to vindicate Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, placing Einstein forever in the annals of Science.

Oh leave the Wise our measures to collate.

One thing at least is certain, light has weight.

One thing is certain and the rest debate.

Light rays, when near the Sun, do not go straight.

~ Sir Arthur Eddington

A Dark Universe.

Nobody knows what dark matter really is, or whether it is even real. We only know of its existence through its gravitational interactions with normal matter. Yet, its existence is of so much importance. Imagine, without dark matter, which accounts for about 85% of the universe’s matter, galaxies would not hold together, and the universe would not be as we know it. Dark matter acts as a sort of gravitational glue for galaxies.

First proposed in 1884 by Lord Kelvin, the origin and composition of dark matter continues to baffle physicists. There are many theories for dark matter, including Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), Primordial Black Holes, or even Modified Newton Dynamics (MoND), which proposes that Newton’s law of gravitation varies at distances as large as the radii of galaxies. None of these theories have been definitively proven yet, which makes the journey to discover the truths perplexing yet exciting at the same time.

One of the most interesting possibilities of dark matter is the possible existence of a parallel universe made up of dark matter. Dark matter definitely exists in our Milky Way galaxy, for our galaxy weighs around 150 trillion solar masses, but the matter as we know it only accounts for around 4 per cent of it. Imagine that, instead of being formless clumps, dark matter behaves like normal matter. They could come together to create dark elements, dark planets, and even dark life, dark you and dark me! Dark life could even exist amongst us for all you know, but because dark matter does not interact with normal matter other than gravitationally, we will not actually know of its presence.

In fact, there may be evidence that dark life does exist. In January 2012, Christoph Weniger, a physicist at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, started noticing hints of a strange type of radiation around the center of our galaxy. NASA’s space observatory, Fermi, recorded multiple flashes of gamma rays, up to 60 billion times as potent as ordinary yellow light, which Weniger realized could be a signal of dark-matter particles smashing into each other, transforming something invisible to something visible.

Having a dark matter parallel universe opens a range of exciting possibilities. If we could interact with our dark matter counterparts (by sending gamma ray signals or any other way), who definitely have access to much more of the universe’s matter, we could perhaps learn more about how our universe works, and perhaps even come up with a theory of everything that unifies all the four fundamental forces into one.



Sources

http://discovermagazine.com/2013/julyaug/21-the-possible-parallel-universe-of-dark-matter

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/4/2/18282606/milky-way-mass-stars-dark-matter

It Ain't Matter but it Matters.

In the beginning, the universe was made up of energy. As it cooled, matter as we know it today began to form. The first atoms formed around 100000 years after the big bang. Alongside matter, there were also antimatter particles. Antimatter particles are just like normal matter particles, but with properties (electrical charge) reversed. It is theorized that every matter particle has an antimatter counterpart, and when both meet, they annihilate each other, giving off energy. The existence of antimatter was predicted by Paul Dirac in 1928. He had combined Einstein’s special relativity equation with quantum mechanics, and he found out that the equation worked for electrons of both negative and positive charges.

However, our universe today is largely made up of normal matter. There is a significant shortage of antimatter! If both were made in equal quantities, they would have annihilated each other and the universe would only exist as residual energy. This is called the baryon asymmetry problem. In the past years, scientists have also observed that the laws of nature do not apply equally to matter and antimatter. They favour the formation of matter more than antimatter, which results in the asymmetry.

“However, if a special kind of marble rolled across a table of spinning coins and caused every coin it hit to land on its head, it would disrupt the whole system. There would be more heads than tails. In the same way, some unknown mechanism could have interfered with the oscillating particles to cause a slight majority of them to decay as matter.”

~CERN website

While antimatter might seem like a topic of science fiction, they can actually be produced in our finest labs (like the Large Hadron Collider) and even have real world applications. Scientists have found great potential to harness energy from matter-antimatter reactions to propel space crafts. Scientists estimate that around one gram of antiprotons could power a spacecraft to Mars in just one month! Instead of the 11 months taken by the Mars Global Surveyor in 1996. But there is a problem, producing one milligram of antimatter, the minimum requirement for application, requires about 100 billion dollars, which is prohibitively expensive. However, just like nuclear energy, I believe in years to come, the price of antimatter production would drastically decrease such that it is commercially viable to use it for spacecrafts. Then, we can look forward to more feasible manned-missions to Mars and beyond.

Sources:
https://www.livescience.com/32387-what-is-antimatter.html

https://www.nasa.gov/exploration/home/antimatter_spaceship.html

https://home.cern/science/physics/matter-antimatter-asymmetry-problem