HackingTheUniverse

You are browsing the archives of 2008 November.

In 1600, William Gilbert published a study of magetic forces and their ability to affect a compass needle.  Gilbert’s studies convinced him that the earth was a giant magnet.  He also believed (incorrectly) that the rotation of the Earth and the magetic field of the Earth had the same cause. In de Magnete, Gilbert also [...]

Born in 1401 in Kues, Germany, Nicholas became known as Nicholas of Kues or Nicholas of Cusa (Latin version of Kues) and was a Cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church. Nicholas attended the University of Padua in Italy and received his doctorate degree in canon law there. In addition to being a religious scholar and [...]

Life support systems in space involve a range of areas and considerations. Short term issues: Hull protection – compression, extreme temperature control, and extreme radiation protection are usually provided by some kind of hull in either a spacecraft or a larger living habitat structure Short term breathable oxygen supply – a tank of air and [...]

AC-18 WIRELESS RESTRICTIONS (NIST SP 800-53) The organization: (i) establishes usage restrictions and implementation guidance for wireless technologies; and (ii) authorizes, monitors, controls wireless access to the information system. NIST Special Publications 800-48 and 800-97 provide guidance on wireless network security. NIST Special Publication 800-94 provides guidance on wireless intrusion detection and prevention. Overview of [...]

Born in Erlangen, Bavaria, Germany in 1882, Emmy Noether was a mathematician who laid the groundwork for the idea of symmetry in mathematics and physics. She studied the works of Hilbert, Klein and Minkowski and was peer with Hermann Weyl. Noether’s theorem – in 1915, she proved a relationship between symmetries in physics and conservations [...]

The Turing Test is a standard set to determine the ability of a machine to demonstrate human-like intelligence. Alan Turing, a mathematician, cryptographer and one of the earliest computer scientists, wrote a paper in 1950 called “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” which described the test as a conversational comparison where an observer attempts to determine whether [...]

English physicist William Crookes expanded on the vacuum tube research done by Geissler, Plucker and Hittorf and created a tube with a greater vacuum that became the new standard. In 1876 Eugen Goldstein called the display inside the tube, “cathode rays” and the tubes became known as cathode ray tubes, which was eventually abbreviated to [...]

Paul Dirac was born in 1902 in Bristol, England. He was a mathematician and physicist who helped to develop quantum mechanics and discovered an equation that successfully predicted anti-matter. In 1928 he created the Dirac equation which provides a mathematical description of elementary particles that is consistent with both relativity and quantum mechanics. The equation [...]

In 1206, an Arabic engineer and inventor from Mesopotamia known as al-Jazari wrote a description of a suction pump, along with several other supporting pieces, all incorporated into the design of a twin cylinder reciprocating piston suction pump. This was the first known use of a partial vacuum to suck fluids into a pump, the [...]

World’s First Nanoradio Could Lead to Subcellular Remote-Control Interfaces The breakthrough nanoradio consists of a single carbon-nanotube molecule that serves simultaneously as all the essential components of a radio — antenna, tunable band-pass filter, amplifier and demodulator. Physicist Alex Zettl led the development team, and graduate student Kenneth Jensen built the radio. The nanoradio is [...]