Internet and age of PC

Personal computers have been around here for almost 40 years and have changed the way people live in many different ways. Now we live in a society where a PC is a very common, affordable and very useful instrument that we use to carry out day to day tasks. Before 1950 the computer was considered as an instrument which can only used by highly educated people like scientists and engineers. Then computers were used for commercial purposes too. By 1955, there were only 250 computers throughout the world and in mid 1980’s 1 million personal computers had been sold.
The following graph illustrates the growth of personal computer sales from 1980 to 1984.It clearly shows the popularity of PC usage has been increased.

(Image retrieved from http://www.contactandcoil.com/tag/standards/) There were  handful of reasons for this, ·         The size of the computer was reduced due to the use of transistors and IC (semiconductors). ·         The performance and capabilities of the pc increased dramatically. ·         With the capabilities of PCs getting increased, the reliability of the machine and the data it outputs were increased too. ·         With all these improvements one of the main reason for the popularity of computers among general public was the decrease in its price. With new semiconductor technology manufacturers were able to make more powerful computers for a much lower price.  As the computers become an essential part of peoples’ lives, manufactures started to invest more and more in research for better technologies. As a result things like microprocessors were invented and these inventions created new pathways to other technologies like mobile phones, PDAs, embedded systems. In 2008 worlds first processor consisting of 1 billion transistors (Intel Itanium) was introduced and this is considered as a milestone of microprocessor manufacturing because it indicates an upper boundary for the development of microprocessors using conventional technologies. Please read the post in the following link to know more about the latest trends in processor manufacturing.http://www.extremetech.com/computing/185688-ibm-betting-carbon-nanotubes-can-restore-moores-law-by-2020

(Image retrieved from http://upload.wikimedia.org)

There are other areas that was heavily influenced by PCs. Entertainment is an industry which was changed exponentially due to the use of PC. Before the emergence of PC people had very different ways of spending their leisure time. But nowadays people spend most of their free time using PCs or other technology related instruments. Computer games are one of the main uses of computers nowadays and consoles are the newest trend in gaming. And also it is estimated that the total worth of gaming industry in the world was about $105 billion dollars in 2010.It gives us a picture about how computers have changed  human lives in just few decades.

Internet and World Wide Web

Today we all are living in a world where over a billion of people in the world are connected  to each other. The Internet or the World Wide Web is a result of years of research and commitment of thousands of people. It can be considered as triumph for the whole mankind. Nowadays it’s almost impossible to carry out most of the tasks without the help of World Wide Web. Social networking, Online banking and purchasing, entertainment, communication and online education are some of the benefits of the Internet.

The predecessor of the Internet was a network called Arpanet. It was the first of its kind to use packet switching technology to transfer data. It was designed in 1969 and used 2 computers in Stanford and UCLA universities as hosts. As with this initial step, others who were interested with networking of computers began to construct other facilities like email, eBooks and web forums. But most of these activities were limited only to scientists and engineers and they weren’t used by general public until the World Wide Web emerges. In 1983 TCP/IP protocol was introduced to the Arpanet and this expanded the amount of devices that can be connected to the network. In 1984 DNS (Domain name system) was created. It’s the system that converts the numerical address of a webpage to a more human friendly humanoid phase. The importance of the IP address is that it’slike the name given to the device which is connected to the network and this helps the device to identify itself and communicate with other devices. In 1990, Tim burners Lee who proposed the World Wide Web and designed it created the World Wide Web .He introduced the current standards that used in internet like the HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol), HTML (Hyper Text Mark up Language) and URL (Universal Resource Locator).The first webpage was created in 1991 and It consists of an introduction for the world wide web.  

Nowadays the internet is immensely large and no one knows how much information is out there and the location of the information that someone needs. So there are Softwares like Google, Internet Explorer to help people to find out what they want in Web. The first web browser which public could access was Mosaic which was introduced in 1993.Netscape was its competitor which was introduced in 1994.And also It was the web browser which was laid foundation for the browsers like Firefox and Safari. One of the major uses of Internet is online transactions and security related to financial transactions. In 1995 Netscape Navigator created SSL (Secure Socket Layer) and this allowed to user to do online transactions safely. Later this led to concern of online security because people found methods to steal information transmitted through internet and use them in illegal actions. Several attempts were taken to minimize this and the most efficient method was to encrypt the data, nowadays RSA encryption is wildly used to encrypt transaction details .The algorithm which is used to decrypt data was developed in 1977 by Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman. 

(Image retrieved from http://www.cohn-family.com/encryption.htm)

In 1998 Google come into web as a search engine. Soon it becomes famous among general public because the success of its search results and it’s simple yet very effective interface. Nowadays Google is the most preferred web browser and the service provider in Internet because of the large amount facilities they are providing for the user such as Gmail, Google maps and Google drive. Google search engine is categorised as a crawler –based engine. It uses programs called crawlers to gather information about websites. The most interesting feature of the Google search engine is that it can track users and use this information to provide customized search results. Although this is a very innovative way to personalize the web experience, it has become a highly controversial topic since some people interpret this as spying on its users.

File sharing is another benefit of the internet .In 1998 the first file sharing software Napster launched. Users were able to share audio files over internet. Nowadays people can downloadmultimedia or other files directly by the host or using a torrent. With rapid advancement of modern telecommunication facilities general public have access to very high internet speed and size of the files are no longer a constraint for the users .A torrent is a way to download files through internet. It was created by a programmer called Bram Cohen in 2001.A torrents file is a small file which contains the details of various hosts that the file can be downloaded. Programs like Bit Torrent can read these files and download the same file from several sources simultaneously. But file sharing facility is a very controversial one because it directly affects the copyrights of a production. Nowadays almost any software, movie, song and other multimedia can be easily downloaded and the owners of those things won’t get any benefit for this. This is illegal by law in many countries but the file sharing keep popularising among youths.

In the first couple of decades, Internet (including Arpanet) was a place to share scientific, business and other professional ideas, knowledge and resources. Most websites were dedicated to these purposes. After 2000, things changed rapidly and the web has transformed into a more complex and diverse place. Social networking is a major component in web and the most popularized portion in the web. Social network websites like Facebook, Myspace and Google+ give opportunity for people to build relationships like never before. The impact of this new phase of the web is huge over general public when comparing to earlier stages of internet in both social and technological way. These websites are called the second generation of the websites (web2.0) because these are highly interactive and user friendly. For example, Blogs are way to represent any individual’s ideas and thoughts and to have arguments and to have conversations in cyber space. In websites like Flickr users are given space to upload their photographs and share with other people. These new technologies define the way people interact with each other.

In the next article I hope to write about a fresh trend in computing, mobile computing and the next version of the internet ,The internet of things. 

Digital era of computers(the saga of computers,part 2)

If you haven’t read my previous post about the inception of computer.Please read it from here.

Before the digital computers, all computers were mechanical computers .that means the computer were built using mechanical components likes gears and wheels. They were simple machines that were capable of doing computations.

replica of the first electro-mechanical computer, Image retrieved by www.wikipedia.org World’s first electro- mechanical was Z1 which was designed by Konrad  Zuse. These were built using Vacuum tubes that can act as a switch in electrical circuits. Z1 is the first computer that used Boolean logic for problem solving. Besides that it was the first computer to use floating point numbers in calculations. Although Z1 used many mechanical components, its design had all the components of a modern digital computer like a control unit, memory unit, and input output devices. Although its outputs weren’t highly reliable .These computer series (Z1, Z2 and Z3) helped to develop most of the theories about computing that are used nowadays. The reason for the unreliability of output data was due to the huge number of mechanical components it had. These mechanical parts mostly consist of metal plates and due to the stresses that occur inside these when in operation, the machine wasn’t able to carry out given calculations precisely. During World War 1 and 2 technological advances was increased like never before because scientists were encouraged to invent new technologies which helped some nations to win war and rise against other nations. Lots of technologies we are familiar nowadays were developed during that period including computer technology. Alan Turing, the famous mathematician who is considered as the father of modern computing laid the mathematical foundations for the digital computers. He theorized a theoretical machine called “Turing machine” which is the grandfather of modern computers, mobile phones embedded systems and almost any digital device you can think of. During this period scientists were able to design and construct special purpose computers. They were huge machines which consumed lots of power and human effort to operate but this simpler machines were the grandfathers of modern computers. They were called special purpose since they were only built to carry out a special task. Colossus computer is an example for this type of computers. It was built by British military to decode the secret “Enigma” code  which was used in their communications. It was considered as unbreakable but with the help of his machine British army was able to read all German messages and this machine helped to end the 2nd world war quickly saving many valuable lives. Picture of the Colossus computer.  These computers architecture was different to computers now a days. There wasn’t any internal memory for the computer and everything was programmed and programming this computer meant configuring it’s hardware according to the programme they are executing. This was very tedious and time consuming task. As you can see single computer needed a team of operators and only highly trained professionals like engineers or scientists were able to operate it.   In this time computers were expensive machines due to the high price of it’s hardware ,the transistors were not available and everything was done by using vacuum tubes. As new technologies emerges scientists realised the potential of computer and they built more general purpose machines which could be programmed using softwares and carry out variety of programs .A computer called SSEM was the world’s 1st stored program computer which was built in 1948.It was a milestone in history of computer science. ENIAC was the 1st general purpose computer. UNIVAC 1 became the 1stcommercial computer which can be programmed according to the requirements of it’s client.(You can view more details about UNIVAC from here.) In this time people were more focused on the hardware of the computer since they weren’t cheap and only limited number of manufacturer were there to buy them. With the progress of system design people begun to pay attention to software as well. In the beginning programming was done by using machine language and it was a very difficult task .then people began to use word phrases (mnemonics )to represent a piece of machine code and assembly language was introduced. it made programming much easier but it was still platform dependent and programmers had to programme different types of computers using different assembly languages due to this. They were called low level programming languages because they were just a more human readable version of machine language. So to solve this scientists invented more advanced and abstract programming languages like Fortran , COBOL  and C. They were platform independent and gave much freedom to the programmer to write programs to a computer without knowing it’s architecture. They are called high level languages. These languages made programming a computer much easier but still assembly is very useful since it gives more control of a computer to the programmer and no high level language can directly access hardware of a computer. These high level languages use a special program called compilers to translate the program a programmer wrote to machine code that a computer understand. In the next post I’m hoping to write the internet era of the computers. Reading the evolution of computers is fun and enjoyable. It may sound like rubbish but there are lots of things to learn from past and we can imagine how the future generation will think about the computers that we use today and I think it won’t be very different from the picture we have in our minds towards the technology about 50 or 60 years ago.

From stones and sticks to bits and bytes,the saga of computers

                                                                     

                                                                The above images represent the journey of humans of finding the first number systems up to the modern world of computers.You might wonder if such simple ideas have evolved up to so complex things which are the building blocks for the prosperity    of  our era.I enjoyed studying this history of how the evolution of computation happened and I am going to share some of the key milestones of that period with you as well as how might our future will be shaped by the future trends in computing.

1.1 Early history of computing

The history of computation goes back thousands of years in human history. People began counting before inventing any number system. It was crucial part of their lives. The purpose of computing was to keep records of various activities that were important for their survival. For example, a shepherd would count his sheep by matching each sheep with a stone when he take them to feed and this helped him to count them back when they return home. Gradually various civilizations came up with their own number systems and counting mechanisms. Evidence for number systems could be found in very early civilizations such as Babylonian, Egyptian and Mayans. After different societies started dealing with each other (mainly for trade purposes) each number system began enriching and gradually Hindu-Arabic number system as we know it today became the most accepted. It took a few more centuries to evolve this simple number system to a knowledge system known as mathematics today. Various mathematicians discovered and invented rules, processes and limitations in place to enhance the breath, accuracy and speed of computing power. However with the industrial revolution and the progress of technology, the demand for faster and more accurate computing came to the forefront like never before. In a period spanning not even a century, humans have achieved exponential growth in computing power and along with it grew an enormous spectrum of data. With the rapid development of computer technology, computing and manipulation of data has become the back bone of our civilization. without the aid of calculating machines or rather computers, world can’t survive for a day since almost every machine need instructions to operate and the only language they can understood is machine language consists of ones and zeros. People began counting even before they form societies or cities. The techniques were simple but sufficient for their needs. Early people only needed numbers to keep track of their resources like number of their cows, cattle, sheep etc. They simply used their fingers of their hands to match each of the units they wanted to count and if the fingers weren’t enough, they used pebbles or other similar objects to count. These methods were efficient when the number of things to count is small in quantity. But as the things get more complex, people needed faster and more reliable methods for calculation.

1.2   Invention of Abacus

(Figure1.2-Image retrieved from http://www.computerworld.com)

The use of Abacus spread quite rapidly among people because of it’s capability to do arithmetic far better than any other means used beforehand. The modern version of Abacus was invented in China around 1200 A.D. (A brief history of the abacus, 2013).Russia, Japan, Greece and Aztecs are the other countries and tribes that used abacus (different methods than China) for the calculations. Its ability to handle more numbers, efficiency in counting and keeping records and also the ability to use it for simple arithmetic like addition, subtraction, multiplication and division were some of the advantages of using abacus. Although it’s a mechanical device, it couldn’t do calculations by itself like calculators or computers these days, all calculations had to be done by the operator and it helped him to visualize the ongoing calculation in his mind. So the accuracy of the calculation was completely depended on the human factor.

1.3 The Pascal machine(Pascaline)

(Figure 1.3 Imageretrieved from http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk)

Pascal machine was invented by famous French mathematician Blasé Pascal .It was the first successful mechanical calculating machine in 17th century. (Dave, 2007).It was a machine capable of only addition but it could perform subtraction, multiplication and division when considered subtraction as the complement of addition and multiplication as a repeated addition and division as repeated subtraction. Pascaline was consisting of rotating wheels, gears and dials and wood parts.

The purpose of the machine was to be used in tax collection. Pascal had to solve many problems due to the nature of the currency of France. Above all, the Pascaline wasn’t a very successful invention .The mechanism of the machine was a good one but to get considerable amount of accuracy, it had to be handled with great care. So eventually the reliability of the results was depend on the operator.

1.4 The Analytical machine

(Figure 3.2.1,Image retrieved from www.pcmag.com)

The analytical engine is considered as the first model of the modern electronic computer. This machine was an improvement of a previous invention called difference engine of Charles Babbage who is considered as the father of modern computing because of his innovative ideas on computing. Babbage designed this machine to be used as a programmable machine that can be customized according to the requirement rather than building machines that could only execute a specific set of instructions. Another similarity of this with digital computer was that there were separated areas for different tasks like executing commands, processing data and storing outputs and intermediate results. A punch card system was used to feed the data into it and results were displayed as plots. (The machines were intended to use for calculations of polynomials). Ada Lovelace got the chance to be the first computer programmer in history by programming the analytical engine. Besides her contribution to program the machine she had a vision that one day the machines like these can be programmed to do much more things other than mire mathematical calculations. These machines all were completely mechanical devices which weren’t even close to modern electronic computers. But the new concepts discovered along with these machines like the logical structure of a computer, separate storing of data from processing unit and the input and output methods still are accepted and valuable in computing. These machines provided the basic foundations for the early computing devices. There were some other important milestones in mechanical devices history. In 1890 the census office of America used a mechanical tabulator for the census purposes which was designed by Herman Hollerith. They were able to complete the census only in one year otherwise would take about 7 years to complete. This showed the power of artificial devices in computing and the advantages of using them in complex calculations.

I’m hoping to continue the next era of computer age ,The inception and evolution of digital computers by the next post.

Building a simple  counter using Arduino uno

                                           Figure 1

Counter circuits are one of the most common uses of digital electronics in our daily life. A digital counter  is a system that is designed to perform counting from a given number to a specified value.(in general case 0 to any arbitrary number.)You don’t need an Ardunio board or any other microcontroller to build a counter  but using Ardunio ,we can simplify our task and we can do changes to our design very easily. In this article I’m hoping  to give a small introduction to sequential systems as well.

Counter s are categorized under a family called sequential systems. In electronics there are two kinds of systems .

Ø  Combinational systems

Ø  Sequential systems

The key difference between these two systems are sequential systems’ output depend on the previous output as well as the inputs and combinational systems’ output depend only on it’s inputs. Another key difference is that the sequential systems will typically have a clock. Clock is an essential part of sequential design and it’s the thing that defines the present and previous state.

                                                                  

Figure2

State Diagram 

State diagrams are used to describe a sequential system. It describes how the transition from one state to another state occur and the inputs (inputs of the system as well as the previous state) that triggers the transition.There are 2 kinds of FSM(finite state machines)

•          Moore state machine -sequential systems which output depend only on states.
•          Mealy state machine – Sequential systems which output depend on states as well as inputs of       the system.

         Counters are Moore machines since it’s output(the corresponding number to each state) only depends on states,there are no inputs to the system.   

Figure <!–[if supportFields]> SEQ Figure \* ARABIC <![endif]–>3<!–[if supportFields]><![endif]–>-State diagram of a 0 to 9 counter

Coding

The following code was used to implement the counter .The reference code is just there for help in writing code since this code is long, coder can just copy and paste and change that piece of code as required to generate the output. I have used a conventional common cathode 7 segment display so there may be a possibility that other 7segments may have different pin configuration.

There are few tricks that I’ve used to simplify coding.

·         I used a for loop to declare the output pins.(you have 7 pins to declare.)

All of them are digital output pins of Arduino .

·         I declared a constant called del to store the delay value in ms . This is very helpful when we want to change the delay time.(That’s the time interval the counter going to stay in each state.)

  The best advantage of implementing circuits using arduino is these circuits can be improved or changed at any stage.if the circuit is built from scratch it is very difficult even to add a small change.but using Arduino you only have to change the code.So it’s very convenient if you are intending to do experiments with your design.
You can download my version of this design(source code and Ardunio source code) by Here  

Remaking the birth of the universe

(Image retrieved from http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/08/the_large_hadron_collider.htm

The Machine you see in the above picture worth about 6 billion US dollars and it is the most sophisticated experimental equipment so far. The picture show only a fraction of the whole LHC and the circumference of this huge machine is 27 km.  LHC is located near Geneva in Switzerland. It is built by CERN(European organisation for nuclear research) yet it’s the final product of more than 10000 scientists and engineers around the world. It is truly    a triumph in human history as well as science. I’m going to share some interesting facts that I found on web about this magnificent machine and at the end of the article there is a link to a BBC documentary on this machine and the links to the web sites I’ve taken these information.

LHC is a particle accelerator. The main objective of the  LHC is to discover new particles and understand the sub atomic world and it’s behaviour. One of the major achievement of LHC was the discovery of a particle called Higgs Boson that was predicted by the standard model. (Standard model is something like the periodic table of particle physics which categories and describes the elementary particles.)The discovery of the particle was announced in July 2012.It was like the holy grail of particle physics and physicist Peter Higgs theorized and predicated the existence of the particle. Some call this particle “The God particle” since physicists use this particle to explain how other particles got their mass by using something called Higgs mechanism. LHC was able to discover  this particle first and it was one of it’s main objective. Studying the structure of space and time, other elementary particles and the interrelationship of general relativity and quantum mechanics were some other objectives.

LHC Detectors

(An image of a collision, Scientists do analysis on these in order to study particles)

 One of the main component of the LHC is it’s four main detectors. They are used to collect data from the collisions that occur by smashing two protons  almost at the speed of  light. Two of the main detectors (ATLAS and CMS) are general purpose detectors and other two detectors (ALICE and LHCb) got some specific tasks to carry on.

Detector	Tasks
ATLAS	General purpose detector. it’s being used to study the origin of mass and study of extra dimensions.
CMS	General purpose detector. It’s being used to detect Higgs and study the nature of dark matter.
ALICE	Special purpose detector. ALICE is studying a “fluid” form of matter called  quark–gluon plasma that existed shortly after the Big Bang.
LHCb	Equal amounts of matter and antimatter were created in the Big Bang. LHCb will try to investigate what happened to the “missing” antimatter.

 Analysing Data

The detectors in LHC produce huge amount of data that needed to be analysed in order to extract what they want. So there is a huge computer grid called  The LHC computer grid consisting of 140 computer centres spread through 35 countries.LHC generally produce about 25 petabytes per year and this consume lot of computing power from this grid.LHC computing grid became the largest computing grid as in 2012.

Some interesting facts about LHC

 

• ·         The LHC has 920 magnets which are run by super conductors. Their temperature while in operation is -271.3C

• ·         The protons that are used are accelerated up to 99.999% of the speed of light.

• ·         Inside the LHC there is a vacuum as almost empty as outer space. It’s there to stop the high energy particles getting hit by air molecules and loose their energy.

• ·         The collisions of photons create temperatures 100000 times hotter than the surface of the sun for a fractions of a second.

• ·         More than 10000 scientists and engineers work on LHC who represent more than 60 countries in the world.

Does LHC really worth it’s price?

As I mentioned earlier ,this experiment’s initial cost was 6 billion US dollars. So we can have some idea about how much costs actually. So I believe that people have a right to question the feasibility of this project in return to human race. In my opinion every experiment is worthy because it never ends with a null results. it may help us to prove  some idea, hypothesis is correct ,or it may turn upside down the hypothesis we tried to check and show us something we never expected. It’s the nature of experiments and it keeps science progressing. As we all know LHC was able to discover the Higgs Boson and it proved it’s existence. In future it may be able to answer some of the fundamental questions about our nature and these discoveries will lead us to discover more useful things.

Some may ask can  we expect  something that is really useful to all humans, not just for scientists, multinational companies or military. It’s too early to tell something for sure but LHC is currently conducting experiments on anti matter and those scientists will be able to understand  and manipulate it  this discovery could revolutionize the energy sector of our civilization by providing unlimited supply of pure energy. we should not be too optimistic about these possibilities because in early 20 century if somebody said that we can  harness energy from by exploding atoms or combining them, society will consider him or her as an daydreamer. There are major problems like poverty, war and conflicts, global warming that our world facing right now and we have to solve them as quick as possible but if we are intending to overcome them by cutting funds or terminating the projects like LHC it’s not the correct way and the results could be much worse.

Future of LHC 

LHC is the biggest and the most powerful particle accelerator we have today. but it’s not strong enough to give more details about the sub atomic world. It would require much powerful machine. It’s a bit funny that we need largest and strongest apparatus to look into the smallest constituents of reality. So scientists are now getting ready to build the predecessor of LHC,VLHC(very large hadron collider).it’s just a bigger version of the LHC but scientists speculate that it would show the atomic world in much more detail. This machine would be 4 times larger than LHC and scientists are hoping to finish this giant before they retire LHC in 2035.Expected collision energy is 100 Tev and the estimated building cost is around 10 billion US dollars. VLHC is just a proposal so far but we can expect that it will become true within our life time and it will help us to understand and appreciate the universe we live in.

BBC documentary on LHC     

          

References

·         http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/176969-searching-for-supersymmetry-work-begins-on-large-hadron-colliders-60-mile-long-successor

·         http://home.web.cern.ch/topics/large-hadron-collider

Paradoxes and us(part 2)

Here are the next 3 paradoxes I have mentioned in my previous post.If you didn’t read it please do it before you continue.

   4. Infinity hotel paradox

Infinity is full of paradoxes and could drive a man to madness!!Infinity is one of the most philosophical idea among  other similar ideas and it’s clearly integrated with our view of the universe. This idea is used in almost every science and philosophy yet it’s one of the hardest concept to grasp. I think mathematics(and physics) are the  only subjects that were able to surrender this mysterious entity and it has become an essential concept when we do maths or physics.

When I think about this paradox ,the only thing I have trouble to understand is that  how can a hotel with infinity  rooms can be filled? Other arguments that build upon this could be true, at least I think it has to be true but this rooms filled with infinity number of guests are really gives me a headache. but the arguments that are based on this is really mind blowing and put our imagination to it’s limits. If you are really interested in infinity try this BBC documentary(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtMwAUaftSU) about the concept of infinity.(warning: this documentary may cause you dizziness or headaches JJ.)

I believe that Infinity is a concept that never be understood by  finite minds like  us and it’s an evidence of our ignorance no matter how smart we are. If you think you are smart, just try to understand how can there  be different sizes of infinities when each one is infinite. It is really deserves to be called as the king of all paradoxes.

5.The twin paradox

The twin paradox is a good example of discovering of some useful knowledge using paradoxes. Paradoxes are normally dead ends but this has given us more clear view of the true nature time and space. Even though it’s obvious that the rate of the  time flow differs from  observer to another yet it’s very hard to starting to believe this idea because we can’t this effect in our day to day chores. It’s the cleverness of Einstein to come to such a controversial conclusion just using his theories and logics while I’m sure even himself was amazed of what he has discovered. according to Einstein ,speed is not the only one that effects the rate of time flow, gravity effects time. Scientists did experiments and proved that time slows down near to a gravitational field and they take this effect into account when they design space journeys. This time dilation concept once again arouse the potentiality of time travel but no one knows how it happens.(Einstein’s theories do not reject time travel and his theories consider time as another dimension just like other 3 and there is nothing that stopping us travelling along that dimension.)

6. Schrodinger’s Cat

This is one of the first paradox I came across when I was at school and I had no idea even after I read the article about this several times. You also shouldn’t shame of yourselves if you couldn’t understand or give an explanation to this unusual phenomena because even the pioneers of quantum physics don’t have any explanation what’s going on.Once the famous scientist and the father of quantum physics Neil Bhor said” Anyone who says that he has understood quantum mechanics has not understood it.”It shows that incomplete understanding is a part of quantum mechanics .  although scientists can use quantum mechanics in their tasks in a very good manner nobody can’t give an satisfactory interpretation why sub atomic world and it’s members behave very strangely .It’s the real mystery here. The origin of this paradox is the famous and most fascinating experiment (according to meJ) double slit experiment which demonstrates the particle-Wave duality. In very small scale the world/things we know become very weird and our language(and our way of thinking) is very inefficient to explain these phenomena. The cat experiment is also something like that although it helps to get some idea about what’s going on it’s not completely capable of illustrating the true nature of nature.

Schrodinger’s thought experiment shows us something strange .If classical entities (like cats, humans, rocks etc..) can be at superposition what does it really implies? someone like Einstein would say it’s not possible at all. A quantum physicist will say although classical objects may act like particles it’s irrelevant or negligible in our world but some scientists might say a very strange thing. This duality is caused by parallel universe. It may sound like crazy but I think it’s no more crazier than saying the cat is both dead and live same time.The interpretation for this thought experiment from that parallel universe team is the experiment creates two universes that in one the cat is dead and in the other it is alive .we only can’t observe both only the one that happens in our reality. But I think this idea is conflicting the basic idea of pure randomness in quantum physics. Anyway, If you are interested in these ideas I mentioned above try this BBC documentary BBC documentary(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ds47ozzSrU) about the nature of reality .          

         

 

Paradoxes and us

                                 

Humans don’t like paradoxes .They make us uncomfortable and doubt about the knowledge we create , but paradoxes have been among us since people began to think about and make theories about our nature and universe. Some scientist like Albert Einstein believed that it’s a misunderstanding of nature but in the other hand his colleagues like Neil Bhor believed it’s a part of the nature. I think there is no single field that doesn’t have paradoxes in its domain and actually sometimes these mysterious entities help us to think more deeply and outside of the box and discover more fascinating and useful knowledge.

I found this very interesting video on YouTube and it tells us about some of the famous paradoxes in physics, maths and computer science in very interesting manner. (I couldn’t stop laughing when I watch this video because of the way the speaker presents these ideas.)so please have a look at the following video before continuing .(I guarantee you will enjoy this very much.)

https://youtube.googleapis.com/v/ag9pjbX6eY4&source=uds

1.Zeno’s paradox

Zeno’s paradox could be one of the oldest among its kind, yet it’s still very fascinating to think about the distance problem like Zeno. I always get amazed when I realized that there are infinitely many natural numbers between just 0 and 1.although we can clearly see definite length yet that space can be divided into infinitely many constituents. It’s very hard to grasp but it is what it is!!!.there are quite number of instances that we can see where one of the property of an object becomes infinite while other one remains finite.(I know only  few  which I came across in maths and physics.)

·         In Gabriel’s horn the volume of the horn reaches to a limit  while it’s surface area became a infinite value .(if u solve the integrations below you will be able see this to your self.)

( Image retrieved from http://www.rhurrell.com/gabriel.html )

·         In mathematics there is a fractal called “Koch Snowflake” which first discovered by Helge Von Koch .The speciality of this fractal is that it has an infinite length but a finite surface area.

These are some of my favourite things in this subject and I think these concepts challenge our common sense every time we stare at them.These things make us very uncomfortable about thinking them.How can be a volume of an object is finite while it’s surface area is not.The easiest answer to this would be simply they are purely mathematical objects but even still it’s very hard for us to believe it.

2.The grandfather paradox

                Every time i hear this story the first thing that comes to my mind is what happens if the time traveller goes back in time and killed the very first human beings on earth.if the grandfather paradox is true, then all the human race should wipe out from earth but there is another possibility that it might be a beginning of a new history,an alternative one. still no one has no idea what might true but I would like to go with the second possibility more than 1^st one. I’m a believer in the parallel universe or rather alternative realities idea (this is my personal opinion only) and in this paradoxes are  not  mind boggling ideas but a normal phenomena. In brief, parallel universe idea says that every time we make a choice a new reality will occur that slightly different from our one.So there is no effect  from what we change in our current timeline. So no matter how much time you travel back in time and kill your ancestors, you will exist and some other reality you will not. As well as this We all have instances  in our lives that we want to change but don’t worry somewhere in this space-time some other form of yourself is going to make that choice live with that. So be happy at least someone like you had made that decision that you couldn’t .I’ll talk more about this in the last section.  

3.The Chinese room

Well this is the first instance I’ve heard of this paradox and it seems it’s rather unfair to think that machines can’t be intelligence just because they can’t speak a language besides I don’t see any reason to categorize this idea as a paradox. It’s just an opinion of some person.

Personally I believe that artificial intelligence isn’t a science fiction. even today some machines (or softwares )are able to behave like human beings ,that are similar to thinking or rather logical reasoning. But the intelligence we expecting from AI machines are much much complex and diverse than just logical reasoning. As humans we use both logical reasoning and just our instinct for our survival  and it’s obvious that logical reasoning is very helpful when the number of unknowns(or variables)are few and clearly visible but most of the time it’s our natural instinct or rather illogical approach to a problem helps us to solve our problems where the number of unknowns are very large or hidden from us.   It’s something that even humans don’t fully understand the mechanism behind it. So how can we give this gift to robots ?When we think about the intelligence  the next most important thing is conciseness that humans have about themselves as well as the world around them. I think this is the hardest part of AI engineering as we have very little knowledge it’s nature and the difficulty to model these using the knowledge we have. So even if we are long way from creating the next intelligent being on earth I hope there will be an end to this road. I have to say this topic is very interesting one and sometimes it seems more philosophical than scientific.  

I’ll tell more about the other 3 paradoxes in my next post.Please feel free to let me know your ideas by comments.