Beginnings of Science

Beginnings of Science
The oldest known treatise on surgery..... written in Egypt 5,000 years ago, discloses  the thoughts of the earliest man who reveals a scientific attitude of mind.

This treatise is therefore the earliest document in the history of science. A history of science might be based on some more or less logical system of definitions and classification. Such systems and such points of view belong to relatively recent and mature periods.

The periods at which primitive man of different races began to have conscious appreciation of the phenomenon of nature, of number magnitude and geometric forms can never be known, nor the time at which their elementary notions began to be so classified and associated as to deserve the name of science.

Very early in any civilization, however there must obviously have been developed simple processes of counting and adding, of time and distance measurement, of the geometry and arithmetic involved in land measurement and in architectural design and construction.
Beginnings of Science

Supernova

A supernova occurs when a star explodes. From the earth, people can see a new start appear in the sky and then fade over months back to invisibility.

Such explosion can be exploded can be caused by a massive star near the end of its life collapsing into a black hole or neutron star or a dead star; a white dwarf, collapsing into a neutron star.

At the turn of the 19th century, the binary star system Eta Carinae was faint and undistinguished.

In the first decades of the century, it became brighter and brighter, until, by April 1843 when it was exploded. The blast spat matter out at nearly 2.5 million kilometers an hour, and was so bright that it was thought to be a supernova explosion.

The larger of the two stars in the Eta Carinae system is a huge and unstable star that is nearing the end of its life.

The event observed in the 19th century was a stellar near-death experience. Scientists call these outbursts supernova impostor events, because they appear similar to supernovae, but stop just short of destroying their star. In 2004, an explosion thought to be similar to the 1843 Eta Carinae event was seen in a galaxy over seventy million light years from the Milky Way. Just two years later, the star exploded as a supernova.

Today nearly 300 supernova remnants are known, the majority having estimated ages from several thousand to several hundred thousand years.

Six supernova explosions have been witnessed with naked eye in historical times, many being recorded by Chinese astronomers, like the Crab nebula in AD 1054.

The first was recorder in AD 185 and the last appeared in 1987 in the Large Magellanic Cloud.  A neutrino burst from a supernova in the Large Magellanic Cloud was observed in the proton decay detectors Kamiokande and IMB on February 23, 1987. This supernova originated 160,000 light years from earth.

Two more are known to have ex0loded in the Milky Way during historic times) around 1671 and 1870), but were not seen because of the high interstellar dust obscuration.
Supernova

The Birth of the Galaxy

Because globular clusters contain the oldest stars associated with the Galaxy the halo marks the fossil remains of its birth.

Within it, globulars orbit the Galaxy on extremely elongated elliptical paths. Most of the time, the globulars move slowly through the halo at the outer extremes of their orbits; only briefly do they whip in and around the nucleus.

These stars exhibit the motions of the cloud from which they were formed. So the Galaxy must have been born form a gas cloud that was initially huge- at least 300,000 ly in radius.

Imagine a tremendous, ragged cloud of gas roughly twice as big as the Galaxy’s halo today. Its density is low. This proto Galaxy cloud probably is turbulent, swirling around with random churning currents.

Slowly at first, the cloud’s self-gravity pulls it together, with it central regions getting denser faster than its outer parts.

Throughout the cloud, turbulent eddies of different sizes form, break up, and die away. Eventually, the eddies become dense enough to contain sufficient mass to hold themselves together. These might be hundreds of light years in size – incipient globular clusters.

Each blob then splits up to form individual stars – all born at about the same time.

Meanwhile, the gas contracts more and fall slowly into a disk. Why a disk? Because the original cloud had a little spin, and the conservation of angular momentum requires that it spin faster around its rotational axis as it contracts.

The kinetic energy energy of the cloud slowly decreases, as gas clouds collide and heat is radiated away.

The disk rapidly flattens. As the disk forms, its density increases and more stars form. Each burst of starbirth leaves behind representative stars at different distances from the present disk.

Finally, the remaining gas and dust settle into the narrow layer as we see today. Somehow density waves appear and drive the formation of spiral arms.

During this time, massive stars were manufacturing heavy elements and flinging them back into the cloud by supernova explosions.

So as stars were born in succession, each later type had more heavy elements. That enrichment continues today in the disk of the Galaxy.
The Birth of the Galaxy

History of Cavendish laboratory

The Cavendish Laboratory is probably one of the most famous scientific institutions in the world.

The Royal Commission on the University having in 1850 published evidence of the needs of science.

Established in 1871, at a time when Cambridge University was being reformed by Parliament, the Cavendish Laboratory initially met with stiff resistance from those who sought to maintain the prestige and reputation of the Mathematical Tripos.

Construction work began soon after and Cavendish Laboratory was formally opened on June 16, 1874. The laboratory became the site of the natural sciences practical examinations and starting with the Lent term of 1877, also became the site of the Elementary Experimental Lectures.

The Laboratory cost about £ 6,300 and the family name of Cavendish had been linked with science in the person of the great Henry Cavendish came forward and offered to bear the cost of the building.

The professorship was established in 1871.

The Cavendish Laboratory officially became a graduate school in 1895. Ernest Rutherford was among the first advanced students to arrive at the lab, soon to be followed by other of great talent, including a few guests from the United States.
History of Cavendish laboratory

Agriculture in History

At the end of the Paleolithic (Old Stone Age), some 12,000 years ago, after hundreds of thousands of years of biological and cultural evolution, human societies were able to make increasingly varied, sophisticated and specialized tools.

Near 8000 BC, people made the major technological advance of domesticating animals and plants.

Observations of a very early date that bear on their relationship have come down today from the civilization that developed in the Sumerians valley of the Euphrates and Tigris.

Large scales of agriculture began when the valley first hooked animals up to a plow and to wheeled carts. These peoples also built ships, which mean they soon need to devise methods of navigation across the sea.

Thus the demand of agriculture, the first occupation, after hunting for which man became organized, led to the accumulation of knowledge and to processes of generalization. The advanced were purely practical but they were some of the earliest examples of people using logic and putting ideas together of understand some small part of the word.

The early part of this agriculture revolution or Neolithic revolution also occurred independently in the Middle East, the orient, New Guinea and the Americas.

A settled agricultural civilization demands tools. Technology developed. The age of stone passed into the age of metals.

The treatments of ores and the working of metals called for a class with special knowledge. Copper was the first metal to be employed and it was in use from as early as 64000 BC, initiating a period sometimes called the Copper Age.

The development of rights in land demanded some sort of surveying. Greek traditions has it that the inundation of the Nile, by obliterating all landmarks, forced on the Egyptian as annual re-measurement of their field. Thus geometry was born.

Major developments of the period following the agriculture revolution were largely in astronomy, mathematics and technology.
Agriculture in History

Early History of Computing Hardware

Early History of Computing Hardware
Many people believe that Stonehenge the famous collection of rock monoliths in Great Britain, is an early form of calendar or astrological calculator.

The abacus which appeared n the sixteenth century BC, was developed as an instrument to record numeric values and on which a human can perform basic arithmetic.

In the middle of the seventeenth century, Blaise Pascal, a French mathematician, built and sold gear- driven mechanical machines, which performed whole number addition and subtraction.

Later in the seventeenth century, a German mathematician, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, built the first mechanical device designed to do all four whole number operations: addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.

Unfortunately, the state of mechanical gears and levers at that time was such that the Leiniz machine was not very reliable.

In the late eighteenth century, Joseph Jacquard developed what became known as Jacquard’s loom, used for weaving cloth. The loom used a series of cards with holes punched in them to specify the used of specific colored thread and therefore dictate the design that was woven into the cloth.

Although not a computing device, Jacquard’s loom was the forts to make use of an important form of input: the punched card.

It wasn’t until the nineteenth century that the next major step was taken this time by a British mathematician, Chares Babbage designed what he called his analytical engine.

His design was too complex for him to build with the technology of his day, so it was never implemented.

His vision however, included many of the important component of today’s computer.

Babbage’s design was the first to include a memory so that intermediate values did not have to be reentered.

His design also included the input of both numbers and mechanical steps making used of punched cards similar to those used in Jacquard’s loom.

During the later part of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, computing advances were made rapidly. William Burroughs produced and sold a mechanical adding machine.

Dr. Herman Hollerith developed the first electro mechanical tabulator, which read information from a punched card.

His device revolutionized the census taken every ten years in the United States. Hollerith later formed a company today known as IBM.
Early History of Computing Hardware

History and Prehistory Humankind

History and Prehistory Humankind
Scholars customarily draw a a sharp distinction between prehistory and history. Prehistory is taken to be the long era from biological beginnings of humankind over 2 million years ago to the origins of civilization about 5,000 years ago in the first urban centers of the Near East.

The transition to civilization and the advent of written records traditionally mark the commencement of history proper.

Prehistory, because of the exclusively material nature of its artifacts, mainly in the from of stone, bone or certain products has inescapably become the province of the archeologist, while the historical era, with its documentary records, is the domain of the history.

However the single label “prehistory” obscures two distinctly different substages: the Paleolithic, or Old Stone Age, which held sway for around 2 million years, is marked by rudimentary stone tools, designed for collecting and processing wild food sources, while the succeeding Neolithic, or New Stone Age, which first took hold in the Near East around 12,000 years ago, entailed substantially more complex stone implements adapted to the requirements of an economy of low intensity food production in the form of gardening or herding.

The technologies of both the Paleolithic and Neolithic eras have left a rich legacy of material artifacts. In constant, only a feeble record exists of any scientific interest in these preliterate societies, mainly in the form of astronomically oriented structures. Thus, at the very outset, the evidence indicates that science and technology followed separate trajectories during 2,000 millennia of prehistory.

Technology of the crafts – formed an essential element of both the nomadic food-collecting economy of Paleolithic societies and the food–producing activities in Neolithic villages, while science , as an abstract and systematic interest in nature was essentially nonexistent, or at any rate, has left little trace.
History and Prehistory Humankind

Static Electricity

Static Electricity
The scientific study of electricity and magnetism began with William Gilbert. Born in Colchester and educated at Cambridge, Gilbert was successful medical practitioner who became physician to Queen Elizabeth I in 1600.

In the same year he also published his books De Magnete, which recorded his conclusions from many year’s spare-time work on electrostatics and magnetism and for the first time, drew a clear distinction the two phenomena.

In a very dangerous experiment the American statesmen Benjamin Franklin showed that a kite flown in a thunderstorm became electrically charged.

His German contemporary Georg Wilhelm Richman was less fortunate: he was killed trying the same experiment at St Petersburg in 1753.

Franklin also studied the discharge of electricity from objects of different shapes, he suggested protection of buildings by lightning conductors and in the lights of his discharge experiments said that they should be pointed.

The discovery of the electric current, about 1800, did not end he story of static electricity. Two important machines of the nineteenth century were Armstrong’s hydroelectric machine and the Wimshurst machine.

William Armstrong was a solicitor and amateur scientist who founded an engineering business in Newcastle upon Tyne.

His attention was drawn to a strange effect noticed by an engine driver on a colliery railway. The driver experienced ‘a curious pricking sensation’ when he touch the steam valve on a leaking boiler.

Armstrong found that steam, issuing from small hole, became electrically charged.

He then built a machine with an iron boiler on glass legs and a hard wood nozzle through which steam could escape.

He found the steam was positively charged and he then made a larger machine which was demonstrated in London producing sparks more than half a meter long.

A War Office committee on mines suggested in 1857 that Armstrong’ machine, with its very high voltage output, could be used for detonating mines.

In practice magneto-electric machines were soon available, and Armstrong’s machine never saw a practical use.

During the nineteenth century numerous machines were made which multiplied static electric charges by induction and collected them in Leyden jars or other capacitors.
Static Electricity

NASA the History

NASA the History
NASA was created in 1958 largely as a response to the sense of emergency that arose from the Soviet Union’s launching of the Sputnik 1 satellite in 1957.

What NASA a s an organization subsequently accomplished in ten short years –landing people on the moon – has few parallels in either the public or private sectors; it met the challenge issued by President Kennedy to win the race to the moon.

NASA began with about 4,000 employees, doubles by 1960 and reached a peak of 36,000 employees in 1966.

In the same period, NASA budget increased eightfold, peaking at about $5 billion dollars in 1965; this was 0.8 percent of the US gross national product for that year.

NASA was an expanded organization, building on the existing National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) – an agency with a long and positive record of foreign American aviation.

As a scientific and engineering institution, NACA had been very successful in aeronautics and was quietly but slow moving into the space exploration field prior to Sputnik’s launch.

NASA, a favorite agency of President John F. Kennedy – himself a near mythical hero to many American – NASA soon became an organization that could do no wrong.

With the Apollo escape program, NASA undertook to land humans on the surface of the moon and bring them back safely to earth, and it accomplished that mission on July 20, 1969.

The agency’s success in carrying out this extraordinary difficult task helped establish US technological superiority on a global scale and also garnered NASA wide admiration for its accomplishment.

In the 1970s and 1980s NASA focused on building frequently launchable and mostly reusable vehicles: the space shuttles. The first shuttle launched was Columbia, in April 1981.
NASA the History

History of X-ray

X-rays were discovered in 1895 by Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen at the University of Wurzburg, Bavaria. 

He noticed that some crystals of barium platinocyanide, near a discharge tube completely enclosed in black pepper, became luminescent when the discharge occurred. 

By examining the shadows cast by the rays, Rontgen traced the origin of the rays to the walls of the discharge tube. 

In 1896, Campbell-Swinton introduced a definite target (platinum) for the cathode rays to hit; this target was called the anticathode. 

For his work x-rays, Rontgen received the first Nobel prize in physics, in 1901. It was the first of six to be awarded in the field of x-rays by 1927. 

The obvious similarities with the light led to the crucial tests of established wave optics: polarization, diffraction, reflection and refraction. 

With limited experimental facilities, Rontgen and his contemporaries could find no evidence of any of these; hence, the designation “x” (unknown) of the rays, generated by the stoppage of anode targets of the cathode rays, identified by Thompson in 1897 as electrons. 

The nature of x-rays was the subject of much controversy. In 1906, Barkla found evidence in scattering experiments that x-rays could be polarized and must therefore by waves, but W.H Bragg’s studies of the produced ionization indicated that they were corpuscular. 

The essential wave nature of x-rays was established in 1912 by Laue, Friedrich, and Knipping, who showed that x-rays could be diffracted by a crystals (copper sulfate pentahydrate) that acted as a three dimensional diffraction grating.

W.H Bragg and W.L Bragg (father and son) found the law for the selective reflection of x-rays. In 1908, Barkla and Sadler deduced, by scattering experiments, that x-rays contained components characteristics of the material of the target; they called these component K and L radiations.
History of X-ray

Einstein Theory of Relativity

Einstein Theory of Relativity
In 1905 Einstein suggested that the new source of energy was none other than matter itself. The route by which he reached this conclusion deserves to be traced. Early in 1905 Einstein published his great paper “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies’” which laid the a foundations of what came to be called the special theory of relativity.

The cardinal notion of the special theory is that light always travels at the same speed regardless of the speed of its source. If you toss a pebble forward from a moving automobile, then the speed or the pebble equals the speed of the automobile plus the speed with which the pebble was thrown. But with light situation is different. If you turn on the headlights of a speeding car, the velocity of the light from the headlights relative to the ground does not consist of the speed of the light plus the speed of the car. According to the special theory of relativity, the speed of the light from the moving headlight is exactly the same as it would have been if the car had not been moving at all. This simple idea that the speed of light is constant relative to very (un-accelerated) frame of reference changed physics and changed the world.

In late 1905 Einstein published three page meditation on the relationship between the mass of an object and energy contained in it. He reasoned that if the expenditure of energy needed to accelerate an object resulted in an increase in the mass of an object, then a decrease in velocity must produce a decrease in the mass of an object. The exact mathematical relationship between the mass of an object and the energy it contained flowed directly from the equations of the special theory, and was expressed in the famous formula:

E=mc2

that is, that the energy of a body is proportional to the mass of the body multiplied by the square of the speed of light. In 1908 physics and chemistry joined hands when Max Planck took note of Einstein’s equation and suggested that the phenomenon of radioactivity could be explained as the direct transformation of matter into energy.

In the years immediately following Einstein’s proposal, physicist and journalist amused themselves with calculations that a teaspoon of matter contained enough energy to power an ocean liner around the world. But even in the relatively pacific years before World War 1 the military implications of radioactivity and atomic energy did not go unnoticed.
Einstein Theory of Relativity

History of Ions

History of Ions
The person who gives a theory of ions is Michael Faraday. It’s around 1830. He describe the portions of molecules that move from anode to cathode or vice versa.

However, there were no fully explanation until 1884 where the scientist name Svante August Arrhenius describe it in his doctoral thesis.

Michael Faraday did his experimenting with electromagnetism in 1821 by demonstrating the conversion of electrical energy into motive force.

Using his special “induction ring” He discovered “electromagnetic induction” or generation of electricity. This is the first electricity transformer.

In 1837, he showed that electrostatic force consists of a field of curved line of force, and conceived a specific inductive capacity. Then he started to develop the theory of light and gravity.
History of Ions