Showing posts with label Science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Science. Show all posts

Monday, February 11, 2008

Quantum Computers



Canadian startup company D-Wave demonstrated a 16-qubit quantum computer. The computer solved a sudoku puzzle and other pattern matching problems. The company claims it will produce practical systems by 2008. Skeptics believe practical quantum computers are still decades away, that the system D-Wave has created isn't scaleable, and that many of the claims on D-Wave's Web site are simply impossible (or at least impossible to know for certain given our understanding of quantum mechanics).

If functional quantum computers can be built, they will be valuable in factoring large numbers, and therefore extremely useful for decoding and encoding secret information. If one were to be built today, no information on the Internet would be safe. Our current methods of encryption are simple compared to the complicated methods possible in quantum computers. Quantum computers could also be used to search large databases in a fraction of the time that it would take a conventional computer. Other applications could include using quantum computers to study quantum mechanics, or even to design other quantum computers.

But quantum computing is still in its early stages of development, and many computer scientists believe the technology needed to create a practical quantum computer is years away. Quantum computers must have at least several dozen qubits to be able to solve real-world problems, and thus serve as a viable computing method.

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/quantum-computer2.htm

Friday, January 18, 2008

2nd world war and Computer age!

Nowadays I am reading the Book called “The Theory of Everything” by Stephen W.Hawking. It contains Stephen’s 6 lectures about Universe, Black holes, Origin of Universe, Time and finally the Theory of Everything. I am enjoying well …

In that book, in one place Stephen has pointed out (Here I am giving a summary in my words) until 1939 lot of the scientists was researching about Macro world things example: about Gravitational forces. But then due to the 2nd world war most of them were involved in Atomic bomb project and then after the war they have concentrated more on the micro world (I mean in the Atomic level)

Therefore if the 2nd world war is not happened, the scientists continued their researches on Macro world, about the Universe, Time, Relativity… They not much worried about the atomic world.

I think, because they have researched on the atomic world they were able to invent transistors. Without transistors we can’t talk about the computer age. So I think the 2nd world war made a change on our life and it led for the Computer Age 

Now, can you all imagine a world without 2nd world war?

Friday, January 4, 2008

Physics + Mathematics

Today I tried, but couldnt get the String theory, but found following description. Worth reading....

The language of physics is mathematics. In order to study physics seriously, one needs to learn mathematics that took generations of brilliant people centuries to work out. Algebra, for example, was cutting-edge mathematics when it was being developed in Baghdad in the 9th century. But today it's just the first step along the journey.

Algebra

Algebra provides the first exposure to the use of variables and constants, and experience manipulating and solving linear equations of the form y = ax + b and quadratic equations of the form y = ax2+bx+c.

Geometry

Geometry at this level is two-dimensional Euclidean geometry, Courses focus on learning to reason geometrically, to use concepts like symmetry, similarity and congruence, to understand the properties of geometric shapes in a flat, two-dimensional space.

Trigonometry

Trigonometry begins with the study of right triangles and the Pythagorean theorem. The trigonometric functions sin, cos, tan and their inverses are introduced and clever identities between them are explored.

Calculus (single variable)

Calculus begins with the definition of an abstract functions of a single variable, and introduces the ordinary derivative of that function as the tangent to that curve at a given point along the curve. Integration is derived from looking at the area under a curve,which is then shown to be the inverse of differentiation.

Calculus (multivariable)

Multivariable calculus introduces functions of several variables f(x,y,z...), and students learn to take partial and total derivatives. The ideas of directional derivative, integration along a path and integration over a surface are developed in two and three dimensional Euclidean space.

Analytic Geometry

Analytic geometry is the marriage of algebra with geometry. Geometric objects such as conic sections, planes and spheres are studied by the means of algebraic equations. Vectors in Cartesian, polar and spherical coordinates are introduced.

Linear Algebra

In linear algebra, students learn to solve systems of linear equations of the form ai1 x1 + ai2 x2 + ... + ain xn = ci and express them in terms of matrices and vectors. The properties of abstract matrices, such as inverse, determinant, characteristic equation, and of certain types of matrices, such as symmetric, antisymmetric, unitary or Hermitian, are explored.

Ordinary Differential Equations

This is where the physics begins! Much of physics is about deriving and solving differential equations. The most important differential equation to learn, and the one most studied in undergraduate physics, is the harmonic oscillator equation, ax'' + bx' + cx = f(t), where x' means the time derivative of x(t).

Partial Differential Equations

For doing physics in more than one dimension, it becomes necessary to use partial derivatives and hence partial differential equations. The first partial differential equations students learn are the linear, separable ones that were derived and solved in the 18th and 19th centuries by people like Laplace, Green, Fourier, Legendre, and Bessel.

Methods of approximation

Most of the problems in physics can't be solved exactly in closed form. Therefore we have to learn technology for making clever approximations, such as power series expansions, saddle point integration, and small (or large) perturbations.

Probability and statistics

Probability became of major importance in physics when quantum mechanics entered the scene. A course on probability begins by studying coin flips, and the counting of distinguishable vs. indistinguishable objects. The concepts of mean and variance are developed and applied in the cases of Poisson and Gaussian statistics.

Natural resources - a silly explanation!

Why should we worry about natural resources... ??

Now we all know that, birth rate is higher than death rate...
Therefore human mass is increasing over time and according to the Einstein's famous equation, E=MC2, energy requirement is also increasing. So this increasing amount of energy should be borrowed from nature. But the energy reaching to the Earth is constant (Via Sun and various cosmic rays).
In addition to that, the spaceships also take a lot of energy to outside the earth...

That is why we are facing natural resource scarcity.


what a silly explanation ha :-)

Sunday, December 23, 2007

Earth-like planet...


This NASA Spitzer Space Telescope artist's conception received 03 October 2007 shows a binary-star, or two-star, system, called HD 113766, where astronomers suspect a rocky Earth-like planet is forming around one of the stars। Corot, a French-funded probe designed to detect worlds orbiting other stars, has found four such candidates in its first year of operation, its mission chiefs said here on Thursday.

Sunday, April 22, 2007

Theory of Everything..

Theory of Everything (”TOE”) unifies the four fundamental interactions of nature: gravity, the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, and the electromagnetic force; it should also explain the spectrum of elementary particles. There has been progress toward a TOE in unifying electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force in an electroweak unified field theory and in unifying all of the forces except for gravity (which in the present theory of general relativity is not a force) in the grand unification theory. One missing piece in a theory of everything involves combining quantum mechanics and general relativity into a theory of quantum gravity.