Dr Rajiv Desai
An Educational Blog
DERAILMENT
DERAILMENT: _______ _______ Prologue: A tremor was followed by a “loud sound like an earthquake”. The carriages began to shake and inside them, passengers began falling on each other. Some carriages telescoped into each other, others rose vertically, “almost standing upright”. In a major train derailment accident, at least 23 passengers were killed and over 60 injured when 14 coaches of the Puri-Haridwar Utkal Express jumped the rails in Khatauli, India at 5.45 pm on19 August 2017 as seen in the figure above. Indian Railways has had the most derailments in a decade in 2016-17: 78 derailments with 193 people dead. On September 14, 2017 (coincidentally my birthday) Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe laid the foundation stone for $17 billion bullet train, the Jammu Tawi-New Delhi Rajdhani Express jumped the tracks at New Delhi station, the ninth derailment in 27 days, a consequence of […]
HOLOGRAM
HOLOGRAM: _____ Typical laser-lit transmission hologram ____ Prologue: Suppose you want to take a photograph of an apple. You hold a camera in front of it and, when you press the shutter button to take your picture, the camera lens opens briefly and lets light through to hit the film (in an old-fashioned camera) or the light-sensitive CCD chip (in a digital camera). All the light traveling from the apple comes from a single direction and enters a single lens, so the camera can record only a two-dimensional pattern of light, dark, and color. To be more accurate camera records wave length (color) and intensity (amplitude) of light waves. If you move your head slightly, the photograph remains same i.e. it is two dimensional. The physical world around us is three-dimensional (3D), yet traditional display devices can show only two-dimensional (2D) flat images that lack depth (i.e., the third dimension) […]
SCIENCE OF TRUTH
Science of Truth: ______ _____ Prologue: I published article ‘The Lie’ on my website on June 5, 2010 wherein I showed how media lied for several decades by saying that Hollywood icon Marilyn Monroe died ‘childless’ in the year 1962. “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth”, is a law of propaganda often attributed to the Nazi Joseph Goebbels. Discussion on ‘lie’ is incomplete unless you discuss the ‘truth’. So what is truth? The question is one of the most ancient in philosophy. It was famously posed by Plato, who asked whether there exist eternal truths or whether, to the contrary, man is the measure of all things. Diderot and d’Alembert, in their Encyclope´die (1751–1772), proposed a simple and straightforward answer: truth consists in conformity of our judgments with things. In other words, something is true when there is a fit between thought and object: This implies […]
3D PRINTING
3D Printing: ____ In reality 3D printing is quite slow as compared to the figure above! ____ Prologue: The First Industrial Revolution took place from the 18th to 19th centuries in Europe and America. It involved iron and textile industries, along with the development of the steam engine. The Second Industrial Revolution took place between 1870 and 1914, just before World War I and technological advances during this period included the telephone, light bulb, phonograph and the internal combustion engine. The Third Industrial Revolution, or the Digital Revolution, started in 1980s which refers to the advancement of technology from analog electronic and mechanical devices to the digital technology available today. Advancements during the Third Industrial Revolution include the personal computer, the internet, and information and communications technology (ICT). The Fourth Industrial Revolution builds on the Digital Revolution, representing new ways in which technology becomes embedded within societies and even […]
SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY (SYNBIO)
Synthetic Biology (synbio): _______ Scientists Elizabeth Allman and Kristin O’Brien teach a course in synthetic biology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. O’Brien said that the goal of synthetic biology is not to build “better organisms” but rather to create biological machines. _______ Prologue: The advent of digital technology is considered one of the biggest revolutions of all time for how quickly and deeply it changed the world forever. Even more powerful revolution is coming, which goes under the name of synthetic biology. The potential of this discipline is very well understood in the biological scientific world. It is time I make general public aware of the impact it will have on our lives. Synthetic biology brings together a bewildering number of disciplines: biotechnology, molecular biology, systems biology, biophysics, computer engineering, genetic engineering, and more. Synthetic biology will allow scientists and engineers to create biological systems that do not occur […]
