12th Dec, 2013

JK Rowling at Harvard Commencement

...rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

Failure meant a stripping away of the inessential.



Michio Kaku - The Quantum Revolution

Our horizons define our understanding of who we are.

Super-conductive materials built from ceramics like yttrium, barium & copper oxide exposed to liquid nitrogen creates a new state of matter that loses its electrical resistance and become super-conducting to induce powerful magnetic fields. A magnet placed on top of the super-conducting ceramic induces a secondary magnetic field (Meisner effect), and the two magnetic fields repel each other giving the illusion of anti-gravity.

Invisibility cloaks - when light hits an object it's the object's atomic structure that determines what we see. It all depends on how the light interacts with the atoms. If we can manipulate these atoms that we ultimately control how the world looks like. Meta materials can bend electromagnetic radiation around them making them invisible to microwaves. Uses - military stealth, and what not!

Nanotubes (fibers as thin as human hair) - stronger and lighter than steel, are made out of individual carbon atoms arranged in a hollow cylinder. The cylinder surface is just one atom across, the diameter is 10 atoms across and these tubes can be billions of atoms long. These tubes have a unique property - they are bonded with strength of diamonds yet they have the flexibility of fiber. Uses - space elevator that can bring down the cost of space travel by a factor of 100; unsmashable cars, uncollapsible buildings and ultralight airplanes. 

Three types of civilizations in the universe:

Type I - Planetary civilization that uses the planetary sources of energy. It moves on to manipulate weather patterns, oceans etc.

Type II - exhausts the planetary sources of energy and get their energy by consuming the energy from their mother star. 

Type III - galactic; use the energy from tens of billions of stars.

We are a Type 0 civilization. We get our energy from dead plants - oil and coal. Can we go beyond our dependency on fossil fuels?

Judging at the rate of our scientific progress, energy conservation is not a desirable goal. Nuclear fusion can be a solution. 

Fusion reactor - Tokamak fusion reactor. International experimental thermo-nuclear reactor (France) is designed to be big enough to create self-sustaining fusion energy for the first time.

Nanotechnology: nanometer is a billionth of a meter - 10 atoms across. Nanomachines can be built on the scale of living cells like proteins, DNA and bacteria, to perform complex tasks. These miniature mechanical devices can turn toxic waste into harmless matter, or they can travel through the blood stream to mend cells from within.

Plants have the ability to capture sunlight and convert it into chemical energy and store it. Now we can grab the protein - photosystem-1, which is responsible for creating this energy and hijack the function, put it on a substance of our own choosing and use the energy to create solar power. In the future, swarms of nano-robots might be a permanent part of us to repair tissues and rebuild the system. They can target rogue cells to fight cancer and fat cells to fight obesity. On the flip side, nano machines, like viruses, may be able to scavenge molecules from their environment to reproduce themselves. They will be smart and autonomous, and they will have the potential to do enormous damage. 

The Holy Grail of Nano Technology:

Nano machines could have the ability to disassemble molecules into individual atoms and reassemble  them into new structures. This means we can make anything we want at home using a personal fabricator - like having a factory on a laptop.

Teleportation - In Vienna, scientists are transporting photons from one prism to another, and it can happen over any distance by using quantum entanglement. In the coming years scientists will teleport the first simple molecule, then the complex molecule, perhaps the first virus within a decade or so.

All this technological explosion is possible because of the synergy and intense interplay (cross-pollination) between the three revolutions - quantum, computer and bio-tech.