Science Aurora

Aurora 2005

EDITORIAL Aurora is GIKI's first and only official science magazine. First published by GIKI Science Society in 1999, it has been revived this year, to cater to the growing demand for such a publication. Aurora's basic aim is to provide a platform for GIKI students to voice their theories and research in various scientific fields. Also, Aurora aims to serve as GIKI's voice in the scientific community, giving an insight as to the scientific activity going on inside GIKI. This issue of Aurora includes Technical articles, Interviews, and a fun section, as well as Final Year Project abstracts and Research papers by prominent people of the field, including many of our own faculty members. It is a great opportunity for GIKI students to express their thoughts and ideas, and take their first steps into the world of scientific research and publication.

Abdul Wasae

Asad Kalimi

Umair Sadiq

Umair Tariq

Bilal Riaz

Murtaza Safri

Waqar Nayyar

Abdul Basit

Aamir Shah

Abdul Hannan

Omar Rana

Foaad Ahmed

GIKI Science Society

Dr. Jameel-un-nabi Dean, Student affairs Giki institute

Apart from being a centre of excellence with regard to academic pursuits, GIKI is also known nationwide for its elaborated and impressive extra curricular culture. Science society has always played a very pivotal role to enrich this culture. AROURA is the official scientific magazine published by GIKI Science Society. It was last published in SPRING 1999 by batch 6. I must congratulate Science Society for reviving this tradition with such a great quality. All the articles and papers from the Faculty and Students of GIK Institute describe the newly emerging technologies. The idea of Science Timeline is also excellently implemented. In short, it is a great effort put up by GIKI Science Society and I once again congratulate them for their hectic effort.

Dr. Ibrahim qazi Advisor, Giki Science Society

Being the Advisor of GIKI Science Society, I will like to take the honor to congratulate GIKI Science Society on Publishing AROURA. Over the years, the Science Society has matured significantly. From humble beginnings, it has grown to become one of the most prestigious societies in GIKI, with an enviable reputation all over the country. AROURA is the official scientific magazine of the Institute. It was last published in SPRING 1999 by batch 6. It is a quality publication and one of major publication of its kind in the country. I once again like to appreciate the efforts of Science Society members and especially the editorial board of AROURA for bringing out this magazine.

Aurora 2005

Contents

Faculty Advisor Was Big Bang really the beginning of Time?

Dr. Ibrahim Qazi

A R T I C L E S

Coordinator Asad Kalimi

Editor in Chief Abdul Wasae

1 Deterministic Chaos - There is a method in the madness. 3 Number Theory 4 Plasma - The fourth state of matter 6 Quantum Teleportation 7 Biological Nanotechnology - Nanomachines 9 The journey to human powered flight 10 Bermuda Triangle 11 Polar Aurora 11

Editorial Board Billal Riaz Umair Sadiq Umair Tariq Waqar Nayyar Abdul Hannan Foaad Ahmed

I N T E R V I E W

R EP SA E AP RE CR H

Interview with Dr. Abdullah Sadiq - Rector GIKI 15

Closed form approximation solutions for the restricted circular three body problem 17

Technical Team Murtaza Safri Aamir Shah Omar Saeed Rana

A B S F T YR PA C T S

Human Computer Interfacing using 21 Biological signals Orca

21

Neuro-Mod

22

Layout Design Abdul Basit A R T I C L E S

Cover Design Omar Saeed Rana Contact: [email protected]

Copyright

2005GIKI SS

B R A I N

C R A C K E R S

Stars - How they originate and how do they change in their life cycle. 19 The fundamental forces of the universe 23

Crossword

26

Brain Teasers

27

Enigma

28

1 A R T I C L E S

Aurora 2005

Was Big Bang Really the Beginning of Time? By Waqar Nayyar Was the big bang really the beginning of time? Or did the universe exist before then? Such a question seemed almost blasphemous only a decade ago. Most cosmologists insisted that it simply made no sense--that to contemplate a time before the big bang was like asking for directions to a place north of the North Pole. But developments in theoretical physics, especially the rise of string theory, have changed their perspective. The prebang universe has become the latest frontier of cosmology. The new willingness to consider what might have happened before the bang is the latest swing of an intellectual pendulum that has rocked back and forth for millennia. In one form or another, the issue of the ultimate beginning has engaged philosophers and theologians in nearly every culture. It is entwined with a grand set of concerns, one famously encapsulated in an 1897 painting by Paul Gauguin: D'ou venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Ou allons-nous? "Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?" The piece depicts the cycle of birth, life and death--origin, identity and destiny for each individual--and these personal concerns connect directly to cosmic ones. We can trace our lineage back through the generations, back through our animal ancestors, to early forms of life and protolife, to the elements synthesized in the primordial universe, to the amorphous energy deposited in space before that. Does our family tree extend forever backward? Or do its roots terminate? Is the cosmos as impermanent as we are? The ancient Greeks debated the origin of time fiercely. Aristotle, taking the no-beginning side, invoked the principle that out of nothing, nothing comes. If the universe could never have gone from nothingness to somethingness, it must always have existed. For this and other reasons, time must stretch eternally into the past and future. Christian theologians tended to take the opposite point of view. Augustine contended that God exists outside of space and time, able to bring these constructs into existence as surely as he could forge other aspects of our world. When asked, "What was God doing before he created the world?" Augustine answered, "Time itself being part of God's creation, there was simply no before!" Einstein's general theory of relativity led modern

500,000 - 400,000 years ago Humans begin to control fire for useful purposes. The use of fire probably develops in four stages: observing natural sources, acquiring fire from natural sources, learning to make fire, and learning to control fire.

cosmologists to much the same conclusion. The theory holds that space and time are soft, malleable entities. On the largest scales, space is naturally dynamic, expanding or contracting over time, carrying matter like driftwood on the tide. Astronomers confirmed in the 1920s that our universe is currently expanding: distant galaxies move apart from one another. One consequence, as physicists Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose proved in the 1960s, is that time cannot extend back indefinitely. As you play cosmic history backward in time, the galaxies all come together to a single infinitesimal point, known as a singularity--almost as if they were descending into a black hole. Each galaxy or its precursor is squeezed down to zero size. Quantities such as density, temperature and spacetime curvature become infinite. The singularity is the ultimate cataclysm, beyond which our cosmic ancestry cannot extend. Strange Coincidence: The unavoidable singularity poses serious problems for cosmologists. In particular, it sits uneasily with the high degree of homogeneity and isotropy that the universe exhibits on large scales. For the cosmos to look broadly the same everywhere, some kind of communication had to pass among distant regions of space, coordinating their properties. But the idea of such communication contradicts the old cosmological paradigm. To be specific, consider what has happened over the 13.7 billion years since the release of the cosmic microwave background radiation. The distance between galaxies has grown by a factor of about 1,000 (because of the expansion), while the radius of the observable universe has grown by the much larger factor of about 100,000 (because light outpaces the expansion). We see parts of the universe today that we could not have seen 13.7 billion years ago. Indeed, this is the first time in cosmic history that light from the most distant galaxies has reached the Milky Way. Nevertheless, the properties of the Milky Way are basically the same as those of distant galaxies. It is as though you showed up at a party only to find you were wearing exactly the same clothes as a dozen of your closest friends. If just two of you were dressed the same, it might be explained away as coincidence, but a dozen suggests that the partygoers had coordinated their attire

3500 BC Sumerians invent the wheel. It consists of two or three wooden segments held together by transverse struts that rotate on a wooden pole. Evidence indicates that the wheel was invented only once and then spread to Asia and Europe.

3000 BC Abacus was invented in southwest Asia use an early form of the abacus to perform calculations. Other early civilizations also used some form of the abacus.

GIKI Science Society in advance. In cosmology, the number is not a dozen but tens of thousands--the number of independent yet statistically identical patches of sky in the microwave background.

To know what really happened, physicists need to subsume relativity in a quantum theory of gravity. The task has occupied theorists from Einstein onward, but progress was almost zero until the mid-1980s.

One possibility is that all those regions of space were endowed at birth with identical properties--in other words, that the homogeneity is mere coincidence. Physicists, however, have thought about two more natural ways out of the impasse: the early universe was much smaller or much older than in standard cosmology. Either (or both, acting together) would have made intercommunication possible.

Evolution of a Revolution: Today two approaches stand out. One, going by the name of loop quantum gravity, retains Einstein's theory essentially intact but changes the procedure for implementing it in quantum mechanics [see "Atoms of Space and Time," by Lee Smolin; Scientific American, January]. Practitioners of loop quantum gravity have taken great strides and achieved deep insights over the past several years. Still, their approach may not be revolutionary enough to resolve the fundamental problems of quantizing gravity. A similar problem faced particle theorists after Enrico Fermi introduced his effective theory of the weak nuclear force in 1934. All efforts to construct a quantum version of Fermi's theory failed miserably. What was needed was not a new technique but the deep modifications brought by the electroweak theory of Sheldon L. Glashow, Steven Weinberg and Abdus Salam in the late 1960s.

The most popular choice follows the first alternative. It postulates that the universe went through a period of accelerating expansion, known as inflation, early in its history. Before this phase, galaxies or their precursors were so closely packed that they could easily coordinate their properties. During inflation, they fell out of contact because light was unable to keep pace with the frenetic expansion. After inflation ended, the expansion began to decelerate, so galaxies gradually came back into one another's view. Physicists ascribe the inflationary spurt to the potential energy stored in a new quantum field, the inflation, about 10-35 second after the big bang. Potential energy, as opposed to rest mass or kinetic energy, leads to gravitational repulsion. Rather than slowing down the expansion, as the gravitation of ordinary matter would, the inflation accelerated it. Proposed in 1981, inflation has explained a wide variety of observations with precision [see "The Inflationary Universe," by Alan H. Guth and Paul J. Steinhardt; Scientific American, May 1984; and "Four Keys to Cosmology," Special report; Scientific American, February]. A number of possible theoretical problems remain, though, beginning with the questions of what exactly the inflation was and what gave it such a huge initial potential energy. A second, less widely known way to solve the puzzle follows the second alternative by getting rid of the singularity. If time did not begin at the bang, if a long era preceded the onset of the present cosmic expansion, matter could have had plenty of time to arrange itself smoothly. Therefore, researchers have reexamined the reasoning that led them to infer a singularity.

The second approach, which I consider more promising, is string theory--a truly revolutionary modification of Einstein's theory. This article will focus on it, although proponents of loop quantum gravity claim to reach many of the same conclusions. String theory grew out of a model written down in 1968 to describe the world of nuclear particles (such as protons and neutrons) and their interactions. Despite much initial excitement, the model failed. It was abandoned several years later in favor of quantum chromodynamics, which describes nuclear particles in terms of more elementary constituents, quarks. Quarks are confined inside a proton or a neutron, as if they were tied together by elastic strings. In retrospect, the original string theory had captured those stringy aspects of the nuclear world. Only later was it revived as a candidate for combining general relativity and quantum theory. Continued on page 24

One of the assumptions--that relativity theory is always valid--is questionable. Close to the putative singularity, quantum effects must have been important, even dominant. Standard relativity takes no account of such effects, so accepting the inevitability of the singularity amounts to trusting the theory beyond reason.

2000 BC Babylonians solve quadratic equations quadratic equations and demonstrate their discovery of what is now called the Pythagorean Theorem.

2

194 BC Eratoshthenes a Greek geographer devised the first world map, including the features of latitude and longitude.

The Sun loses up to a billion kilograms every second because of the solar wind that blasts out from its surface. Uranus is the only planet whose poles are warmer than its equator. The tail of a comet always points away from the sun due to pressure of solar wind (particles ejected from the surface of sun).

250 AD Diophantus pioneered in solving certain indeterminate algebraic equations.

A R T I C L E S

517 AD John Philoponus determined that falling objects do so with the same acceleration, or 'impetus,'

3 A R T I C L E S

Aurora 2005

Deterministic Chaos is a method in the madness The stars in the sky have always been seen as a symbol of harmony and order. The Copernican, heliocentric image of the world is so convincing in its simplicity that it was easy to assume for a long time that the course of the planets will never change, that the solar system is therefore stable in a sense. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, astronomy was undergoing a highly successful period, building on Newton's law of gravity and on the progress made in analytical mechanics. The planets Neptune and Uranus were predicted and discovered as a result of deviations between calculated and observed data regarding the movements of Jupiter and Saturn. Following this, King Oscar II of Sweden offered a prize for proof of the stability of the solar system. The prize was finally awarded to a French mathematician, Henri Poincare, but for proving that this proof could not be given! Poincare discovered what are now known as hyperbolic structures in the space of the planets encompassing their positional and momentum coordinates (phase space), which make it practically impossible to trace the courses of the planets in the long term: planetary movement turns out to be chaotic on a long time scale. What still appeared to be a peculiar quirk of planetary movement in Poincare's time was soon to be an essential element of natural laws. Nearly a hundred years later, this chaotic behavior was being found in almost every field of science: comprehensive experimental and numerical studies in biological, ecological, chemical, physical and other systems constantly revealed the same seemingly random, irregular movements, the same longterm or even short-term unpredictability. Chaos is everywhere! Future weather, for example, can be mathematically worked out in a principle, but any great degree of accuracy is simply not attainable for more than a short period. What is remarkable about this form of chaos is that it does not develop from a large number of unknown influences, like noise in electrical circuits, for example, that is caused by the disordered movements of myriad electrons. It is rather the result of the nonlinear law of motion, which is otherwise entirely deterministic. How can we understand this? Let us first imagine a billiard table with two balls on it at some distance from one

750 AD Paper was invented by the Chinese.

There

By Umair Sadiq

another. One of the balls is then hit off the other in two different experiments with a slightly different angle but from the same starting position in both cases. After each collision, the angle between the two trajectories of the balls is significantly greater than before. If we consider colliding atoms of a gas, each disturbance in the angles of their flight trajectories will be increased on each additional collision with other gas atoms. Information about the original direction of the trajectory will very soon be totally lost. The phenomenon described are known as deterministic chaos and this has two characteristic defining features: firstly, almost every initial disturbance of a chaotic system, however small, will intensify itself continually and, secondly, a specific range of values, fixed for all components of the system, will be adhered to during this process (e.g. 360 degrees for the angle of impact). These two together result in irregular and unpredictable movements that appear to be random. Even in this chaos, certain space-time patterns develop over longer periods of time and these generally have a fractal structure: they are known as strange attractors. Although long term predictions of the course of motion are practically impossible, we can have by modern aids a deep insight in the phenomenon. A characteristic signature of chaotic behavior in a system is the fact that its sequence over time can be described only by a superposition of a continuum of periodic movements. The equations of motion are purely deterministic and involve no random elements, but they are nonlinear. Chaos requires only a few degrees of freedom, but it is not limited to simple systems with few degrees of freedom. We encounter chance and statistics in Nature in three different ways. Firstly, we have an inherently statistical character of quantum mechanics, about which we obtain information from the laws of probability amplitudes, which are in themselves strict. Secondly, we have deterministic chaotic motion occurring as a result of nonlinear, classical laws of nature, with all the known random elements, such as unpredictability and irregularity of sequence. Thirdly, we have chance, originating from the interplay of many individual components (electrons, molecules, grains, chunks of dust in Saturn's rings, star clusters etc). We know by now that for many statistical phenomenon of a macroscopic nature, it is irrelevant whether the particles move

800 AD Jabber bin Hayyan, did wonders in the department of chemistry, tried to create gold from sulphur and mercury.

850 - 900 AD - Water mills were developed to supply mechanical power to drive machinery etc. -Moors in Spain prepared pure copper by reacting its salts with iron, a forerunner of electroplating.

GIKI Science Society According to the laws of quantum mechanics or the classical, nonlinear laws. It is solely the vast number of particles involved that causes macroscopically random behavior that we graphically describe as “noise”. As was recently discovered, this noise can even cause resonance vibrations (“stochastic resonance”) and directed motion. It also has a decisive influence on the course of every chemical reaction and might be relevant for the way in which even muscles work (biological nanomachines).

4

It could well be said that deterministic chaos will have an important part to play in future high-speed computer chips that work with “ballistic” electrons. The insights gained in the meantime concerning the analysis of chaotic time sequences are increasingly also being used outside the field of physics in medicine for the evaluation of electrocardiograms and electroencephalograms, for example, and in quality control or in the analysis of stock market prices.

Number Theory By Foaad Ahmed Tahir Since the dawn of mankind, man has been endeavoring to make his life better and more comfortable. In this quest he began discovering and inventing new things. This led to the birth of mathematics. The first thing that led to mathematics was numbers. However shortly man began to investigate these numbers and thus discovered some remarkable properties of theirs. This led to the birth of Number Theory. This deals with all the abstract properties of numbers which connects set of numbers. These properties have found numerous uses in our everyday lives. Some of the properties of numbers are described below. Prime Numbers: Prime numbers have fascinated men since the beginning. They seem to contain magical powers among them in that they cannot be divided wholly by any number other than itself and 1. A lot of advancement has been made in mathematics due to research done in investigating prime numbers. Although the criterion of prime number is simple, yet to find large prime numbers is a long process using the simple factorization method. For this purpose a special type of prime numbers called Mersenne prime numbers is the main field of interest for finding large prime numbers. These prime numbers are of p the form 2 -1 where p is itself prime. The advantage for such numbers is that there is an algorithm for finding out its primality. The algorithm goes like this:

remainder is 0, then the number is prime. Initially we take n as 4. 5 For example we have 31= 2 -1, where the prime number p is 5. 2 1. We have n=4, n -2 = 14, 14 mod 31 = 14. 2 2. We have n=14, n -2 = 194, 194 mod 31 = 8. 2 3 We have n=8, n -2 = 62, 62 mod 31 = 0. This algorithm has been performed 5-2=3 times and the final result is 0. So the number 31 is prime. This algorithm is so efficient that the largest prime number and 25,964,951 the 42nd Mersenne prime number so far found is 2 - 1, having 7,816,230 digits. It has great practical uses as well. Because of the fact that prime numbers are so hard to factorize, they are used to secure financial dealings by encryption. Thus an abstract property such as primality is also of great use in everyday lives.

A

Perfect Numbers: Perfect numbers are numbers which are the sum of their factors other than the number itself. For example 6 = 1+2+3 is the smallest perfect number. Perfect numbers also have a relationship with Mersenne prime numbers as each of these prime numbers is associated with a perfect number. If p is a Mersenne prime number then the triangular number p(p+1)/2 is a perfect number, this can be shown as follows: Let Mersenne Prime number be p = 2n 1, then the perfect number is P=p(p+1)/2 = (2n -1)2n-1 .Thus the sum of factors of the perfect number is given by

R

S=1+2+…+2n-1 + (2n -1)(1+2+…+2n-2) =2n-1 + (2n-1)(2n-1-1) = (2n-1)(2n-1-1+1) = (2n-1)2n-1 =P

E

1. Take a number n and square it. 2 2. Now subtract two from it, we have n -2. 2 3. Now divide the n -2 by the number p and take the whole remainder as n.

T I C L S

This process is repeated p-2 times and if the final

1000 AD Ibn al-Haitam introduced the idea that light rays emanate in straight lines in all directions from every point on a luminous surface.

1044 AD Chinese found the recipe of gunpowder.

1100's AD -The concept of Blast furnace was established. -Alchemists had developed the art of distillation to the stage at which distillates could be captured by cooling in a flask, and wine could be distilled to yield aqua vitae.

1145 AD Abraham ben Meir Ibn Ezra explained the Arabic system of numeration and the use of the symbol 0.

5 A R T I C L E S

Aurora 2005 Thus the sum of factors of the perfect number equals itself. Hence with the discovery of every new Mersenne prime number a new perfect number is also discovered. However no odd perfect number has been found as yet and there is no proof that none exists, if there is one it is extremely large. Fibonacci Series: This is the series 0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21, … where every number is the sum of the previous two terms. This series was discovered by Fibonacci also known as Leonardo of Pisa. He thought of the following problem:

whose square is 1 more than itself while the reciprocal is 1 less than itself. It is (1+√5)/2 which comes out to be about 1.61. This number has the property that geometrical object having this ratio seem pleasant to the eye. If the sides of rectangle have this ratio then it looks pleasant. Thus this series has its uses and is found everywhere in the nature.

A closed compound is left with a rabbit which starts breeding after two months but thereafter breeds monthly. The newborns also breed similarly. What will be the number of rabbits as the months progress? The answer as it emerges is the Fibonacci series. This series is found everywhere in the universe. If the number of petals on flowers are counted they are arranged in the form of Fibonacci numbers, 1 in centre then 2,3,5,8,… as we move out radially . If a rectangle is formed with sides having length equal to two consecutive numbers, and then a square with side equal to the shorter side is made inside it, the new inscribed rectangle also has sides equal to consecutive Fibonacci numbers. If this process is repeated and then the centers of the squares are joined and the curve smoothened, then the resulting curve is Fibonacci curve. If the spiral galaxies are observed then the spiral is fibonaccian. Similarly, the horns of animals have the fibonaccian spiral. If the ratios of two relatively large consecutive fionaccian numbers are taken it emerges as the golden ratio. This is a number

Nanoelectronics Quantum-confinement nanostructures on semiconductors and monomolecular electronics (single molecules as electronic devices) are emerging technologies that would realize extremely large scale integrated, extremely low-power consumption electronic circuits and powerful computers of very small size. This is a kind of nanotechnology that will have a great impact on many markets other than the electronic appliances and computer market, in the near future. Just as what happened with the term "nanotechnology", there is some confusion about what is meant by "molecular electronics". This term should properly be reserved to single-molecule based devices and systems. Inappropriately, the same term is used to designate

1202 AD Leonardo Pisano, gave birth to the Fibonacci series.

By Umair Sadiq

devices and systems based on conductive molecular materials; while it is used generally for thin film or "lowdimensional" molecular materials, it is to be stressed that the properties featured by the molecular material in this case are bulk, not single-molecule properties. The progress in Molecular Nanotechnology looks closely related to advances in Nanoelectronics for control purposes. Supramolecular science (chemistry and physics) is supplying tools and processes toward the development of complex molecular electronic structures, because supramolecular structures are essentially based on weak, van der Waals bonds capable of a richly varied behavior with respect to strong, covalent chemical bonds.

1285 AD Alessandro della Spina invented spectacles for farsightedness.

1364 AD Giovanni di Dondi built a complex clock which kept track of calendar cycles and computed the date of Easter by using various lengths of chain.

GIKI Science Society

Plasma matter

The fourth state of By Umair Sadiq

We encounter the matter around us in its three familiar states: as solids, liquids, or gases. Everyone knows that all materials go through these three states as the temperature rises, the order being solid - liquid - gas. The evaporation temperature of normal air as an example of a gas mixture is far below zero degree Celsius, while temperatures above 5,000 oC are required to turn heat resistant materials, such as tungsten, into the gaseous state. People are less aware of the fact that every substance assumes a “fourth state” when heated very intensely to roughly 20,000oC: it becomes plasma. Due to these high transition temperatures, plasma formation is a rather rare occurrence in our everyday environment, because no vessels exist in which a substance could be converted to its plasma state by means of extreme heating. Nevertheless, “naturally” occurring plasmas can also be found on Earth: lightening is probably the most familiar example of terrestrial plasma. However, if we consider all the visible matter in the universe, it becomes evident that the plasma state is by far predominant and that the three states of matter familiar to us solid, liquid, gaseous are the exceptions: plasma makes well over 90% of all matter and is thus the most frequent and “natural” state of matter. Plasma can be found as extremely dense matter at the hot centre of a star, and as extremely diluted matter in interstellar space, where it contributes to the formation of new stars. Plasma physics, the science of plasma, is thus also one of the key sub-disciplines of astrophysics.

An essential feature of the plasma state is that the previously neutral atoms or molecules of matter break down into the positive nucleus or ion and the associated, now free, electrons. Matter in the plasma state thus acquires new physical properties and can simultaneously have a specific effect on its colder surroundings: l Good (metal-like) electrical conductivity, l Strongly influenced by magnetic fields (constriction), l Radiation emission from the infrared to the UV or X-ray range, l Powerful heat source (at high plasma densities), l Specific plasma-chemical effects in the bulk and on surfaces. These features are associated with numerous, interesting physical plasma phenomena, as well as with important technical applications for example in lighting technology, controlled nuclear fusion, thin layer surface treatments, plasma etching etc. The removal of surfaces by means of plasma etching has made a decisive contribution to advancing microelectronics structuring making possible the manufacturing of highly integrated processors, memory chips, micro sensors and much more. The fundamental physics of all these techniques is thoroughly understood. However, further development of established plasma processes or the discovery of new ones still requires an immense research effort. Plasma process engineering is still in the exploratory phase in several fields, such as biotechnology, medical technology and environmental engineering.

You are not the only one ..... L Albert Einstein could not speak until he was four years old, and did not read until he was seven. L Beethoven's music teacher said about him, "As a composer he is hopeless.” L When Thomas Edison was a young boy, his teachers said he was so stupid he could never learn anything. L Walt Disney was once fired by a newspaper editor because he was thought to have no "good ideas.” L When the sculptor Auguste Rodin was young he had difficulty learning to read and write. Today, we may say he had a learning disability, but his father said of him, "I have an idiot for a son.” L Caruso was told by one music teacher, "You can't sing. You have no voice at all."

1468 AD Type Writer was invented by Johann Gutenberg.

6

1473 -1543 AD Polish astronomer Nicolas Copernicus changed the concept of the universe for the people of the world. Gave the model of universe and planetary motion.

1482 AD Leonardo da Vinci began his notebooks in pursuit of evidence that the human body is microcosmic, which, by 1 5 1 0 - 1 5 11 , i n c l u d e d dissections of the human body.

A R T I C L E S

1545 AD Girolamo Cardano, in Ars Magna, published a complete discussion of Tartaglia's solution for cubic equations.

7 A R T I C L E S

Aurora 2005

Quantum Teleportation By Abdul Hannan Teleportation is the name given by science fiction writers to the feat of making an object or person disintegrate in one place while a perfect replica appears somewhere else. How this is accomplished is usually not explained in detail, but the general idea seems to be that the original object is scanned in such a way as to extract all the information from it, then this information is transmitted to the receiving location and used to construct the replica, not necessarily from the actual material of the original, but perhaps from atoms of the same kinds, arranged in exactly the same pattern as the original. A teleportation machine would be like a fax machine, except that it would work on 3-dimensional objects as well as documents, it would produce an exact copy rather than an approximate facsimile, and it would destroy the original in the process of scanning it. A few science fiction writers consider teleporters that preserve the original, and the plot gets complicated when the original and teleported versions of the same person meet; but the more common kind of teleporter destroys the original, functioning as a super transportation device, not as a perfect replicator of souls and bodies. In 1993 an international group of six scientists, including IBM Fellow Charles H. Bennett, confirmed the intuitions of the majority of science fiction writers by showing that perfect teleportation is indeed possible in principle, but only if the original is destroyed. In subsequent years, other scientists have demonstrated teleportation experimentally in a variety of systems, including single photons, coherent light fields, nuclear spins, and trapped ions. Teleportation promises to be quite useful as an information processing primitive, facilitating long range quantum communication (perhaps ultimately leading to a "quantum internet"), and making it much easier to build a working quantum computer. But science fiction fans will be disappointed to learn that no one expects to be able to teleport people or other macroscopic objects in the foreseeable future for a variety of engineering reasons, even though it would not violate any fundamental law to do so. In the past, the idea of teleportation was not taken very seriously by scientists, because it was thought to violate the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics, which forbids any measuring or scanning process from extracting all the information in an atom or other object. According to the uncertainty principle, the more accurately an object is scanned the more it is disturbed by the scanning process, until one reaches a

1590 AD Zacharias and Hans Janssen combined double convex lenses in a tube, producing the first telescope.

point where the object's original state has been completely disrupted, still without having extracted enough information to make a perfect replica. This sounds like a solid argument against teleportation: if one cannot extract enough information from an object to make a perfect copy, it would seem that a perfect copy cannot be made. But the six scientists found a way to make an end run around this logic, using a celebrated and paradoxical feature of quantum mechanics known as the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen effect. In brief, they found a way to scan out part of the information from an object A, which one wishes to teleport, while causing the remaining, unscanned, part of the information to pass, via the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen effect, into another object

C which has never been in contact with A. Later, by applying to C a treatment depending on the scanned-out information, it is possible to maneuver C into exactly the same state as A was in before it was scanned. A itself is no longer in that state, having been thoroughly disrupted by the scanning, so what has been achieved is teleportation, not replication. As the figure above suggests, the unscanned part of the information is conveyed from A to C by an intermediary object B, which interacts first with C and then with A. What? Can it really be correct to say "first with C and then with A"? Surely, in order to convey something from A to C, the delivery vehicle must visit A before C, not the other way around. But there is a subtle, unscannable

1592 AD Galileo found that the path of a projectile is a parabola by assuming that the uniform motion preserved in the absence of an external force is rectilinear.

1609 AD -Kepler calculations of Mars' orbit, which were inconsistent with then current assumption that it was a circle. -Galileo built a telescope with which he discovered the mountains on the moon, the four largest satellites of Jupiter, and sunspots.

GIKI Science Society kind of information that, unlike any material cargo, and even unlike ordinary information, can indeed be delivered in such a backward fashion. This subtle kind of information, also called "Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) correlation" or "entanglement", has been at least partly understood since the 1930s when it was discussed in a famous paper by Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen. In the 1960s John Bell showed that a pair of entangled particles, which were once in contact but later move too far apart to interact directly, can exhibit individually random behaviour that is too strongly correlated to be explained by classical statistics. Experiments on photons and other particles have repeatedly confirmed these correlations, thereby providing strong evidence for the validity of quantum mechanics, which neatly explains them. Another wellknown fact about EPR correlations is that they cannot by themselves deliver a meaningful and controllable message. It was thought that their only usefulness was in proving the validity of quantum mechanics. But now it is known that, through the phenomenon of quantum teleportation, they can deliver exactly that part of the information in an object which is too delicate to be scanned out and delivered by conventional methods. This figure on the right compares conventional facsimile transmission with quantum teleportation (see above). In conventional facsimile transmission the original is scanned, extracting partial information about it, but remains more or less intact after the scanning process. The scanned information is sent to the receiving

station, where it is imprinted on some raw material (e.g. paper) to produce an approximate copy of the original. By contrast, in quantum teleportation, two objects B and C

are first brought into contact and then separated. Object B is taken to the sending station, while object C is taken to the receiving station. At the sending station object B is scanned together with the original object A which one wishes to teleport, yielding some information and totally disrupting the state of A and B. The scanned information is sent to the receiving station, where it is used to select one of several treatments to be applied to object C, thereby putting C into an exact replica of the former state of A.

The following concerns a question in a physics degree exam at the University of Copenhagen: "Describe how to determine the height of a skyscraper using a barometer." One student replied, "You tie a long piece of string to the neck of the barometer, then lower the barometer from the roof of the skyscraper to the ground. The length of the string plus the length of the barometer will equal the height of the building." This highly original answer so incensed the instructor that the student was failed. The student appealed on the grounds that his answer was indisputably correct and the university appointed an independent arbiter to decide the case. The arbiter judged that answer was indeed correct, but did not display knowledge of physics. To resolve the problem it was decided to call the student in and allow him six minutes in which to provide a verbal answer, which showed at least a minimal familiarity the principles of physics. For five minutes the student sat in silence, forehead creased in thought. The arbiter reminded him that time was running out, to which the student replied that he had several extremely relevant answers, but couldn't make up his mind which to use. On being advised to hurry up the student replied as follows, "Firstly, you could take the barometer up to the roof of the skyscraper, drop it over the edge, and measure the time it takes to reach the ground. The height of the building can then be worked out from the formula H = 0.5g x t squared. But bad luck on the barometer." "Or if the sun is shining you could measure the height of the barometer, then set it on end and measure the length of its shadow. Then you measure the length of the skyscraper's shadow, and thereafter it is a simple matter of proportional arithmetic to work out the height of the skyscraper." "But if you wanted to be highly scientific about it, you could tie a short piece of string to the barometer and swing it like a pendulum, first at ground level and then on the roof of the skyscraper. The height is worked out by the difference in the restoring force T = 2 pi sq. root (l /g)." "Or if the skyscraper has an outside emergency staircase, it would be easier to walk up it and mark off the height of the skyscraper in barometer lengths, then add them up." "If you merely wanted to be boring and orthodox about it, of course, you could use the barometer to measure the air pressure on the roof of the skyscraper and on the ground, and convert the difference in millibars into meters to give the height of the building." "But since we are constantly being exhorted to exercise independence of mind and apply scientific methods, undoubtedly the best way would be to knock on the janitor's door and say to him 'If you would like a nice new barometer, I will give you this one if you tell me the height of this skyscraper'." The student was Niels Bohr, the only person from Denmark to win the Nobel Prize for Physics.

1614 AD John Napier created the first logarithmic tables and the first use of the word 'logarithm.'

8

1644 AD -Evangelista Torricelli devised the mercury barometer and created an artificial vacuum. -Blaise Pascal built a five digit adding machine, driven by rising and falling weights.

1647 AD Cavalieri derived the relationship between the focal length of a thin lens and the radii of a surface's curvature.

A R T I C L E S

1649 AD Descartes laid the foundation of analytical geometry.

9 A R T I C L E S

Aurora 2005

Biological NanotechnologyNanomachines

By Umair Sadiq

Nanotechnology offers the prospect of designing and building novel materials and devices at the atomic level. A long-term goal of this field is to devise nanomachines that will be able to store, retrieve and replicate programs accurately, acquire raw materials, assemble them according to their programming, and obtain or generate the energy needed to carry out these elementary processes. Such capabilities are necessary before a nanomachine can ultimately replicate itself. Much of the current work in the design of nanomachines has utilized mechanical analogies in an attempt to duplicate macroscopic mechanisms, such as gears and rods, on a microscopic scale. An alternative paradigm to the `mechanical engineering' approach to nanomachines is provided by biological systems. At the cellular level, information is stored by sequences of nucleic acids, which constitute the programs for the key functions of the organism. With the aid of appropriate enzymes, the specific sequence of nucleic acids is replicated, and, when necessary, repaired, with an error rate of only 10-6. Other enzymes enhance the rates of chemical reactions in cells by several orders of magnitude. These reactions allow for building long biopolymers and operating the cellular machinery in an accurate and highly controlled manner. The energy necessary to drive these chemical reactions is captured from the environment by specialized assemblies of proteins. One broad class of energycapturing proteins converts light energy into chemical energy, in the form of proton gradients across membranes. Since light energy can easily be distributed over large areas, we can envision large 2-dimensional arrays of nanomachines, each including a set of proton pumps for its power supply. However, naturally occurring light-driven proton pumps, such as bacteriorhodopsin, are complex and involve many, sometimes poorlyunderstood stages. Let us take a brief look on the design of a simple nanomachine; a simple light-driven proton pump, using state-of-the-art molecular modeling. There are two basic components to a simple light-driven proton pump: a source of photo-generated protons and a `gate-keeper', which prevents these protons from re-binding to their source. Deamer has shown that polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, incorporated into membranes, release protons when they are illuminated. Therefore, focusing on the design of the

1654 AD French mathematicians Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat formulate the theory of probability.

`Gate-keeper.', the initial approach involves a pair of proton acceptors, coupled to each other by a transient water bridge, and supported in the membrane by a small bundle of peptide helices. Upon illumination, the proton source transfers its proton to the first acceptor of the gatekeeper. While the reverse reaction is highly probable, irreversibility is ensured by a nonvanishing probability that the proton will be transferred to the second acceptor across a transient water bridge. Back transfer of the proton to the first acceptor, and hence to the proton source, is impeded by the free energy required to move the proton uphill towards the proton source, as well as by the disruption of the water bridge resulting from the change in the hydration of the two acceptors. Based on the established principles, a prototypical peptide proton pump can be readily constructed and tested by experimentalists. Once it is successfully demonstrated that the pump performs its functions, it can be further optimized for efficiency and regulatory precision. Beyond this application of biological principles to nanotechnology, scientists are working on designing small, peptide enzymes supported by membranes. Using membranes as the supporting material would allow for the reduction in the size of enzymes and aligning them in two-dimensional arrays. This, in turn, can prove very useful in synthesis of different types of polymers. Furthermore, using membrane-supported enzymes in combination with proton pumps and membrane-bound peptide channels could lead to a simple synthetic system entirely driven by light (with no other source of energy needed).

’ Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That's relativity’ . ’ If A is success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut’ . ’ Do not worry about your problems with mathematics, I assure you mine are far greater’ . Albert Einstein

1678 AD Dutch astronomer and physicist Christiaan Huygens proposed Theory of Light Waves.

1682 - 1705 AD Applying Newton's laws of motion to comets and mathematically demonstrating that comets move in elliptic orbits, English astronomer Edmond Halley correctly predicts that a comet he described in 1682 would return in 1758.

GIKI Science Society

10

The journey to human By Foaad Ahmed Tahir powered flight Since ages man has dreamt of flying. There were various attempts made at flying by strapping wings to the arms and falling from heights but all were flawed at the basic fact that, weight for weight, human muscles are not as powerful as birds and so cannot sustain the weight of body by the method of flapping wings. The reason lies at the fact that the mode of thrust is air being pushed down and in reaction an equal force is applied on the body. Now the force applied depends upon the rate at which momentum is imparted on the air, which in turn depends on the mass of air and its velocity, but the limiting factors of human, its power, is related to the rate at which energy is imparted to the air, which in turn is related to its mass and square of velocity. Thus in order to minimize the energy consumption, while keeping the momentum and thus force constant, large amount of air has to be pushed at slow velocities. In the flying mode of flapping wings small amount of air is pushed at great velocity, thus the design is flawed. When attempts were made to rectify this mistake by making aircraft, the weight was too great and the efficiency too low for it to be successful. Thus the human dream of flight by own power was nearly forgotten. That is until a British industrialist again ignited interest in this matter by announcing an award of £50,000 for a human powered controlled and steered flight. Many attempts were made but none succeeded. That is until 1977 when an American engineer Dr. Paul Mccready pursued this project.

ends of wings were specially treated to reduce their thickness to 1/32 inch. They were so thin that under stress they were rubber like. He covered the wings with special Mylar plastic to reduce the weight. It was the first such type of project in which the components' mass was measured in grams. Their design was a hang glider shaped wingspan with the rudder and aerolon controls at the front. It had a 2 meter long propeller which was 86% efficient and rotated at 120 rpm. A 3:2 ratio gear was used as the human power is at its peak at 80 rpm. The plane itself moved at just 16km/h. It had a wingspan of 96 feet but weighed in at an astonishing 35 kilograms. It was named Gossamer Condor. To win the prize it had to take off unassisted and steer in an 8 shaped figure and then clear an 8 foot pole. It achieved that easily and thus made history by being the first human powered, controlled and steered flight.

He was inspired about the project when he saw eagles gliding effortlessly in the drift of wind. He started calculating the ratios of load per area of the wings of different birds. Finally he arrived at the design of hang glider. He calculated that it requires 0.5 horsepower for flight. Thus if its wingspan is doubled without increasing the weight, its power requirement would be reduced to about 150 watts, roughly what a healthy athlete can produce for the duration of the test flight.

However the story of Dr. Paul Mccready does not end here. He went on to make a company, Aerovironment, which is a leading name in energy efficient machines. First a remote controlled solar airplane was made that flew from London to Paris. Then in collaboration with GM motors it participated in solar car race in Australia and won by a margin of 50% over runners up. This led to the design of an electric car made by GM in collaboration with Aerovironment. It had an aerodynamic drag coefficient of 0.19, that of an f-16 fighter jet, and went from 0-60 mph in 8.9 seconds.

His method for the construction of the plane was very a crude engineering approach. If a component worked, they made it lighter until it broke; if it broke initially they strengthened it. Thus they worked by trial and error. He used extremely light and strong materials of his day. In all, he used balsa wood, aluminum, cardboard, epoxy resins and piano wire. The aluminum tubes used at the

1684 AD German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz publishes an account of his discovery of calculus. Sir Isaac Newton developed calculus independently in 1666 but does not publish a description of his method until 1687.

Then the same British industrialist offered an even bigger prize of £100,000 for a human powered flight across the 23 miles of English Channel. The same team lead by Dr. Paul Mccready again worked on an improved plane called Gossamer Albatross. It had an even bigger wingspan but was lighter due to advancement in materials. It flew across the channel in 1979 in more than 2 hours, thus setting the then world record of the longest flight, which was later improved by the Deadulus plane of MIT on which staggering 100,000 man hours were spent.

Thus Dr. Paul Mccready has endeavored on many trendsetting and breakthrough projects and is rightly called the father of human powered flight. His motto is rightly “Doing more with less.”

1698 AD English engineer Thomas Savery builds the first practical steam engine, which serves as a water pump. It uses two copper vessels alternately filled with steam from a boiler.

1714 AD Gabriel Daniel Fahrenheit makes the first thermometer to use mercury instead of alcohol.

A R T I C L E S

1742 AD Swedish astronomer Anders Celsius describes a temperature scale.

11 A R T I C L E S

Aurora 2005

Bermuda Triangle The "Bermuda or Devil's Triangle" is an imaginary area located off the southeastern Atlantic coast of the United States, which is noted for a high incidence of unexplained losses of ships, small boats, and aircraft. The apexes of the triangle are generally accepted to be Bermuda, Miami, Fla., and San Juan, Puerto Rico. In the past, extensive, but futile Coast Guard searches prompted by search and rescue cases such as the disappearances of an entire squadron of TBM Avengers shortly after take off from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., or the traceless sinking of USS Cyclops and Marine Sulphur Queen have lent credence to the popular belief in the mystery and the supernatural qualities of the "Bermuda Triangle.” Countless theories attempting to explain the many disappearances have been offered throughout the history of the area. The most practical seem to be environmental and those citing human error. The majority of disappearances can be attributed to the area's unique environmental features. First, the "Devil's Triangle" is one of the two places on earth that a magnetic compass does point towards true north. Normally it points toward magnetic north. The difference between the two is known as compass variation. The amount of variation changes by as much as 20 degrees as one circumnavigates the earth. If this compass variation or error is not compensated for, a navigator could find himself far off course and in deep trouble.

An area called the "Devil's Sea" by Japanese and Filipino seamen, located off the east coast of Japan, also exhibits the same magnetic characteristics. It is also known for its mysterious disappearances. Another environmental factor is the character of the Gulf Stream. It is extremely swift and turbulent and can quickly erase any evidence of a disaster. The unpredictable Caribbean-Atlantic weather pattern also plays its role. Sudden local thunder storms and water spouts often spell disaster for pilots and mariners. Finally, the topography of the ocean floor varies from extensive shoals around the islands to some of the deepest marine trenches in the world. With the interaction of the strong currents over the many reefs the topography is in a state of constant flux and development of new navigational hazards is swift. Not to be under estimated is the human error factor. A large number of pleasure boats travel the waters between Florida's Gold Coast and the Bahamas. All too often, crossings are attempted with too small a boat, insufficient knowledge of the area's hazards, and a lack of good seamanship. The Coast Guard is not impressed with supernatural explanations of disasters at sea. It has been their experience that the combined forces of nature and unpredictability of mankind outdo even the most far fetched science fiction many times each year.

Polar Aurora Polar auroras are optical phenomena characterized by colourful displays of light in the night sky. An aurora display in the Northern Hemisphere is called the aurora borealis, or the northern lights; in the Southern Hemisphere it is called the aurora australis. Auroras are the most visible effect of the solar wind upon the Earth's atmosphere. The aurora occur when the Van Allen radiation belts become "overloaded" with energetic particles, which cascade down magnetic field lines and collide with the earth's upper atmosphere. The most powerful aurora tend to occur after coronal mass ejections. Aurora in Latin means dawn and Borealis comes from Boreas, the name of the Greek god of the northern wind.

1777 AD French physicist Charles Coulomb invents the torsion balance for measuring the force of magnetic and electrical attraction, to formulate the principle, known as Coulomb's law.

The sun gives off high-energy charged particles (also called ions) that travel out into space at speeds of 300 to 1200 kilometres per second. A cloud of such particles is called plasma. The stream of plasma coming from the sun is known as the solar wind. As the solar wind interacts with the edge of the earth's magnetic field, some of the particles are trapped by it and they follow the lines of magnetic force down into the ionosphere, the section of the earth's atmosphere that extends from about 60 to 600 kilometres above the earth's surface. When the particles collide with the gases in the ionosphere they start to glow, producing the spectacle that we know as the auroras, northern and southern. The array of colours consists of red, green, blue and violet.

1780 AD Scottish inventor James Watt and English manufacturer Matthew Boulton begin manufacturing a steam engine for providing power to machinery. This accelerates the process of industrialization popularly known as the Industrial Revolution.

1799 AD German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss submits a proof that every algebraic equation has at least one root, or solution. It comes to be called "the fundamental theorem of algebra."

GIKI Science Society

12

The Northern Lights are constantly in motion because of the changing interaction between the solar wind and the earth's magnetic field. The solar wind commonly generates up to 1,000,000 megawatts of electricity in an auroral display and this can cause interference with power lines, radio and television broadcasts and satellite communications. By studying the auroras scientists can learn more about the solar wind, how it affects the earth's atmosphere and how the energy of the auroras might be exploited for useful purposes.

A R T I C L E S

1800 AD Sir William Herschel announces his discovery of infrared radiation in the Sun's light.

1803 AD English physicist and physician Thomas Young demonstrates light interference and helps establish the wave theory of light.

1804 AD British inventor and engineer Richard Trevithick constructs the first practical steam locomotive in 1804. Within fifty years the railroad becomes the dominant means for moving people and freight

1822 AD - Jean B.J. Fourier publishes his mathematical analysis of heat, showing that through a trigonometric series,any function can be expressed as the sum of an infinite series of sines and cosines. -Charles Babbage begins work the Difference Engine.

15 I N T E R V I E w

Aurora 2005

Interview with Dr. Abdullah Sadiq How it all started… I became a physicist through pure chance. Thanks to my teacher Mr. Ghulam Ishaq Khan I developed interest in mathematics in my childhood. I was also fond of making my own toys and tinkering with simple machines I could lay my hands on. I could hardly put them back though after I had put them apart! But I hardly had any plans to become a scientist. After my intermediate from Islamia College Peshawar, I tried to become a GDP (pilot), cleared the written test but got rejected on medical grounds because of a weak collar bone. Hence I continued my studies. After my B. Sc I again applied for a job but the late Professor Abdul Majid Mian, who was the Principal of Islamia College as well as Chairman of Physics and Mathematics departments of Peshawar University, refused to give me a letter of recommendation. Instead he advised me to join the Physics Department. Hence I went to University of Peshawar and did my masters in physics. As a university student I went on a study tour of Lahore and visited the then Atomic Energy Center there. That was my first visit to a place as far as Lahore! I was so impressed by its well kept lawns, shiny floors and well equipped laboratories that I decided join this place on my graduation. After my masters and teaching for a few months in my Alma Mater I applied for the job in the Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC) and was interviewed in the same Center in Lahore. An American professor on the Interview Board, Michael Moravcsik, asked me the reason for the oval-shape of the sun just before it sets. My rather tentative answer must have impressed him as I was offered a job in PAEC. A few months later I was inducted as an Officer on Special Training, or OST. Dr Samar Mubarakmand, Chairman NECOM and Mr. Parvez Butt, Chairman, PAEC were some of the other OSTs who joined PAEC with me. I had an exciting time in Lahore and met leading physicists of the country including Professor Abdus Salam. And what made it all the more interesting was the diversity of talented people belonging to different fields from over the country, including the then East Pakistan. It was very difficult to distinguish between Professor Riazuddin, and his identical twin, Professor Fayyazuddin, who was my research supervisor. It was not uncommon for me to go to Riazuddin for consultation taking him for Fayyazuddin. He would politely tell me that perhaps I want to talk to his brother. I did quite well in the training but for some reason I went abroad for my higher studies a year later than most of my batch mates. In summer 1964, before I went abroad, I had to choose between three possibilities. To go to Edinburgh as a Commonwealth Scholar and study under the supervision of Higgs, now of the Higgs Boson fame, to go to the University of Colorado on a scholarship or to study at the University of Illinois (U of I) as a teaching assistant. After discussions with some teachers I finally chose the U of I at Urbana-Champaign, USA. A new phase of life… I found an intellectually and culturally rich environment at the U of I. There were students from all over the world with weekly seminars and colloquia by famous scientists from within and outside the States, this was particularly so during the Centenary Celebrations of the University. These were the days soon after President Kennedy and Malcolm X were assassinated, the black movement was at its peak and USA got involved in Vietnam. These developments made students all over the world relatively more concerned about social issues. Students at the U of I Campus were also drawn into the so called students' movement that reached its peak towards the late sixties. This also made me conscious of my social responsibilities and during 1970 I managed to raise some funds for flood victims of the then East Pakistan. Back to the homeland… On my return home in 1971 I got involved in social work and infra-structure development for research at the expense of my own physics research. I tried to improve literacy in neglected areas of the society by going to a locality of sanitation workers and teaching their children. At about the same time my teacher, mentor and friend, Michael 1 Wortis, also helped me write and publish my PhD research. PINSTECH was then newly established. I also took 1. Pakistan Institute of Nuclear Sciences and Technology.

1825 AD Carl Friedrich Gauss (German), Nikolay Ivanovich Lobachevsky (Russian), and János Bolyai (Hungarian) independently discover nonEuclidean geometry, in which more than one parallel can be drawn to a given line through a given point not on the line.

1826 AD French inventor Joseph N. Niépce takes the first surviving permanent photograph using a bitumen-coated pewter plate exposed in a camera obscura (a box with a lens that projects an image onto the box's inside surface).

1831 AD English physicist Michael Faraday discovers electromagnetic induction, proving that a current flowing in a coil of wire can induce electromagnetically a current in a nearby coil.

GIKI Science Society

16

active part in the organization and development of its library into a modern and extensive resource base of scientific and technical information. Realization… In due course of time a feeling started nagging me that my involvement in social work and other non-academic activities is not making much difference to the society. I felt that I might be able to make some contribution in the field in which I had some formal training. I requested Dr Ishfaq Ahmad, then member PAEC, to relieve me of the library related work with a view to go back to physics research. My association with Raza Tahir-Kheli of Temple University, USA and the International Center for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) at that stage greatly facilitated this transition. I also got an opportunity to spend about 18 months in Germany as an Alexander von Humboldt fellow, which eventually paved the way for the ICTP Prize and Gold Medal. Still after all that, there lied a dormant feeling to do something more. It was at that time I switched my career of a scientist to one as an educationist. Foundations of GIKI… In response to a request from Mr. Ghulam Ishaq Khan, who was then Federal Minister of Finance, PAEC nominated me to help him plan an engineering institution. The initial proposal was for a post B. Sc. graduate school. I strongly felt that we need to select people at an earlier age and it ended up like it is today. We rented a small building in Islamabad, where I used to spend a few hours daily before going to my office in PINSTECH. Mr. Samiullah Marwat soon joined that office on full time basis. The Society for the Promotion of Engineering Sciences and Technology in Pakistan (SOPREST) was soon formed as the parent body of the new Institution. Mr. Ghulam Ishaq Khan was its President and Dr. A. Q. Khan, Mr. H. U. Beg, me and some others as its founding members. An academic planning team was also assembled with Dr. A. Q. Khan, Mr. Amanullah Khan and me as interim deans and the former also as Project Director and Mr. H. U. Beg as an Executive Director. Because of my involvement with GIKI I had to decline faculty position at ICTP as a staff associate. With the dedicated work of the project and academic teams the institute got functional in fall 1993. I was the first faculty member to shift here with my family and taught physics 101 and 102 to the pioneering batch. After one year I decided to leave GIKI. I wanted to go back to my village, but on the insistence of my wife I returned to my parent organization, PAEC and was posted in the Center of Nuclear studies, CNS that was led by my teacher and mentor, Dr Inam-ur-Rehman. 1

NPTC and PIEAS … President Laghari started a series of meetings with professionals from various fields at the time I went back to PAEC in 1994. Dr Ishfaq Ahmad, Chairman PAEC led a team of physicists in one of these meetings and asked Dr. Masud Ahmad, now Member Physical Sciences, PAEC, and me to make a list of points for discussions. Initiating Physics Talent Contest (NPTC) was one such point. NPTC is meant to groom the youth of the nation for careers in Science, Engineering and Technology, or STEM Careers and prepare a Pakistani team for participation in the International Physics Olympiad. The President graciously endorsed this proposal among others and with the help of funding from PAEC we launched it on a pilot scale in 1995. Meanwhile in CNS we also started other activities like weekly Colloquium where country chief of ICI, Chairman HEC, poets like Ahmed Faraz and other luminaries gave talks. NPTC has been a great success. Pakistani students are now successfully competing in the International Physics Olympiads. President Musharaf is taking keen interest in this activity and has been awarding additional cash prizes to the selected students. NPTC has been extended to similar contests in mathematics, biology and chemistry in the form of National Science Talent Contest and a National Engineering Competition under the umbrella of STEM careers project of Higher Education Commission. Finally, after coming back to GIKI… I look forward to strengthening all disciplines of specialization. We need the faculty who own the institution and for that I am keenly interested in GIKI alumni. The social environment at GIKI is good. The idea of societies dates back to batch one. It's a healthy activity and produces more well rounded and refined engineers. GIKI now seems to me an opportunity to be able to fulfill my earliest dreams. It probably would have been better were I younger at this stage. Now I am trying but yes with some handicaps. After twelve years I feel I lack that energy but I am resolute to put up my best and I hope all people to show their enthusiasm as well. As for the inspiration of students I would like to say that in general you should try to do your best whatever field you choose. As for science, get new works and fill in the blanks!

I N T E R V I E w

1. Pakistan Institute of Engineering and Applied Sciences

1837 AD American inventor Samuel F. B. Morse and British physicist Sir Charles Wheatstone independently invent the first electric telegraphs.

1842 AD German Julius Robert von Mayer formulates the law of c o n s e r v a t i o n o f e n e r g y. German scientist Hermann von Helmholtz and British physicist James Prescott Joule also are credited with discovering this principle.

1850 AD German mathematical physicist Rudolf Clausius is the first to enunciate the second law of thermodynamics.

1854 AD Boolean Algebra British mathematician and logician George Boole describes an algebraic system in which logical propositions are denoted by symbols and can be acted on by abstract mathematical operators that correspond to the laws of logic.

17 R E S E A R C H P A P E R

Aurora 2005

Closed form approximation solutions for the restricted circular three body problem Abu Bakr Mehmood S. Umer Abbas Ghulam Shabbir An approach is developed to find approximate solutions to the restricted circular three body problem. The solution is useful in approximately describing the position vectors of three spherically symmetric masses, one of which has a much smaller mass than the other two. These masses perform free motion under each others' gravitational influence. The set of solutions is found using the Lambert's wave function. Key words: Lambert's wave function, spherically symmetric masses.

The aim of this paper is to find approximations for the restricted circular three body problem. The problem by definition is to describe the free motions of three masses, two of which have spherically symmetric mass distributions and one of which is small compared to the other two. The smaller mass should be small enough in comparison to the other two, so that it can be approximated as a point mass. A typical real life application of the problem would be the motion of a probe between the earth and moon. Moreover, the spherically symmetric mass distributions of the earth and moon would allow them to be approximated by point masses. In the problem considered, it is further assumed that the motion of

1866 AD German engineer Werner Siemens discovers the principle of the electric dynamo. The company he cofounded in 1847, Siemens & Halske, produces the first electrical power transmission system ten years later.

the two larger masses, say m1 and m2 is not affected by the presence, or motion of m3; the smaller mass. It therefore follows that m1 and m2 execute two body motion under each other's gravitational influence only, whereas m3 executes motion which is effected by both the presence and motion of m1 and m2. The motion of m1 and m2 shall be solved for, only by considering two body motion, and the motion of m3, shall then be solved for by the use of generalized three body motion equations. Figure 1 presents a diagrammatic representation of our system of three bodies, which form an isolated system in free space. Our aim is to find r1, r2 and r3 explicitly as time functions. We choose to solve the problem in

1867 AD Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel patents dynamite.

1869 AD Russian chemist Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleyev publishes the first version of the periodic table of elements.

GIKI Science Society

two dimensions. The bodies perform translational motion under each other's gravitational attraction. Since our assumptions allow us to approximate the three bodies as point masses, we neglect rotational motion. In this paper we have developed a versatile approach to find approximate solutions for the restricted circular three body problem. The problem finds a lot of applications in celestial mechanics. As mentioned previously, a typical application of the problem would be to describe the motion of an interplanetary probe under the gravitational influence of two massive gravitating bodies, that is planets. We considered the fact that the motion of the two massive bodies m1 and m2 was not effected by the presence or motion of

[ For 1873 AD British mathematician and physicist James Maxwell publishes his electromagnetic theory of light and suggests that a whole family of electromagnetic radiation must exist, of which visible light is only one part.

a third body m3 having negligible mass on a relative scale. Using this proposition, we found analytic approximations for the motions of m1 and m2, which were given by the expressions defining r1(t), r2(t), μ1(t) and μ2(t). Of course this was accomplished by a simple consideration of the two body motion executed by m1 and m2. Having done this, we modeled the system of three bodies, taking into account the motion of m3, under the gravitational influence of m1 and m2. The next step was to find approximations for the motion of m3. This was accomplished by using our approximations for the motions of m1 and m2 (found through consideration of two body motion), and performing algebraic manipulations on the system of equations developed while considering three body dynamics.

]

complete research paper, please contact Dr. Ghulam Shabbir. shabbir @ giki.edu.pk

1875 AD Seventeen European nations adopt the metric system. A decimal system of physical units based on the meter, it was introduced in France almost a century earlier.

1876 AD Using a transmitter and receiver , Scottish-American inventor Alexander Graham Bell delivers the first telephone message to his assistant, Thomas A. Watson.

18

R E S E A R C H P A P E R

1877 AD German inventor Nikolaus A. Otto patents the Otto cycle engine. It is the first effective four-stroke internal combustion engine, the type that will eventually be used in automobiles..

19 A R T I C L E S

Aurora 2005

Stars, how they originate and how do they change in there life cycle? By Muhammad Usman Raza What is a star? Are hot bodies of glowing gas that start their life in Nebulae. They vary in size, mass and temperature, diameters ranging from 450x smaller to over 1000x larger than that of the Sun. masses range from twentieth to over 50 solar masses and surface temperatures range from 3,000 degrees Celsius to over 50,000 degrees Celsius. The colour of a star is determined by its surface temperature, the hottest stars are blue and the coolest stars are red . The Sun has a surface temperature of 5,500 degree Celsius. Its colour appears yellow. The energy produced by a star is by nuclear fusion in the stars core. Many stars occur in special types of groupings. These groupings are called star clusters. These clusters are divided into Open Clusters and Globular Clusters. The open clusters contain small number of young stars; the globular clusters are much older and contain many more stars. How do stars originate? Stars form from concentrations in huge interstellar gas clouds. These contract due to their own gravitational pull. As the cloud gets smaller it loses some of the energy stored in it as potential gravitational energy. This is turned into heat which in the early days of the embryo star can easily escape and so the gas cloud stays cool. As the clouds density rises it gets more and more difficult for the heat to get out and so the center 'burning' of hydrogen into helium takes place, as in the Sun. The object is then a star. How do they change in their lifecycle? Stage 1: Giant Molecular Cloud: A giant molecular cloud is a large, dense gas cloud (with dust) that is cold enough for molecules to form. Thousands of giant clouds exist on the disk part of our galaxy. Each gain molecular cloud has a 100,000's to a few million solar masses of material (most of this material is gathered when a supernova explodes). Fragments of giant molecular clouds with tens to hundreds of solar masses of material apiece will start collapsing for some reason all at about the same time. Possible trigger mechanisms could be a shock wave from

1879 AD British inventor Thomas Swan and American inventor Thomas Edison independently develop practical electric lights.

the nearby massive star at its death or from the passage of the cloud through regions of more intense gravity as found in the spiral arms of spiral galaxies. These shock waves compress the gas clouds enough for them to gravitationally collapse. Gas clouds may start to collapse without any outside force if they are cool enough to spontaneously collapse. Whatever the reason, the result is the same: gas clumps collapse to form protostars. Stage 2: Protostars: When the gas clumps together to form protostars energy is released. The gas clump becomes warm enough to emit a lot of infrared and microwave radiation. A protostars will reach a temperature of 2000 to 3000 K, hot enough to glow red, but the cocoon of gas and dust surrounding it blocks the visible light. Stage 3: Main Sequence: Fusion starts in the core of the star and the outward pressure from these reactions stop the core from collapsing any further. But material from the surrounding cloud continues to fall onto the protostars . Most of the energy produced by the protostars is from the gravitational collapse of the cloud material. Eventually the star becomes stable because hydrostatic equilibrium has been established. The star settles down to spend about 90% of its life as main sequence star .It is readily fusing hydrogen to form helium in the core. Stars initially begin their lives in clusters near other stars. After a few orbits around the galactic center, gravitational tugs from other stars in the galaxy cause the stars in the cluster to wander away from their cluster and live their lives alone or with perhaps one or two companions. The gas and dust around the stars may be residual material from their formation or simply interstellar clouds the cluster is passing through. The more massive the star is the more quickly it burns hydrogen and hence the brighter, bigger and hotter it is and so the less is its life line. Stage 4: Forming of a red giant: The medium mass stars like our sun eventually

1882 AD Thomas Edison develops and installs the first central electricpower station in New York City. The station generates electricity in direct current, which is replaced later by alternating current.

1893 AD German inventor Rudolf Diesel publishes Theory and Design of a Rational Heat Engine, which describes the highefficiency internal combustion engine. The engine uses heat caused by air compression to ignite fuel.

GIKI Science Society run out on their hydrogen supply and converts it all into helium in their centers during their main-sequence stage but eventually there is no hydrogen left in the center to provide the necessary radiation pressure to balance gravity. The center of the star thus contracts until it is hot enough for helium to be converted into carbon. The hydrogen in a shell continues to 'burn' into helium but the outer layers of the star have to expand. This makes the star appear brighter and cooler and it becomes a red giant. There are very few stars of more than 5 times the mass of the sun. These stars burn their hydrogen out very quickly compared to the sun. Like medium mass stars, they 'burn' all their hydrogen at the centers and continue with hydrogen burning shell and central helium 'burning' shell. They become brighter and cooler on their outside and are called red super giants. Carbon burning can develop at the stars center and a complex set of element burning shells can develop towards the end of the stars life. During this stage many different chemical elements will be produced in the star and the central temperature will approach 100,000,000 degrees Kelvin. Stage 5: End of the star's life: During the red giant phase a star often loses a lot of its outer layers, which are blown away by the radiation coming from below. Eventually, in the more massive stars of the group the carbon may be 'burnt' to even heavier elements but eventually the energy generation will fizzle

20

out and the outer layers drift away from the core as a gaseous shell, this gas that surrounds the core is called a Planetary Nebula. The star will collapse to what is called a 'degenerate white dwarf', when it dims and finally stops' shining it is called a black dwarf. This is what happens to a star about the mass of the sun. The high mass stars that form the red super giants, for all the elements up to iron the addition of more nucleons to the nucleus produces energy and so yields a small contribution to the balance inside the star between gravity and radiation. To add more nucleons to iron nucleus energy is required, so no more energy is released and the star cools down and the star's core then has no resistance to the force of gravity and once it starts to contract a very rapid collapse will take place. The protons and electrons combine to give a core composed of neutrons and vast amounts of energy is released. This energy is sufficient to blow away all the outer parts of the star in a violent explosion and the star becomes a supernova in less than a second. The light of this one star is then as bright as that from all the other 100,000,000,000 stars in the galaxy. During this phase all the elements with atomic weights greater than iron are formed and, together with the rest of the outer regions of the star are blown out into interstellar space. The central core of neutrons is left as a neutron star if it has a mass of between 1.5-3 solar masses. If the core is much greater than 3 solar masses, the core contracts to become a Black Hole.

A R T I C L E S

1900 AD German physicist Max Planck lays the foundation for the quantum theory, or quantum mechanics.

1901 AD Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi sends the first wireless message overseas.

1903 AD At Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, American aviator Orville Wright makes the first successful flight of a piloted, heavier-than-air flying machine. Built by Wright and his brother, Wilbur, the craft flies a distance of about 37 m (120 ft).

1905 AD German American theoretical physicist Albert Einstein develops his special theory of relativity.

21 F Y P A B S T R A C T s

Aurora 2005 Abdus Saboor Human Computer Ihsan Ullah M. Hammadullah Interfacing Saad bin Hussain using Biological signals Human Computer Interfacing using biological signals is an emerging technology which has enabled disabled people to communicate with the world and with their surroundings. With the help of this setup not only locked-in syndrome people will be benefited but all others can also use it as well. Mouse control via eyeball movement has been described in this text. Various techniques are used for this purpose to establish the task. Digital image processing is one of these which require light as a primary source but we approached the same problem by capturing EOG (electro-oculography) signals (produced by eyeball movement due to relative potential difference generated between retina and cornea) by placing EOG electrodes at right positions in the proximity of the eyes. These signals were then processed and interfaced with computer via microcontrollers and then were mapped on computer monitor screen via custom software to control the mouse cursor efficiently. You can click an icon merely by staring at that icon for three seconds. The advantage of EOG signal based technique over the previous one is that it can operate in darkness as well i.e. light is not required as a source. This setup will help in virtual gaming, virtual keyboard, eye painting, net browsing and in crime investigation.

Omer Masood Qureshi S. Mansoor Ali Faheem Salem Gilani Jawad Aslam Butt

Orca

Human powered vehicle, Orca is a vehicle that was designed and built with three primary objectives in mind. First and foremost, the design is to be beautiful in its simplicity. Secondly, since the vehicle is being designed for one purpose, speed; all design selections are to be made with this purpose in mind. Thirdly, the attainment of Orca maximum velocity will be done with rider safety as a paramount goal. These objectives were achieved by performing aerodynamics analysis, bio-mechanics considerations, calculations involving safety of the rider and the frame design. The Orca design is a long wheel based low racer, front wheel drive recumbent. This design is the first of its type produced at GIK Institute.

[The full reports are available at the GIKI Library.]

1906 AD American engineer Lee De Forest invents the audion, later known as the triode, a vacuum tube that becomes a key component in many electronic systems, including radio and television. It is eventually replaced by the transistor.

1908 AD German physicist Hans Geiger invents a portable radiation counter. The device detects and records information about subatomic particles emitted by radioactive substances.

1913 AD American industrialist Henry Ford begins to use standardized interchangeable parts and assembly-line techniques in his automobilemanufacturing plant, and is chiefly responsible for their general adoption and subsequent wide use.

GIKI Science Society

Neuro-Mod

22

Muhammad Faraz Azhar Muhammad Usman Amjad Nida Javed Umair Shafai Rao

The aim of this project was to develop an application that reads an MR image library of a patients brain images and automatically reconstructs the 3-D model from it. It performs segmentation to extract the brain part from the given MRI scans. The segmented data is then utilized for the brain reconstruction. The input data is in the form of bitmap images acquired from MR Imaging hardware. The segmentation module extracts the brain part using an automated hybrid approach comprising anisotropic diffusion, thresholding, erosion, selection and mask application. The 3D reconstruction module applies the marching cubes algorithm on the segmented images. Both modules are fully automatic performing their required functions solely on the basis of image data. The prime concern in the application is the accuracy of the various algorithms and their correct mathematical computations to suit the bio-medical imaging problem at hand. This implies that the design takes into account the minor details of anatomy displayed in each image for calculation of the model. The proposed system with a few modifications, can act as a 3-D engine for the reconstruction of various anatomical parts whose image slices can be obtained using medical imaging techniques. Applications: tThe system eliminates the need for 3D reconstruction process. The hardware systems are only required to capture the MRI scans. Once a digital copy has been obtained, there is no need to go back to the expensive hardware. 3D reconstruction can then be performed on any computer system fulfilling the basic set of requirements. This allows a physicians at a remote location to obtain a better visualisation of the patient's brain scans to facilitate the diagnosis process. tThe project serves as a baseline for future research in Medical Image Processing. The segmentation process proposed for the brain scans can be applied to any other anatomical part of the body with equal efficiency. Similarly, the 3D reconstruction module can act as a generic 3D engine. The various facilities provided by with the system can further be modified to act as powerful tools in totally automated diagnosis of brain abnormalities and can easily be extended, by including various diagnostic techniques for tumours and clots detection, to aid in laser therapy. tFinally, the system is very cost-effective. The maintenance cost of MR Imaging systems is very high. By separating the reconstruction process (post-processing) from the image acquisition (preprocessing), the performance of the imaging hardware is enhanced resulting in less frequent maintenance required.

[The full reports are available at the GIKI Library.]

1916 AD German American theoretical physicist Albert Einstein publishes his general theory of relativity. It succeeds Newton's theory as the basic explanation of gravitation.

1919 AD British physicist Ernest Rutherford bombards nitrogen gas with alpha particles and obtains atoms of an oxygen isotope and protons. This transmutation of nitrogen into oxygen is the first artificially induced nuclear reaction.

1925 AD Austrian American physicist Wolfgang Pauli defines the exclusion principle of quantum mechanics, which states that no two electrons can occupy the same quantum or energy state of an atom simultaneously.

F Y P A B S T R A C T S

1926 AD Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger presents his theory of wave mechanics, which expresses Louis de Broglie's 1923 wave concept mathematically.

23 A R T I C L E S

Aurora 2005

The Fundamental Forces of Universe By Foaad Ahmed Tahir All things that we observe in our universe can be explained on the basis of physical laws. Everyday observations from the running of automobiles to the movement of planets in orbits and the burning of stars occur because of the presence of forces between 'matter'. The universe consists of matter and energy and the interaction of matter occurs in the form of forces which leads to the presence of energy. These interactions occur because of the force carrying particles. There are four fundamental forces in the universe, namely the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, the electromagnet force and the force of gravity. Combined, these forces are responsible for the workings of this universe. The Strong Nuclear Force: The strong nuclear force is responsible for the binding of the nuclei of atoms. It has a very short range and thus its effect is only felt within the nucleus. It is transmitted via force particles called gluons which bind together quarks that lead to the formation of protons and neutrons and cumulatively the nucleus. It is the strongest force of all and is 100 times stronger than the electromagnetic force. But due to its small range it does not play a major role in our everyday lives. The Electromagnetic Force: The electromagnetic force plays a dominant role in our everyday lives. The atoms and molecules within an object are held together only because of these forces. Our machineries such as car engines, maglev trains and other equipment cannot work without it. It is also a strong force. It acts only between charged particles such as proton and electron. This interaction occurs because of the force particles photons. The electromagnetic force is unique in the sense that not only can it interact directly between matter but it can also travel in the form of electromagnetic waves thus enabling us to transmit information via it. It is a long range force as it varies inversely with square of distance. The Weak Nuclear Force: This force is responsible for the disintegration of nuclei. It is again a short range force and its effect is limited only within the nuclei. It is transmitted via W+,Wand ZO particles. It plays part in phenomenon such as radioactivity and nuclear fission and fusion. It is a very weak force and is a million times weaker than electromagnetic force. Yet its role is decisive as the stars

1927 AD German physicist Werner Heisenberg formulates the uncertainty principle, which states that the position and momentum of a subatomic particle cannot be specified simultaneously.

would cease to burn without it. The Force of Gravity: The force of gravity plays also plays a very important role in our lives as the orbits of planets, formation of stars and our daily routine activities depend upon it. It is a very weak force and is 100 million billion billion billion times weaker than electromagnetic force. However it plays the most dominant role in the universe due to the fact that it is always cumulative, unlike electromagnetic force which is both attractive and repulsive. Thus due to accumulation of matter its effect increases drastically. Infact, so great is its power that when a star explodes and if it has a critical radius, the matter is sucked and compressed due to its own gravitational attraction and eventually so much mass is confined in such a small space that the resulting gravitational field is strong enough to prevent light from escaping it. Such a phenomenon leads to the birth of black holes. Gravity is caused by the hypothetical field particles dubbed gravitons, though they have not been practically observed. In the time before 20th century the concept of gravity was that given by Newton - an object creates gravitational field around it with which another object interacts leading to an attractive force. Though this theory was very successful and predicted many things, including orbits of planets, but still there were some observations unexplained by it. However in 1916 Einstein presented his general theory of relativity in which he presented a totally new theory for the explanation of gravity which explained the previously unexplainable phenomenon such as shift in apparent position of star and the rotation of axis of Mercury's orbit. It stated that gravity is a result of the distorting of space-time where a massive object is placed. Thus when any object is traveling in space-time it follows the distortion and we observe it as an orbit. It can be visualized as a heavy object placed on a rubber sheet causing it to sag more at places near it, and less farther away. Thus according to this theory even light bends as it passes near a massive object. Another remarkable conclusion of this theory is about transmission of gravitational changes. Newton said that changes in gravitational field are transmitted instantaneously over distances. However this contradicted Einstein's postulate that nothing travels faster than light. Thus he did calculations and it evolved that gravitational changes travel at the speed of light. Thus if a star explodes, gravitational changes, such as

1929 AD Comparing the distances of galaxies to the speed at which they are moving away from Earth, Edwin Hubble discovers that the farther a galaxy is from Earth, the faster it is recedinga relationship so consistent that it comes to be known as Hubble's Law.

1930 AD British aviator and aeronautical engineer Sir Frank Whittle files his first patent for a turbojet engine. The engine is tested in a British experimental fighter plane during World War II.

GIKI Science Society Thus if a star explodes, gravitational changes, such as change in orbit, would be observed simultaneously with the sight of star exploding. This theory also predicts energy dissipation in the form of gravitational waves. Evidence supporting this fact has been seen in the form of binary stars reducing their mutual distances, though there has been no practical observation of this gravitational counterpart of electromagnetic waves despite 20 years of research. The Grand Unification Theory: A Pakistani physicist (Dr. Abdus Salam), along with two fellow scientists proved that under extreme

24

conditions electromagnetic force and weak nuclear force behave similarly, thus they unified the two. Since then work has been going on to unite the other forces too. Among the three, gravity seems to be the one hardest to relate to others. If all can be united then the whole universe can be explained completely in a single equation. It is also said that it would be too complicated to be of practical use although two of the most fundamental theories of 20th century, the theory of relativity and quantum theory, have resulted in inventions such as nuclear energy and electronics respectively. If such an accomplishment is achieved it will be a great step towards understand the working of this universe.

Was Big Bang really the Beginning of Time? Continued from Page 2 The basic idea is that elementary particles are not point like but rather infinitely thin one-dimensional objects, the strings. The large zoo of elementary particles, each with its own characteristic properties, reflects the many possible vibration patterns of a string. How can such a simple-minded theory describe the complicated world of particles and their interactions? The answer can be found in what we may call quantum string magic. Once the rules of quantum mechanics are applied to a vibrating string--just like a miniature violin string, except that the vibrations propagate along it at the speed of light--new properties appear. All have profound implications for particle physics and cosmology. First, quantum strings have a finite size. Were it not for quantum effects, a violin string could be cut in half, cut in half again and so on all the way down, finally becoming a massless pointlike particle. But the Heisenberg uncertainty principle eventually intrudes and prevents the lightest strings from being sliced smaller than about 10-34 meter. This irreducible quantum of length, denoted ls, is a new constant of nature introduced by string theory side by side with the speed of light, c, and Planck's constant, h. It plays a crucial role in almost every aspect of string theory, putting a finite limit on quantities that otherwise could become either zero or infinite. Second, quantum strings may have angular momentum even if they lack mass. In classical physics, angular momentum is a property of an object that rotates with respect to an axis. The formula for angular momentum multiplies together velocity, mass and distance from the axis; hence, a massless object can have no angular momentum. But quantum fluctuations

1932 AD -Ernst A.F. Ruska and Max Knoll build the first electron microscope, capable of magnifying objects 400 times. -Sir John D. Cockcroft and Ernest T.S. Walton use artificially accelerated particles to successfully disintegrate the nucleus of an atom.

change the situation. A tiny string can acquire up to two units of h of angular momentum without gaining any mass. This feature is very welcome because it precisely matches the properties of the carriers of all known fundamental forces, such as the photon (for electromagnetism) and the graviton (for gravity). Historically, angular momentum is what clued in physicists to the quantum-gravitational implications of string theory. Third, quantum strings demand the existence of extra dimensions of space, in addition to the usual three. Whereas a classical violin string will vibrate no matter what the properties of space and time are, a quantum string is more finicky. The equations describing the vibration become inconsistent unless space-time either is highly curved (in contradiction with observations) or contains six extra spatial dimensions. Fourth, physical constants--such as Newton's and Coulomb's constants, which appear in the equations of physics and determine the properties of nature--no longer, have arbitrary, fixed values. They occur in string theory as fields, rather like the electromagnetic field, that can adjust their values dynamically. These fields may have taken different values in different cosmological epochs or in remote regions of space, and even today the physical "constants" may vary by a small amount. Observing any variation would provide an enormous boost to string theory. One such field, called the dilation, is the master key to string theory; it determines the overall strength of all interactions. The dilation fascinates string theorists

1935 AD -Charles F. Richter and his associates devise a scale for measuring the strength of earthquakes. -Robert Watson-Watt demonstrates a ground-based radio-locating device that can spot and count aircraft more than 161 km (100 mi) away.

1937 AD American mathematician Howard Aiken begins work on an important forerunner to the digital computer. The machine, the Mark 1, is completed in 1944.

A R T I C L E S

1938 AD After bombarding uranium with neutrons, German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann find traces of bariumevidence that the uranium has undergone fission.

25 A R T I C L E S

Aurora 2005 because its value can be reinterpreted as the size of an extra dimension of space, giving a grand total of 11 space-time dimensions. Taming the Infinite: All the magic properties of quantum strings point in one direction: strings abhor infinity. They cannot collapse to an infinitesimal point, so they avoid the paradoxes that collapse entails. Their nonzero size and novel symmetries set upper bounds to physical quantities that increase without limit in conventional theories, and they set lower bounds to quantities that decrease. String theorists expect that when one plays the history of the universe backward in time, the curvature of spacetime starts to increase. But instead of going all the way to infinity (at the traditional big bang singularity), it eventually hits a maximum and shrinks once more. Before string theory, physicists were hard-pressed to imagine any mechanism that could so cleanly eliminate the singularity. Conditions near the zero time of the big bang were so extreme that no one yet knows how to solve the equations. Nevertheless, string theorists have hazarded guesses about the pre-bang universe. Two popular models are floating around. The first, known as the pre-big bang scenario, which my colleagues and I began to develop in 1991, combines T-duality with the better-known symmetry of time reversal, whereby the equations of physics work equally well when applied backward and forward in time. The combination gives rise to new possible cosmologies in which the universe, say, five seconds before the big bang expanded at the same pace as it did five seconds after the bang. But the rate of change of the expansion was opposite at the two instants: if it was decelerating after the bang, it was accelerating before. In short, the big bang may not have been the origin of the universe but simply a violent transition from acceleration to deceleration. The beauty of this picture is that it automatically incorporates the great insight of standard inflationary theory--namely, that the universe had to undergo a period of acceleration to become so homogeneous and isotropic. In the standard theory, acceleration occurs after the big bang because of an ad hoc inflation field. In the pre-big bang scenario, it occurs before the bang as a natural outcome of the novel symmetries of string theory. According to the scenario, the pre-bang universe was almost a perfect mirror image of the post-bang one. If the universe is eternal into the future, its contents thinning to a meager gruel, it is also eternal into the past. Infinitely long ago it was nearly empty, filled only with a tenuous, widely dispersed, chaotic gas of radiation and matter. The

1942 AD Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi and his colleagues at the University of Chicago in Illinois initiate a controlled chain-reaction, an experiment that constitutes the first nuclear reactor.

forces of nature, controlled by the dilaton field, were so feeble that particles in this gas barely interacted. As time went on, the forces gained in strength and pulled matter together. Randomly, some regions accumulated matter at the expense of their surroundings. Eventually the density in these regions became so high that black holes started to form. Matter inside those regions was then cut off from the outside, breaking up the universe into disconnected pieces. Inside a black hole, space and time swap roles. The center of the black hole is not a point in space but an instant in time. As the infalling matter approached the center, it reached higher and higher densities. But when the density, temperature and curvature reached the maximum values allowed by string theory, these quantities bounced and started decreasing. The moment of that reversal is what we call a big bang. The interior of one of those black holes became our universe. Not surprisingly, such an unconventional scenario has provoked controversy. Andrei Linde of Stanford University has argued that for this scenario to match observations, the black hole that gave rise to our universe would have to have formed with an unusually large size--much larger than the length scale of string theory. An answer to this objection is that the equations predict black holes of all possible sizes. Our universe just happened to form inside a sufficiently large one. A more serious objection raised by Thibault Damour of the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques in Bures-sur-Yvette, France, and Marc Henneaux of the Free University of Brussels, is that matter and spacetime would have behaved chaotically near the moment of the bang, in possible contradiction with the observed regularity of the early universe. I have recently proposed that a chaotic state would produce a dense gas of miniature "string holes"--strings that were so small and massive that they were on the verge of becoming black holes. The behavior of these holes could solve the problem identified by Damour and Henneaux. A similar proposal has been put forward by Thomas Banks of Rutgers University and Willy Fischler of the University of Texas at Austin. Other critiques also exist, and whether they have uncovered a fatal flaw in the scenario remains to be determined. So, when did time begin? Science does not have a conclusive answer yet, but at least two potentially testable theories plausibly hold that the universe--and therefore time--existed well before the big bang. If either scenario is right, the cosmos has always been in existence and, even if it recollapses one day, will never end.

October 14, 1947 Supersonic Flight Charles “Chuck” Yeager of the United States Air Force becomes the first person to break the sound b a r r i e r. H e p i l o t s a n experimental aircraft, the Bell X-1, to a speed of 1065 km/h (662 mph), faster than the speed of sound at his altitude.

1948 -Claude E. Shannon presents his initial concept for a unifying theory of information transmission and processing. -American physicists Walter H. Brattain, John Bardeen, and William B. Shockley develop the transistor.

GIKI Science Society

26

ACROSS

DOWN 1. Point on the celestial sphere which is directly above 1. A zone of the celestial sphere, 9 degrees on each side an observer. (6) of the ecliptic, and divided into 12 equal parts. (6) 4. American Botanist,(1872-1956), who discovered the 2. Particle with spin one half, but with zero rest mass and important antibiotic, aureomycin. (6) zero charge, of importance in beta decay. (8) 8. The sort of refraction shown by crystals of calcite. (6) 3. Prefix meaning "distant", as in -metry, -scope, etc. (4) 9. The time for one cycle of a repeating phenomenon. (6) 5. Carbamide. (4) 11. Unit based on the mass of one litre of hydrogen at 6. For an amplifier, this is the ratio of output power to S.T.P. (5) input power. (4) 12. An atomic grouping which cannot lead a separate 7. Type of symmetry in which a plane divides into 2 existence, and yet passes unchanged through chemical halves which are mirror images, as seen in many reactions. (7) animals. (6) 14. A complex nitrogenous organic compound of high 10. Dutch physicist, (l853-l928), who deduced the molecular weight consisting of amino acids joined into contraction in length and the increase in mass for a body folded chains by peptide links. (7) with a velocity close to that of light. (7) 15. Electrical connection to ground. (5) 13. Russian physicist, (b1904), who caused particles to 20. Element of atomic number 6, which (with the possible exceed the velocity of light in a transparent medium, and exception of silicon), is unique in its ability to form long thus give off a characteristic radiation. (8) 14. Unit of pressure equivalent to 1 newton per square chains. (6) 21. Inventor of the rotary petrol engine. (6) metre. (6) 22. Complex compound forming about 30% of wood, and 16. English biologist, (1825-1895), an ardent Darwinist, which must be removed from wood if pure cellulose is who did much to promote the theory of Natural Selection. required. (6) (6) 23. English biologist, (l578-l657), who studied blood 17. A chemical used in medicine.(4) 18. One property of an ellipse is that the sum of the circulation, and is regarded as the founder of modern physiology. (6) distances from any point on the ellipse to these is constant. (4) 19. The facts on which a computer program operates. (4)

November 01,1952 United States detonates the first hydrogen bomb in a test on Enewetak Atoll. Its force is about 500 times greater than the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. USSR detonates its first hydrogen bomb eight years later.

1956 AD American computer scientist John McCarthy coins the term "artificial intelligence" (AI). In 1959-1960 he develops LISP, a list-oriented computer programming language, which becomes the standard language for AI research.

1957 AD The USSR launches the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, to study Earth's upper atmosphere. The satellite weighs 83 kg (184 lb) and circles Earth in 95 minutes. The launch of Sputnik 1 marks the inauguration of the space age.

B R A I N C R A C K E R S

1960 AD American astronomer Allan R. Sandage finds the first star-like objects with strong radio emissions.

27 B R A I N C R A C K E R S

Aurora 2005

Have you ever wondered Why are manhole covers round rather than square? Does the sun always rise in the east? If you are on a boat and toss a suitcase overboard, will the water level rise or fall? How many times a day do a clock's hands overlap? How many points are there on the globe where, by walking one mile south, one mile east, and one mile north, you reach the place where you started? How would you weigh a jet plane without using scales? Why do mirrors reverse right and left instead of up and down?

Knowledge BIN

&

The day of Venus is longer than its year. The highest mountain in solar system is Olympus Mons on Mars which is 29 km high. The Amazon River is smaller than Nile River but contains more than 60 times its water. At the time of launch of Space rocket, 86% percent of its weight is fuel. The deadliest fish is piranha which has razor sharp teeth that can rip the skin off crocodiles. So high is its hunger than if one of its own is caught in a fishing line and it can't free itself, the rest of the school will even eat it. The strongest animal in the world, a beetle, can lift objects 750 times more massive than itself. The energy in one hurricane is equal to about 500,000 atomic bombs. The Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean is so deep that Mount Everest could be submerged in it with its summit still two kilometres below the surface. In the middle of the Atlantic the two plates, the African Plate and the American plate, are moving apart at about the same speed as your fingernails grow. A bolt of lightning contains enough energy to toast 160,000 pieces of bread. Unfortunately the bolt only takes 1/10,000 of a second – so turning the bread over might prove difficult.

Unquotable Quotes

¥

"They say that something as small as a butterfly beating its wings in China can cause a hurricane in America, so maybe we should go to China and kill all the butterflies, just to be safe." - Ken Advent "The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us." -Calvin and Hobbes "If it's green or wriggles, it's biology. If it stinks, it's chemistry. If it doesn't work, it's physics..." Handy guide to science "A scientist can discover a new star, but he cannot make one. He would have to ask an engineer to do that." Gordon L. Glegg [ The answers to puzzles are available at www.giki.edu.pk/campus/ss/aurora.html ]

1961 AD First Human in Space Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin becomes the first human to travel in space. Launched aboard Vostok 1, he orbits Earth once, spending an hour and 48 minutes aloft.

1969 AD -U.S. astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” A l d r i n , A p o l l o 11 c r e w members , become the first people to walk on the Moon. -U.S. Defense Department contractors set up ARPANET (predecessor of current Internet)

1971 AD American engineer Marcian Edward proposes the idea of putting all of the logic circuitry of a calculator's central processing unit on a single chip. This first microprocessor, which Intel produces in 1971 and names the Intel 4004,

GIKI Science Society

28

Enigma

B R A I N

Hints: 1. Every symbol represents an alphabet . 2. Five is an important number. 3. The letter ‘Z’ is not encoded. 4. The most repeated alphabet in any text is the letter ‘E’.

Solve the puzzle within a week and win a free dinner on behalf of Science Society. To claim your prize join #science on mIRC and write ‘Science Rules!!’

1986 AD The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) launches Mir, a space station designed to provide long-term accommodations for crew members while in orbit around Earth.

1990 AD Hubble Space Telescope The first optical telescope in space, the Hubble Space Telescope, is launched into Earth orbit by the U.S. space shuttle Discovery.

1993 AD Students at the NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, develop Mosaic, the first browser software.

C R A C K E R S

June 26, 2000 AD Researchers announce the completion of a rough draft of the human genome. The decoding of the genome is expected to lead to development of new drugs and treatments for genetically related diseases.

29

Aurora 2005

Science Society Activities GIKI Science Society is one of the most active societies in Ghulam Ishaq khan Institute. It has always played an important role in the extra curricular culture of this place. Here is a brief detail of Science Society activities. All Pakistan Science Fair Sixth All Pakistan Science Fair was organized on 4th6th Feb 2005. About 22 teams from across the country participated in two events Science Contest and Science Exhibition. Science contest was won by Roots College, Science Exhibition in Electronics category was won by GC Lahore and in Physics category it was won by Jinnah College Peshawar. Till now six successful All Pakistan Science Fairs have been organized. Science Marathon Science Marathon is the biggest internal event organized by GIKI Science Society. The purpose of this event is to show the lighter side of science. Every year a large number of teams participate. In this event teams are given the clues to reach a final place in the form of mathematical and physical problems. After solving these problems they reach at their final destination where they are given a practical problem. Team which completes all these stages first is declared the winner. The winners are given handsome cash prizes. Science Kasoty This event comprises of two rounds. In the first round that is the qualification round MCQ's based general knowledge test is given. Top 15 teams qualify for the final round. In the final round teams have to guess the personality of a scientist, Event/Invention/Phenomena on the basis of the hints provided. There is also an other round called dumb charade in which one team member has to act and the other two have to guess. Winner is decided on the aggregate score of all three rounds. The winner is awarded a trophy along with the certificates and cash prize.

GIKI Science Society Science Eureka The purpose of the Science Eureka is to challenge and enhance the experimental approach of the participants. This is a team based event where each team comprises of three students. Each team is given a problem for which they have to design an experiment in which simplest approach and minimum apparatus is used. Each team is given one hour to design and perform the experiment. The winner is decided on the basis of their approach towards the problem solving and the viva taken by the judges. The winners are awarded with certificates and handsome cash prize. Invention Contest Invention Contest is a regular event organized by GIKI Science Society. This event basically comprises of two categories Wacky Inventions and Serious Inventions. Participants have to give a demonstration (if possible) other wise a presentation of their invention at the event. In wacky invention the purpose is to utilize the scrap material and make some thing useful from it. Ideas for some wacky inventions are Sleeping glasses, Message boards, Theta pads, Bubblegum holder, water Gun etc. while in the category of serious/sober inventions scientific projects can be presented. Some ideas are robots, automated rooms, Invisible writing pad etc.

Astronomy Night Astronomy night is the most interesting event organized by GIKI science Society. Telescopes are brought to GIKI to provide a chance to the students who are interested in astronomy to see the planets and the stars. At this event very interesting lectures are also arranged on astronomy and space sciences which are delivered by renowned space scientists of the country. There is always a very active participation from the students at this event.

30

A GIKI Science Society Publication