Steampunk: the rise of an alternative Science?

Whirlygig Emoto, a steam electric hybrid motorcycle

 

 

Steampunk. Have you ever heard of it? It is a newest subculture that draws on the elaborate aesthetics and romantic worldview of 19th‑century England to envision how things might have looked had a few key technologies been developed further. It conjures a gaslit cityscape filled with steam-powered robots, mechanical computers, ray-gun-toting aeronauts, and monocled mad scientists. Remember the movie Frankenstein? Anyone?

Steampunk is a derivation of the term cyberpunk which was a fad in the 80s. I think the major reason behind the growth of this subculture is the nostalgia of the “golden era” and the frustration at the monotony of the mainstream technological development. This could be the same think that Alternative music and alternative media did to the entertainment industry in the 90s. However it is still not clear whether this will grow into a worldwide phenomenon or not. And most of these steampunks are not serious inventors or anything. They are just playing out the roles of the Victorian inventors.

Still, are there lessons to learn from those Victorian inventors? There most certainly is. Thats why the IEEE magazine, “Spectrum” did a special on this steampunk phenomenon. The ideas and throwbacks from this subculture can certainly help the advancement of mainstream science. And help scientists think ’sideways’ rather that gazing narrowly.

The steampunk phenomena is not new actually. A lot of Hollywood movies have drawn on this theme with quite a success. A few prominent ones being,

• • The Impossible Voyage (1904)
  • Conquest of the Pole (1912)
  • Metropolis (1927)
  • Frankenstein (1931)
  • Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
  • The Invisible Man (1933)
  • The Island of Dr. Moreau (1933 – as Island of Lost Souls, 1977, 1996)
  • Things to Come (1936)
  • 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954)
  • The Fabulous World of Jules Verne (1958)
  • From the Earth to the Moon (1958)
  • Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959)
  • The Time Machine (1960, 2002)
  • Mysterious Island (1961)
  • Master of the World (1961)
  • Five Weeks in a Balloon (1962)
  • Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1964)
  • First Men in the Moon (1964)
  • The City Under the Sea (War Gods of the Deep) (1965)
  • Captain Nemo and the Underwater City (1969)
  • Time After Time (1979)
  • The Adventures of Mark Twain (1985 claymation)
  • Return To Oz (1985)
  • Young Sherlock Holmes (1985)
  • Castle in the Sky (1986 anime)
  • Windaria aka. Once Upon a Time (1987 anime)
  • The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1989)
  • Back to the Future Part III (1990)
  • The Rocketeer (1991)
  • Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994)
  • The City of Lost Children (1995)
  • Wild Wild West (1999)
  • Sleepy Hollow (1999)
  • Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001)
  • Vidocq (2001)
  • Le Pacte des Loups (Brotherhood of the Wolf) (2001)
  • The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003)
  • A Detective Story (2003)
  • Casshern (2004)
  • Hellboy (2004)
  • Steamboy (2004 anime)
  • Van Helsing (2004)
  • Around the World in 80 Days (2004)
  • Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004)
  • H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (A proper period version of the tale – 2005)
  • Howl’s Moving Castle (2005 anime)
  • The Brothers Grimm (2005)
  • The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello (2005 short film)
  • The Fall (2006)
  • The Prestige (2006)
  • Stardust (2007)
  • Perfect Creature (2007)
  • The Golden Compass (2007)
  • City Of Ember (2008)
  • Mutant Chronicles (a steam punk universe – steam powered spaceships) (2008)
  • Hellboy 2: The Golden Army (Steampunk technology and settings) (2008)
• To this list I must add  Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends (2006) which was one of the latest computer games that I have played based on this genre.

You can see the IEEE spectrum’s take on Steampunk here,

http://spectrum.ieee.org/print/6810

LHC project simulator

A lot of my university colleagues ask me how exactly the Large Hadron collider works. So here is the official LHC simulator site, setup to give the general public an idea about the greatest physics experiment of all time.

LHC simulator from CERN

Give it a spin, I am sure you will find it interesting. In the meanwhile, I recommend checking out the slideshows they’ve put up on the site as well. 

Visit http://www.particledetectives.net/html/main.html

At least now I can rest assured without always being bugged by LHC questions (Hopefully!)

Intel poised to launch a new processor architecture: Nehalem

Nehalem is the codename for a future processor microarchitecture being developed by Intel., which will be marketed under the Core i7 brand-name. Nehalem will be released in late 2008 for high-end desktop and dual-processor platforms and in Q4 2009 to Q1 2010 for mainstream desktop and mobile platforms. The microarchitecture is the planned successor to the Core microarchitecture.

Nehalem uses the 45 nm manufacturing methods from Penryn and applies it to the new Nehalem microarchitecture. A working system with two Nehalem processors was shown at Intel Developer Forum Fall 2007, and a large number of Nehalem systems were shown at Computex in June 2008.

The processor is named after the Nehalem River in Northwest Oregon, which is in turn named after the Nehalem Native American tribe inOregon. The code name itself had been seen on the end of several roadmaps starting in 2000. At that stage it was supposed to be the latest evolution of the NetBurst architecture. Since the abandonment of NetBurst, the codename has been recycled and refers to a completely different project.

Intel Processor roadmap

Read more at,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nehalem_(microarchitecture)

“New” lightweight kernel from Microsoft

Microsoft is preparing a leaner new kernel for the next major Windows release, codenamed Windows 7. Dubbed MinWin, this new kernel is notable for a few reasons. First, it’s the first major bit of actual news about Windows 7 yet revealed. And second, it suggests that Microsoft is preparing to push Windows into even more markets, since the current version of this kernel can run in as little as 40 MB of memory.

It sounds really interesting. There’s just one problem: MinWin isn’t new. And if you’re running Windows Vista or a pre-release version of Windows Server 2008, you’re already using this technology. In fact, it’s the basis for Microsoft’s componentization work on both of those OSes.

• WinMin
  • 25MB Kernal
  • 40MB of memory, 7MB free.
  • HTTP Server? I hope that’s for demo’s only.

The “scheduled” release date is 2010, which is 2-3 years out. I point out the 2-3 year time frame, because I think it’s significant for a couple of reasons. First, how many things got cut from Vista in the 2-3 years leading up to it (WinFS anyone?). Second, how much of what we are hearing today, will make it to the final product? Third, will I still be blogging in 2010, such that I can look back on this post and comment on it when Windows 7 gets released.

First beam in the LHC – accelerating science

Geneva, 10 September 2008. The first beam in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN was successfully steered around the full 27 kilometres of the world’s most powerful particle accelerator at 10h28 this morning. This historic event marks a key moment in the transition from over two decades of preparation to a new era of scientific discovery.

So what has been done so far? on the 10th, scientists were successfully able to send a stream of Protons the size of a human hair through the circular tunnel. They have achieved a speed of acceleration close to speed of light. Next step is to send another Proton stream in other direction.  After making sure that no obstructions lie in the path of Protons, the Protons will be made to collide, creating the same conditions as just after the occurrence of the big bang.

However it is uncertain as to how long it will take to deliver results that we need, especially the hope of observing the Higgs boson, the particle that is believed to give matter its mass.

So what exactly are the expected outcomes of this project?

How did our universe come to be the way it is?

The Universe started with a Big Bang – but we don’t fully understand how or why it developed the way it did. The LHC will let us see how matter behaved a tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang. Researchers have some ideas of what to expect – but also expect the unexpected!

What kind of Universe do we live in?

Many physicists think the Universe has more dimensions than the four (space and time) we are aware of. Will the LHC bring us evidence of new dimensions?

Gravity does not fit comfortably into the current descriptions of forces used by physicists. It is also very much weaker than the other forces. One explanation for this may be that our Universe is part of a larger multi dimensional reality and that gravity can leak into other dimensions, making it appear weaker. The LHC may allow us to see evidence of these extra dimensions – for example, the production of mini-black holes which blink into and out of existence in a tiny fraction of a second.

What happened in the Big Bang?

What was the Universe made of before the matter we see around us formed? The LHC will recreate, on a microscale, conditions that existed during the first billionth of a second of the Big Bang.

At the earliest moments of the Big Bang, the Universe consisted of a searingly hot soup of fundamental particles – quarks, leptons and the force carriers. As the Universe cooled to 1000 billion degrees, the quarks and gluons (carriers of the strong force) combined into composite particles like protons and neutrons. The LHC will collide lead nuclei so that they release their constituent quarks in a fleeting ‘Little Bang’.  This will take us back to the time before these particles formed, re-creating the conditions early in the evolution of the universe, when quarks and gluons were free to mix without combining. The debris detected will provide important information about this very early state of matter.

Where is the antimatter? 
The Big Bang created equal amounts of matter and antimatter, but we only see matter now. What happened to the antimatter?

Every fundamental matter particle has an antimatter partner with equal but opposite properties such as electric charge (for example, the negative electron has a positive antimatter partner called the positron). Equal amounts of matter and antimatter were created in the Big Bang, but antimatter then disappeared. So what happened to it? Experiments have already shown that some matter particles decay at different rates from their anti-particles, which could explain this. One of the LHC experiments will study these subtle differences between matter and antimatter particles.

Why do particles have mass?

Why do some particles have mass while others don’t?  What makes this difference? If the LHC reveal particles predicted by theory it will help us understand this.  

Particles of light (known as photons) have no mass. Matter particles (such as electrons and quarks) do – and we’re not sure why. British physicist, Peter Higgs, proposed the existence of a field (the Higg’s Field), which pervades the entire Universe and interacts with some particles and this gives them mass. If the theory is right then the field should reveal itself as a particle (the Higg’s particle). The Higg’s particle is too heavy to be made in existing accelerators, but the high energies of the LHC should enable us to produce and detect it.

What is our Universe made of?

Ninety-six percent of our Universe is missing! Much of the missing matter is stuff researchers have called ‘dark matter’. Can the LHC find out what it is made of?

The theory of ‘supersymmetry’ suggests that all known particles have, as yet undetected, ‘superpartners’. If they exist, the LHC should find them. These ‘supersymmetric’ particles may help explain one mystery of the Universe – missing matter. Astronomers detect the gravitational effects of large amounts of matter that can’t be seen and so is called ‘Dark Matter’. One possible explanation of dark matter is that it consists of supersymmetric particles.