Electric Universe: The Shocking True Story of Electricity by David Bodanis

Author:David Bodanis [Bodanis, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General, Nonfiction, Science, Physics, Electricity
ISBN: 9781400050604
Publisher: Broadway
Published: 2005-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

The attack was shattering, yet all that horror and struggle—the Chain Homes defenses, as well as the Hamburg-destroying war machines—only skims the surface of what electrical effects can produce. For there’s yet another level that goes beyond the image of powerful waiting electric charges, beyond even the invisible, space-crossing waves that can force those charges to move. The vision that Maxwell had of atoms was incomplete.

In the 1910s and 1920s—even before Watson Watt found himself in Slough—a small number of theorists had begun exploring this new, submicroscopic world. If they were right, then the world beneath our own is composed of electrons that travel in abrupt teleporting jumps—known as “quantum” jumps—and also in sudden stops and starts.

This would change everything, for electrons are central to electricity, and whenever we discover something new about them, the groundwork is laid for a fresh technology. In late Victorian times, the vision of electrons as hard little balls led to the technology of telephones, lightbulbs, and electric motors. Faraday’s and Hertz’s understanding of waves had led to radio and radar, which were so central to World War II. Now the realization that electrons could dematerialize—that they could in effect pop through space and be made to start and stop in fresh places—would open the way for yet another device, a thinking machine, which would shape our era as much as electric lighting and telephones had shaped the nineteenth century.

In the 1920s the English word computer (and its cognate in other languages), still meant a person, usually female, who spent laborious hours at a desk, using a mechanical calculator, or even old-fashioned pencil and paper, to compute whatever dull arithmetical task was assigned. It seemed impossible to go further, for if any genuine thinking machine were to match the quick flicks of human thought, it would need to shift its internal circuitry far faster than anyone could then imagine. No solid, mechanical object could do that.

But perhaps the wildly teleporting flights of tiny electrons could.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.