Physics - Fizik

Some scientific developments, and the inventions resulting from them, are so important that they change people's lives all over the world. In 1903, two brothers from Dayton, Ohio, USA, managed to solve a problem that others had failed to conquer for hundreds of years. They were Wilbur and Orville Wright and the problem was how to build a flying machine. The Wrights made many scientific studies of the shapes of wings, the way propellers work, and how to control an aircraft in flight. They carried out the first true powered airplane flight on 17 December, 1903 at the coastal sand dune area of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, USA. Their invention of the plane transformed our world.

A COMPUTER IS AN ELECTRONIC MACHINE that manipulates, changes and processes information, or data, of all kinds - not only numbers but also words, patterns, pictures, animations, sounds and so on. The data is processed called a program, which tells the computer what to do. Inside a computer, the program according to a sequence of instructions and data are in digital form, as patterns of tiny electrical signals that pass around the many circuits and microchips. Computers can deal with vast amounts of information in a very short time. For example, a supercomputer can work out all the consequences of more than 200 million chess moves every second.

Supercomputers A supercomputer must work so fast that its main processing and memory circuits are supercooled to many degrees below freezing. Supercooling reduces the resistance of the conductors in the electronic circuits.


In the 1830s English mathematician Charles Babbage (1792-1871) designed several kinds of programmable mechanical calculators. His machines used gearwheels to do the calculating and had more than 2,000 moving parts. Due to engineering and money problems, Babbage's machines were never finished at the time. But modern computers still use his basic ideas.

Amedio Avogadro (1776-1856) worked as a lawyer before taking up science and becoming professor of physics. In about 1811, he imagined a row of the same-sized containers. Each held a different gas, but at the same numbers of molecules in each container. This is now known as Avogadro’s law-equal volumes of all gase, when at the same temperatures and pressure, have the same numbers of atoms or molecules.