My Science School

The Wright brothers need no introduction. Best known for achieving the first powered heavier-than-air craft flight, the Wright brothers obtained the patent for a "Flying Machine" on May 22, 1906.

The names of Wilbur Wright and Orville Wright will forever be intertwined with the history of flying machines. For, the Wright brothers were the first to achieve the flight of a powered heavier-than-air craft.

 The elder of the two, Wilbur, was born in 1867 and was the third child in the Wright family. Orville was the sixth of seven children that his parents had. The seeds for an idea about flying were sown when Wilbur and Orville were still two young boys.

A toy that inspires

Their mother gave them a toy helicopter to play with. This little piece of wood that had two rubber bands to turn a propeller laid the foundation for a lifetime's work.

Drawn towards flying, the Wright brothers spent plenty of time observing birds in flight. This allowed them to notice that lift was created when birds soared into the wind and the air flowed over the curved surface of their wings. They use this knowledge to build kites, which they even sold to their friends.

Cycling to aviation

As avid cyclists, Wilbur and Orville owned a bicycle shop as adults. Despite the fact that they had less than 10 years of combined high school education, the experience of building bicycles provided them the understanding of early engine design - be it using chains, sprockets, or ball bearings.

Years of riding a bicycle gave them ideas as to how they could control and balance an aircraft. Add to this the countless hours that they had spent observing flight in nature and they had the necessary knowledge and interest to get started.

By 1899, the Wright brothers ventured into flying. Between 1900 and 1902, they researched every aspect of flight, from roll, pitch, and yaw to the rudder, elevator, and performance of the wing. In order to test the aerodynamic qualities of wing models, they even developed the first wind tunnel. The brothers also worked on their own piloting skills by making over a thousand flights on a series of gliders at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

Master a control system

Their years of trial and error allowed them to master their glider in all three axes of flight: pitch, roll, and yaw. While the pitch was operated by a forward elevator, their breakthrough discovery included the simultaneous use of roll control with wing-warping and yaw control with a rear rudder.

Even though they had just started conducting experiments with propellers and begun to build their own engines, they applied for a patent in March 1903 for their control system. They were granted U.S. Patent 821,393 for a "Flying Machine" on May 22, 1906. This patent is significant as it laid down a useful and modern means of controlling a flying machine, regardless of whether it was powered or not.

Not ones to be kept waiting, the Wright brothers had already made the first free, controlled, and sustained flights in a powered, heavier-than-air craft on a chilly day at Kitty Hawk, on December 17, 1903. With just a handful of others witnessing history, Orville stayed 12 seconds in the air and flew 120 feet in the first trial at 10.35 a.m. In the fourth and final trial of the day, Wilbur achieved the longest flight of 59 seconds in the air and reached a height of 852 feet. In a little over 100 years since then, human beings have flown farther and faster than ever before, and continue to progressively get better at it.

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Sheldon Glashow, Abdus Salam, and Steven Weinberg were awarded the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics for their contributions to the unification of the weak and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 1979 Nobel Prize in physics to be shared equally between Professor Sheldon L. Glashow, Harvard University, USA, Professor Abdus Salam, International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Italy and Imperial College, Great Britain, and Professor Steven Weinberg, Harvard University, USA, for their contributions to the theory of the unified weak and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles, including inter alla the prediction of the weak neutral current.

Physics, like other sciences, aspires to find common causes for apparently unrelated natural or experimental observations. A classical example is the force of gravitation introduced by Newton to explain such disparate phenomena as the apple falling to the ground and the moon moving around the earth.

Another example occurred in the 19th century when it was realized, mainly through the work of Oersted in Denmark and Faraday in England, that electricity and magnetism are closely related, and are really different aspects of the electromagnetic force or interaction between charges. The final synthesis was presented in the

1860’s by Maxwell in England. His work predicted the existence of electromagnetic waves and interpreted light as an electromagnetic wave phenomenon.

The discovery of the radioactivity of certain heavy elements towards the end of last century, and the ensuing development of the physics of the atomic nucleus, led to the introduction of two new forces or interactions: the strong and the weak nuclear forces. Unlike gravitation and electromagnetism these forces act only at very short distances, of the order of nuclear diameters or less. While the strong interaction keeps protons and neutrons together in the nucleus, the weak interaction causes the so-called radioactive beta-decay. The typical process is the decay of the neutron: the neutron, with charge zero, is transformed into a positively charged proton, with the emission of a negatively charged electron and a neutral, massless particle, the neutrino.

Although the weak interaction is much weaker than both the strong and the electromagnetic interactions, it is of great importance in many connections. The actual strength of the weak interaction is also of significance. The energy of the sun, all-important for life on earth, is produced when hydrogen fuses or burns into helium in a chain of nuclear reactions occurring in the interior of the sun. The first reaction in this chain, the transformation of hydrogen into heavy hydrogen (deuterium), is caused by the weak force. Without this force solar energy production would not be possible. Again, had the weak force been much stronger, the life span of the sun would have been too short for life to have had time to evolve on any planet. The weak interaction finds practical application in the radioactive elements used in medicine and technology, which are in general beta-radioactive, and in the beta-decay of a carbon isotope into nitrogen, which is the basis for the carbon-14 method for dating of organic archaeological remains.

Credit : The Nobel prize

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The first woman to travel in space was Soviet cosmonaut, Valentina Tereshkova. On 16 June 1963, Tereshkova was launched on a solo mission aboard the spacecraft Vostok 6. She spent more than 70 hours orbiting the Earth, two years after Yuri Gagarin’s first human-crewed flight in space.

Tereshkova was born on 6 March 1937 in the village of Bolshoye Maslennikovo in central Russia. Her mother was a textile worker, and her father was a tractor driver who was later recognised as a war hero during World War Two. At the time of his death on the Finnish front, Tereshkova was only two years old. 

After leaving school, Tereshkova followed her mother into work at a textile factory. Her first appreciation of flying was going down rather than up when she joined a local skydiving and parachutist club. It was her hobby of jumping out of planes that appealed to the Soviets' space programme committee. On applying to the cosmonaut corps, Tereshkova was eventually chosen from more than 400 other candidates. 

Tereshkova received 18 months of severe training with the Soviet Air Force after her selection. These tests studied her abilities to cope physically under the extremes of gravity, as well as handle challenges such as emergency management and the isolation of being in space alone. At 24 years old, she was honourably inducted into the Soviet Air Force. Tereshkova still holds the title as the youngest woman, and the first civilian to fly in space. 

While Tereshkova remains the only woman to have flown solo in space, her mission was a dual flight. Fellow cosmonaut Valeriy Bykovsky launched on Vostok 5 on 14 June 1963. Two days later, Tereshkova launched. The two spacecraft took different flight paths and came within three miles of each other. The cosmonauts exchanged communications while making 48 orbits of Earth, with Tereshkova responding to Bykovsky via her callsign ‘Seagull’. During the flight, the Soviet state television network broadcast a video of Tereshkova inside the capsule, and she spoke with the Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev over the radio. 

In her later life, Tereshkova was decorated with prestigious medals and has held several prominent political positions both for the Russian and global councils. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, she was an official head of State and was elected a member of the World Peace Council in 1966. 

Today, she holds the position of Deputy Chair for the Committee for International Affairs in Russia. She also remains active within the space community and is quoted as suggesting that she would like to fly to Mars - even if it were a one-way trip. 

Credit : Royal  museums greenwich

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Charles Darwin was an English scientist who proposed that evolution happened through ‘natural selection’. According to Darwin, the organisms that lived on are those which had the best traits to survive their environment, and passed on those traits to following generations.

Charles Robert Darwin, (12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was an English naturalist, geologist and biologist, best known for his contributions to the science of evolution.

The Theory of Evolution by natural selection was first formulated in Charles Darwin's book "On the Origin of Species" published in 1859. In his book, Darwin describes how organisms evolve over generations through the inheritance of physical or behavioral traits, as National Geographic explains. The theory starts with the premise that within a population, there is variation in traits, such as beak shape in one of the Galapagos finches Darwin studied.

According to the theory, individuals with traits that enable them to adapt to their environments will help them survive and have more offspring, which will inherit those traits. Individuals with less adaptive traits will less frequently survive to pass them on. Over time, the traits that enable species to survive and reproduce will become more frequent in the population and the population will change, or evolve, according to BioMed Central. Through natural selection, Darwin suggested, genetically diverse species could arise from a common ancestor.

Credit: Live Science

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Peter Higgs is a British physicist who proposed the existence of the Higgs boson, a subatomic particle, which was confirmed through the discovery at CERN, a European Organization for Nuclear Research, in 2012. He and Belgian physicist François Englert were awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles." The Higgs boson is the fundamental particle associated with the Higgs field, a field that gives mass to other fundamental particles such as electrons and quarks.Higgs was born in England in 1929. He was taught at home as a child. Later, he attended Cotham Grammar School in Bristol and was inspired by the work of the school alumnus Paul Dirac founder of the field of quantum mechanics. Peter Higgs graduated in Physics from King's College London in 1950 and achieved a master's degree in 1952. He was awarded a Research Fellowship from the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1951 and performed his doctoral research in molecular physics under the supervision of Charles Coulson and Christopher Longuet-Higgins. He received his PhD degree in 1954 and became a lecturer in mathematical  physics at Edinburgh in 1960 and remained there till his retirement in 1996.

In 1956, Higgs began working in quantum field theory. In 1964, he proposed the theoretical existence of the Higgs Boson. Higgs developed the idea that particles - massless when the universe began - acquired mass a fraction of a second later as a result interacting with a theoretical field (which became known as the Higgs field). Higgs postulated that this field permeates space, giving mass to all elementary subatomic particles that interact with it. Independently of one another, both Peter Higgs and the team of François Englert and Robert Brout proposed this mechanism. In 1964, Physical Review Letters, published Higg's paper which predicted a new massive spin-zero boson (now known as the Higgs boson). In 2012, two experiments conducted at the CERN laboratory in Geneva confirmed the existence of the Higgs particle. Definitive confirmation that the particle was the Higgs boson was announced in March 2013.

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