Fusion Energy

The fundamental currency of our universe is energy. It lights our homes, grows our food, powers our computers. We can get it lots of ways: Burning fossil fuels, splitting atoms, or sunlight striking photovoltaics. But there's a downside to everything.

Fossil fuels are extremely toxic, Nuclear waste is... well, nuclear waste, Solar and wind aren’t always reliable. Hydrothermal and hydroelectric aren’t widely accessible. And we'll eventually deplete our oil reserves. So Around the world people are working on fusion energy, which might be the safe, efficient, reliable, clean energy source that could save our planet.

This may come as a surprise to some, but fusion is not some futuristic, sci-fi idea, it’s real. It’s happening. You’ve seen it. Fusion energy exists every time we go out in the day and look at the sun, we see a big ball of burning hydrogen gas...If you go out at night and look at the stars, those are also billions and billions, to quote Carl Sagan “of burning plasma engines, fusion engines”.

Fusion is the process of two light atoms, like hydrogen, being forced together due to immense heat and pressure to form a heavier atom, like helium. When this merger happens, energy is released, which creates heat and light. Fusion is the energy that makes life possible on our planet (you know how). And many think fusion will power our cities of the future.

Unlike fossil fuels, Nuclear fusion doesn’t release toxins and polluting greenhouse gasses like carbon dioxide. The byproduct of fusion is helium, an inert, non toxic gas. The fuel is made of two hydrogen atoms that can be pulled from our abundant supply of seawater. And yes, fusion does produce radioactive byproducts, but the half-life of that waste is much shorter than in a fission reactor.

We currently have the technology to heat up hydrogen atoms to well beyond the temperature of the sun, to a point where fusion can occur. We have the technology to keep that superheated plasma (gas that has been energized to the point that electrons break free from the nucleus an travel with them) in place long enough for fusion to occur. We know we can turn heat into electricity and currently have the infrastructure to put that electricity onto the grid. So what are we waiting for?

Well, it all comes down to Q. In the world of fusion, Q represents “energy gain.” It is the ratio of the nuclear power generated to the power required to maintain the plasma in the steady state. And right now scientists are finding ways to build a fusion reactor which could produce ten times the energy that’s putting in. That’s the goal for ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor), the largest scale fusion experiment on the planet that’s been in the works for decades.

ITER, which means ‘the way’ in Latin and is a major international fusion collaboration that’s been in progress since 1985. China, the EU, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia, and the U.S. are all contributing members who have agreed to fund ITER’s goal of producing fusion energy that could power our world. It uses a magnetic field ( produced by superconducting electromagnets cooled with liquid helium) to squeeze a plasma in a doughnut shaped chamber where the reactions take place. The small scale model of ITER looks like this

But, ITER is an experiment only to demonstrate that fusion can produce a net energy gain. As big and expensive as it is, will not power anyone's home. If it’s successful, than a power station called DEMO will be built, aiming to put fusion electricity onto the grid somewhere between 2030 and 2050. Or, maybe even a little after that. Which is one of the complaints about the world of fusion so far; it takes time.

Government projects aren’t the only way to achieve fusion. Private companies are also getting in on the world of fusion and they’re not waiting around for ITER to prove successful. For example MIT, recently teamed up with a private company on a plan that they think could lead to an operational fusion power plant within the next 15 years.

There are fusion experiments currently being carried out all over the world and the computer models have already proved that the science works. People want it, governments wants it, private industry wants it and well...the environment wants it. It just needs to be tested, built, made scalable, approved and installed.

Star Wars

Triumph of good over evil has been eulogized invariably by everyone. We have always loved the fight between hero and villian in which the hero wins eventually. Whether it is the Ram's win over the Ravana, Shaktiman over Kilvish or the Jedi knights over the Galactic empire, the moral of the story remains the same, that is "the good always wins".


 What if I tell you about an uprising in a galaxy far far away from ours, fascinating isn't it ? Well, this is what the star wars is all about. Star wars is an epic saga of war between the good and the evil in the space. 

It acts as an exemplary  science fiction movie. The engrossing part of the story is the impeccable display of action in the space.The central idea of the series is "FORCE" that is an energy field created by all the loving things around them. While the Jedi knights use light side of the force, the Galactic empire uses its dark side.

The first movie in the franchise is "Star wars: a new hope", released back in 1977. Lucasfilm created by George Lucas has produced nine fims in the star wars franchise till now with each being more successful than the preceding one.


Remarkable dialogue from the movie"May the force be with you"  always succeeds in winning the heart of the viewer.

Self Driving Cars

Imagine a world where you wake up, grab your cup of coffee, and hop in your car to drive to work, except you are not doing the driving. You have more time to sleep, read a book, or even get a physical. This is a world we all want to live in. And although we are not quite there yet, people all over the world are working on developing, testing, and planning for a future with autonomous vehicles. Because who doesn’t want that extra hour of sleep. So, Today in this tech blog we will find out the three most important challenges in building a Self Driving Car.

First is building a safe system without human intervention. But we can’t guarantee that accidents won’t occur as Murphy’s Law is always in play. Murphy’s law is an adage (important truth derived from experience) that states that “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” In order to replace human drivers, the self driving cars needs to be safer than a human driver. That includes human being stupid and crashing while drunk or looking at their phone. The Global safety report on road safety stated that in 2013 more than 231,000 people were killed in road accidents in India every year.

We can probably hold our vehicle to a higher standard. But that can be our benchmark for now. It needs to fail less than once every 231,000 times. Most of the vehicles nowadays are using lidar sensor which do not need light to see. The disadvantage of using lidar pulses is that it can be effected by heavy rains or low hanging clouds because of the effects of refraction.

Tesla unveiled its new purpose built computer, a chip specially designed for running a neural network, which Elon stated was one of its kind. It looks something like this

The fusion of sensors in Tesla’s Model 3 looks something like this

It doesn’t rely only upon visual camera’s but also makes use of 12 ultrasonic sensors which provide a 360 degree picture of the immediate area around the vehicle, and 1 forward facing radar.

Other manufactures have millions of kms driven to gain data but Tesla has over a billion. For training a neural network data is key. I will not go into the details of the neural network but the key take away for you is that the more data you have to train a neural network, the better it’s going to be.

Second challenge is building an affordable system that the average person will be willing to buy. The biggest disadvantage of the lidar sensors is that they are bulky and expensive. Tesla is focused on building not just a cost effective vehicle but a good looking vehicle.

Tesla’s mission to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable transport has pushed tesla towards a cheaper sensor fusion setup. That is a cost effective solution and according to Tesla their hardware is already capable of allowing the vehicle to self drive. Now they just need to continue improving on the software and Tesla is in a fantastic position to make it work.

The third and the most important challenge is programming the vehicle on how to handle every scenario. This is a vital part of building not only a self vehicle, but a practical self driving vehicle. Programming for safety and practicality often conflict with each other.

If we program a vehicle for only safety, it’s safest option is not to drive. Driving is an inherently dangerous operation, and programming for the multiple scenario that can arise while driving is an insanely difficult task. Sometimes the computer will need to make difficult decisions, and may at times need to make a decision that endangers the life of it’s occupants or people outside of the vehicle.

It’s easy to say “follow the rules of the road and you will do fine” but the problem is if everybody obeys it why we need to have traffic police at each intersection. But if we continue to improve technology we could start to see road death plumment, while making taxi services drastically cheaper and freeing many people from the financial burden of purchasing a vehicle.         

  

Murphy's Law

“It was GRAVITY.”

Space expedition is something that aspires so many of us, the unseen frontiers that is out there to be found!
There are plenty of theories and discovery that has let us closer to the faraway galaxies and stars, and there are a number of people who are working hard day and night making it possible.

LIGO, the Hubble telescope, the imaging of Black Hole, the ISS, SpaceX's falcon, the satellite launches that take place every now and then from the corners of the world; everything brings us closer to the unknown and uncharted. When we talk about gravity, the two ‘N’ that would come- Newton and Nolan! That is definitely Science and Fiction, fair enough.

The theories of Wormholes, singularity, 5D, time dilation, black holes, and moreover the story of the future, it was all there in the movie- INTERSTELLAR.

The portrayal of Murphy's Law, anything that can go wrong, will go wrong, by having one of the characters named as Murph...Ahh!
Cooper and Brand, having their differences too, they ended up being there for each other, finding another solar system for human survival, carrying out their “plan B”.
When the complete earth was suffocating and was to die, one person changed it, solved the mystery of the constant time, the delusional concept that the professor created to give a Hope. The Sliding back to Gargantua, how Cooper helped Murph being her ghost, the singularity, the black hole, the TIME.

Since it was fiction it had the elements of a typical movie, such as betrayal, love, sacrifice but the filming was done so right, for a moment, you won't believe that it's not true.
The part where, the team had a discussion on visiting Millers, Mann or Edmunds’ planet, Brand said," Love is the one thing that we're capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space.”  Later we found out that she was indeed right!

The robots TARS and CASE wonderfully included in the plot- how they helped Cooper all the time, giving an epic dialogue, “Absolute honesty isn't always the most diplomatic nor the safest form of communication with emotional beings.”
Cooper: Okay, 90 percent it is.

Coming to the very familiar lines from Dylan's poem- Do not go gentle into that good night, how precisely were they used.

The love between a father and daughter, the promise, the analogue watch, the Morse Code, and that ending dialogue at the Cooper's Station- “And everyone, once a child, wants to look into their own dad’s eyes and know he saw. But, usually, by then, the father is gone. Nobody believed me, but I knew you’d come back.”
“ Because my dad promised me.”

Here, have a look at this trailer:
https://youtu.be/zSWdZVtXT7E

Starship

Let’s play a popular game in which I say a word and you have to tell me the first thing that comes to your mind after listening to that word. Now if I say Entrepreneur, which name comes to your mind first? If you are a tech enthusiast, you will probably say Elon Musk. And it makes sense because Elon Musk is not only the Most Innovative Leader of 2019 (acc. to Forbes) but also he is one of the most handsome Entreprenuers in the world. 

Elon founded SpaceX in 2002 with the intention of creating a colony on Mars. The 17 year old company already has a lot of firsts in its pocket like the first private company to successfully launch, orbit and recover a spacecraft, first private company to send a spacecraft to the ISS (International Space Station) etc. And now the company has taken a giant step to achieve the goal of the company by unveiling the first iteration of interplanetary vehicle Starship.

Built to carry 100 passengers, Starship will serve as the spacecraft to shuttle both people and cargo to earth’s orbit and beyond. The thing that is most interesting about it is that it is made from Stainless steel rather than carbon fiber or aluminium alloy. Stainless steel has largely fallen out of use for propellent tanks since the 60’s because of its less strength to weight ratio. Strength to weight ratio is one of the most important things that is considered before choosing any material in making a spacecraft.

The reason for choosing Stainless steel was its maximum operating temperature. Here it outperforms carbon fibre and aluminum alloys by a significant margin. Starship will enter into the martian atmosphere at speeds of upto 21000 km/hr and will experience temperatures upto 1700 degrees. For this much temperature, they needed a material that has a good strength and high max. operating temperature. Also it will require significantly less heat shielding than an aluminium alloy or carbon fibre composites.

It is powered by 6 raptor engines, 3 for its time in the atmosphere and 3 for propulsion in space. Each engine is fueled with cryogenic methane (cryogenic means able to be kept at extremely low temperatures in order to maintain them in a liquid state) and liquid oxygen (which acts as an oxidizer). But the real power comes from the Super Heavy rocket which is 68 m high and generates 72 mega newtons of thrust at liftoff. Super Heavy can carry 100 metric tons because of its 37 raptor engines.

Once it reaches the earth’s orbit, booster and spacecraft will detach. Starship will continue towards its destination, while Super Heavy will return to earth landing vertically like the previous Falcons. As for Starship, when it returns from its galactic voyages, this behemoth of a spacecraft will re-orient itself and re-enter the upper atmosphere at around 60-degree angle. Then, as it nears just a few hundred meters from the ground, the ship will turn its engines on to adjust itself for a swift vertical landing.

Starship will continue to run resupply missions to the ISS, with the added bonus of being able to shuttle both crew members and cargo at a relatively lower cost than Falcon vehicles (forgot to mention that Stainless steel is also cheaper than carbon fibre composites or aluminium alloy). SpaceX will also continue to launch satellites, thanks to Starship's massive 9m diameter forward payload section.

Once developed, Starship and Super Heavy will be the world’s most powerful launch vehicle. Musk envisions Starship’s uncrewed orbital test flight could happen by the spring of 2020.

Untill then, it seems that Musk may be one step closer to his vision of getting humans to the red planet.

Inception

We all love dreaming, don't we? What if we can dream in a dream, or dream in someone else's dream, then dream again...ahaaa... INCEPTION, it is.

The strongest power that one possesses is to think and if you can infiltrate someone's thinking, you have won a war. Quoting Cobb,”The most resilient parasite is an idea”

The beauty of this is the veracity of the words chosen in it, parasite, the creature that eats up another host for its survival. And once you create an idea, it only grows bigger!

The idea is something which originates from our little brain, and how it formulates, how it grows, how much time it takes, how it enlarges to something big.

What if you can implant an idea, sounds something very fascinating, it is indeed. But what could be the effects of leaving a piece of idea in someone's head, the one which was never theirs...will that change the reality or the dream itself will become a Reality! Catch-up with the movie Inception.

https://youtu.be/YoHD9XEInc0

“You mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling.”
 This epic one from Eames to Arthur in the shot-gun scene. You are smiling right, the smirk on Hardy's face after aiming the target from his impressive and big gun, all the Nolan fan out there, we can never forget this, right?

The classic dialogue from Hardy, and how can we forget DiCaprio, the characters from the movie were all just awesome in their own ways.

“If you're going to perform inception, you need imagination.
You need the simplest version of the idea-the one that will grow naturally in the subject's mind. Subtle art.”

Dark Matter and Energy

As a kid, if you never wanted to become an Astronaut, were you really a kid?Wehave always been told that the Universe is made up of planets, moons, stars, asteroids, comets, meteoroids, black holes and galaxies. As the technologies improved, we saw everything from the first photos of our Earth to the first image of the black hole which was released on 10^th April, 2019. If you haven’t seen it yet, it looks something like this.

But what if I tell you that the Universe is not made of just these things. According to ESA (European Space Agency) all these things only make 4% of all the Universe which we can observe. So what is the rest of the universe is made of which we can’t see? The answer is Dark Universe which is invisible yet dominating part of the Universe. It includes a substance called Dark Matter and a force called Dark Energy, both of them make 20% and 76% of the Universe respectively (acc. to ESA). While little is known about either, each helps us understand the Universe beyond what the eye can see

Astrophysicists suggests that Dark Matter is responsible for preventing stars within galaxies to drift away. They say that all the matter we see doesn’t create enough gravitational pull to explain Universe’s large structure. The name Dark emphasizes the fact that it doesn’t interact with any type of light. Its existence can only be observed by its gravitational pull on the visible Universe.

The concept of Dark Energy dates back to Albert Einstein’s General theory of relativity in which he considered a repulsive force that pushed space and particles apart. Researchers say that Dark Energy counteracts the force of gravity and it is the reason for the expansion of the Universe.

The next big step in unfolding mysteries of the dark universe is ESA’s Euclid Space Telescope which is going to be launched in 2022 and it will be in the sky for 6 years.

Euclid will analyze the shape and redshift (shifting away) of thousands of millions of galaxies spanning back 10 billion years. This will provide a large scale 3-D map which will allow the scientists to see how dark energy contributes to the expansion of the universe.

It consists of a silicon carbide mirrorthat spans 1.2 meters in diameter,Near-Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer (NISP) andVisual Imager or Visible Instrument (VIS).

VIS will be used to measure the deformation of the galaxies by exploiting the method of Gravitational Lensing. Gravitational lensing happens when the gravitational filed of an object bends the light that passes by it. As Galaxies have lot of stars, it emits light which is deviated mostly due to dark matter, giving us distorted images.

NISP, which is going to measure redshifts (shifting away) of over a billion galaxies, will be working to determine the Baryonic Acoustic Oscillations. Described by ESA as ‘wiggle patterns’ within galaxy clusters, Baryonic Acoustic Oscillations provide a standard ruler method for measuring dark energy with the expansion rate of the universe.

As there is plenty of time left before Euclid starts sending information to us, we will be eagerly waiting for the conformation about the parts of the Dark Universe we already know and all the parts we are yet to uncover.

INCREDIBLE EYES

Ever thought of meta-physical world and science going head to head?

If you come across a something, say a worm which can’t see. For it, light doesn’t exist as light can’t be sensed by it (the sense of vision is absent). What if we mutate the worm and it starts sensing the light (basic vision)? It would start to feel the light, which once it never had.
Similarly, many of us would agree (or disagree) that we don’t have a sense of the spiritual world as our senses’ numbers are limited to 5! We lack the sense which can understand the world which is beyond life.

Not to convince everyone out here, suppose you give your Smartphone (in the locked mode) to someone and he unlocks the phone (through Iris Scanner). Well, you will label it as a bug but deep down you would be like ‘how the hell??’
Well, maybe that someone has the same retinal/iris composition as yours! He/she may react to a series of pictures in the same way you would have reacted, fascinating, isn’t?

Well, this is the line where you will find science wrestling with the meta-physical world.

Now, these words wouldn’t be enough to convince but Yes, if you are having a bit of confusion, watch this eye-opening sci-fi I ORIGINS: https://youtu.be/sEGppIgwKf0

Quantum Supremacy

On the 23^rd of Oct, I was scrolling down Google Chrome’s home page for some interesting news. In the midst of which politician backstabbed which party and government denying economic slowdown, I saw something that instantly grabbed my attention. 

The news quoted, “Google has claimed to achieve Quantum Supremacy!”. 

Now, what the hell is “Quantum Supremacy” and how Google achieved it? Let's find out.

Quantum Supremacy is when a Quantum Computer beats the best Supercomputer in solving some kind of problem. Before getting into it we need to first understand how quantum computers work and how they are different from the computers we have.

For doing this we have to discuss two phenomena of quantum physics- “Superposition” and “Entanglement” which gives quantum computers an edge over the classical computers.

Superposition states that a quantum system can be in different states at the exact same time untill it is unobserved. Now we know that classical computers work on bits which are either 0 or 1.

Quantum Computers work on qubits (quantum bits) which are in a superposition of probabilities for 0 and 1 (like it can be 0 or 1 or an intermediate state), and you can’t predict which one will it be. But the instant you measure it, it collapses into one of its state. This is what gives that incredible processing power to the quantum computer.

For example- 2 bits can be in one of the 4 different configurations (00, 01, 10, 11) at one time. 2 qubits can be in all the four configurations at the same time storing more information than bits.

Entanglement is a close connection that makes each of the qubits react to a change in the other’s state instantaneously, no matter how far they are. This means by measuring just one entangled qubit, you can directly deduce properties of its partners without having to look. This property is so weird that the great scientist Albert Einstein called it “Spooky action at a distance”.

In classical computers there are logic gates, which takes a set of inputs and produce a definite output while in Quantum computers there are Quantum Gates, which takes an input of superpositions and produces another superposition as its output and measures the outcome, collapsing superpositions to an actual sequence of 0s and 1s.

It means that you get all the calculations that are possible with your input at the same time. Ultimately you can only measure one of the results and it will probably be the one you want.

Now coming back to Quantum Supremacy, Google has claimed to achieve it with its quantum computer having a 53 qubit Sycamore Processor by beating IBM’s supercomputer in solving a complex circuit.

           

While the race for the first commercially viable quantum computer continues, Quantum Computers can definitely revolutionise our world we see today.