Necessity is the mother of invention, as the old saying goes; and in warfare, necessities can be urgent indeed. As a result, many technological innovations occur during wartime. The First World War brought us huge advances in aircraft design; the Second World War brought us atomic energy. But on a less grandiose scale, technical innovations …
Tag: technology
IndyCar racing
You can keep your hockey, your baseball, your lacrosse–this week, my favorite sport is in the spotlight, as 33 drivers contest the Indianapolis 500. No other sport involves as much science and technology as automobile racing. Public fascination with technology first made it popular: at the first organized race in France 100 years ago, the …
Plastic
I vividly remember a science fiction book I read as a kid about the destruction of civilization by a new strain of bacteria. It didn’t kill people: it ate plastic. Electronic equipment disintegrated, clothes dissolved, airplanes fell apart, buildings burned–modern society ceased to function, so dependent had it become on plastic. If our ancestors lived …
The Superconducting Super Collider
A few weeks ago I wrote about the Human Genome Initiative, “biologists’ equivalent of the Apollo program.” But there’s an even bigger and more expensive initiative happening down in Texas that you might call physicists’ equivalent of Apollo. This gigantic (in every sense of the word) project is called the Superconducting Super Collider, or …
Glass
There’s a window above my desk through I’m watching a cold wind blowing leaves down the street. It’s not blowing in my face, however, thanks to a very special material: glass. Glass is an “amorphous solid”– its molecules don’t form a strict pattern, like the molecules of steel or granite, but are jumbled together like …
Clausotechnolometry: the study of the technology of Santa
A couple of Christmases ago I wrote about aerotarandusdynamics: the study of flying reindeer. In passing, I mentioned their mysterious master, one “Santa Claus.” Now scientists are studying him, too, trying to understand the advanced technology this “jolly old elf” (as one authority describes him) uses yearly in his Christmas crusade. These scientists are “clausotechnolometrists.” …
Pens
I’m writing this on a computer powered by electricity and connected to a laser printer. For most of the several thousand years humans have been writing things down, though, the only computer in use was the moist gray one inside our skulls and the only printers connected to it to were the penta-digital ones at …
Recording sound
In 1877, Thomas Edison was experimenting with a way to repeat Morse-coded telegraph messages using a waxed paper tape on which the message was written by a stylus. He noticed that if he pulled an already inscribed tape past the stylus it produced a note, and reasoned that he should be able to use the …
Paper
As a writer (and reader), I have always had a deep affection for a pretty mundane material: paper. After all, making black marks on paper is how I make a living. Our society seems to have a similar affection (or maybe addiction!) to the stuff, because for all our talk of civilization being built on …
Water softeners
Not long after I first moved into a house from an apartment, I woke in the night to the sound of rushing water from the basement. Groggily, I investigated, visions of finding all my boxes of junk afloat dancing in my sleep-fogged brain, only to discover that all that noise came from a cabinet-sized device …
Television
There’s probably no object in your house that is a better example of the impact of science and technology than your television set — and probably no object less understood. Strictly speaking, television really is just “radio with pictures.” Like radio, it’s based on the fact that an electrical current flowing in one wire emits …
Golf
‘Tis the season to chase little white balls over big green spaces, and to contemplate, while combing through waist-high grass, the history and science behind your endeavours. The Romans played a game called “paganica,” chasing a feather-stuffed ball around the countryside with a bent stick, but the Scots usually get the credit (or blame) for …