Miss Buddha (89 page)

Hard on those heels, in 1906, the American
inventor Lee De Forest invented what is properly called the triode,
but which everyone calls the vacuum tube. The vacuum tube was to
become one, if not the, key component in nearly all early radio,
radar, television, and computer systems.

A handful of years later, in 1920, the
Scottish engineer John Logie Baird developed the Baird Televisor, a
primitive television that provided the first transmission of a
recognizable moving image. Based on Baird’s invention, during the
next decade or so, the American electronics engineer Vladimir Kosma
Zworykin improved the television’s picture and reception to the
point where it began to resemble the television we are now used to,
and so laid the foundation for a news and entertainment industry
that has only grown since then.

Shortly before the Second World War, in
1935, the British Physicist Sir Robert Watson-Watt deployed radio
waves to reflect from (and so locate) aircraft in flight. Radar
signals, as they were soon called, have since been reflected from
the moon, planets, and stars to learn their distance from Earth and
to track their movements.

Shortly after the Second World War, in the
now famous Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, the American Physicists
John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley invented the
transistor, an electronic device used to control or amplify an
electrical current—pretty much what the triode did. However, the
transistor was much smaller, and was far less expensive to
manufacture than the triode. It also required less power to
operate, and was considerably more reliable than the triodes—who by
now could see the writing on the wall, for since their first
commercial use in hearing aids in 1952, transistors have replaced
triodes in virtually all applications.

Mid-century, the transistor found another
home, and by now computers were built using transistors rather than
triodes. Earlier computers, such as the electronic numerical
integrator and computer (ENIAC)—first introduced in 1946 by
American Physicist John W. Mauchly and American electrical engineer
John Presper Eckert, Jr.—used as many as 18,000 triodes and filled
a large room.

The transistor changed all that by sparking
microminiaturization, in which individual electronic circuits are
reduced to microscopic, if not atomic, size. This trend drastically
reduced not only the computer’s size and cost, but also its power
requirements, which eventually led to electronic circuits with
processing speeds measured in billions of computations per
second.

By the early 1970s, continued
miniaturization led to the first microprocessor, which in essence
is a computer on a chip. Combined with other specialized chips, the
microprocessor became the central arithmetic and logic unit of a
computer smaller in size than a portable typewriter.

By the 1990s, with their small size and a
price less than that of a used car, these personal computers were
many times more powerful than the physically huge,
multimillion-dollar computers of the 1950s.

By now, these computers—faithfully adhering
to Moore’s law, which states that the number of transistors on an
integrated circuit will double every four years, while the cost
will halve—have reduced in size to that of a small wallet, and
could be made a lot smaller were that a practical way to go.
Instead of reducing the size, however, the computing power of our
current handheld computers, such as the Mortimer, would match that
of, say, one hundred mainframe computers of the 1960s.

Today, computers are, of course, used by
virtually everyone on our planet, not the least to interface with
worldwide communications networks, such as the Internet and the
World Wide Web, to send and receive e-mail, to shop, or to find
information on just about any subject.

Space Exploration

The early 1950s saw increasing public
interest in space exploration. Some say that the seminal event, the
event that sparked the space age, was the International Geophysical
Year from July 1957 to December 1958, during which hundreds of
scientists around the world coordinated their efforts to measure
the Earth’s near-space environment. During, and as part of, this
study, both the United States and the then Soviet Union announced
that they would launch artificial satellites into orbit for
nonmilitary, exploratory, purposes.

The Soviet Union—much to the embarrassment
of the United States, beat its American rivals to the punch, and
when they launched the first Sputnik satellite in 1957, this feat
spurred the United States to intensify its own space exploration
efforts; and so, in 1958, the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration (NASA) was founded for the purpose of developing
human spaceflight.

NASA then went on to design, manufacture,
test, and eventually use the Saturn rocket and the Apollo
spacecraft for the first manned landing on the Moon in 1969, and
during the 1960s and 1970s, also designed and built the first
robotic space probes to explore the planets Mercury, Venus, and
Mars.

NASA then focused its efforts on a reusable
space shuttle, which was first deployed in 1981. In 1998 this space
shuttle, along with Soyuz, its Russian counterpart, enabled the
construction of the International Space Station.

Quantum Physics

It was in the year 1900 that the German
physicist Max Planck proposed the (at the time) sensational idea
that energy is always given off in set amounts, or quanta. Five
years later, Albert Einstein successfully used quanta to explain
the photoelectric effect, which is the release of electrons when
metals are bombarded by light.

This, together with Einstein’s special and
general theories of relativity, challenged some of the most
fundamental assumptions of the Newtonian era.

Unlike the laws of classical physics,
quantum theory deals with events that occur on the smallest of
scales; explaining how subatomic particles form atoms, and how
atoms interact when they combine to form chemical compounds.

In fact, quantum theory deals with a world
where the attributes of any single particle can never be fully
known—an idea known as the uncertainty principle—put forward by the
German physicist Werner Heisenberg in 1927.

But while the subatomic level appears a sea
of uncertainty, quantum physics does successfully predict the
overall outcome of subatomic events, a fact that definitely relates
it to the macroscopic world—that is, the one in which we live.

In 1934, Enrico Fermi began a series of
experiments in which he used neutrons (subatomic particles without
an electric charge) to bombard atoms of various elements, including
uranium. The neutrons combined with the nuclei of the uranium atoms
to produce what he thought were elements heavier than uranium,
known as trans-uranium elements.

In 1939, however, some of his fellow
physicists demonstrated that in these experiments Fermi had not
formed heavier elements, but instead had managed to split the
uranium atom’s nucleus, a feat that eventually led to fission both
as an energy source and as a weapon.

These experiments and studies, along with
the development of particle accelerators in the 1950s, initiated a
long expedition into the nature of subatomic particles, a journey
that continues today.

Scientists now know that, far from being
indivisible, atoms are made up of at least 12 fundamental particles
known as quarks and leptons, which combine in different ways to
constitute all matter currently known.

Cosmology

The advances in particle physics are closely
linked to similar advances in cosmology. From the 1920s onward,
when the American astronomer Edwin Hubble showed that the universe
is indeed still expanding, cosmologists have sought to rewind the
clock and so determine how the universe began.

Today, most scientists hold that our
universe started with a cosmic explosion (the Big Bang) sometime
between 10 and 20 billion years ago (most subscribe to
approximately 13 billion years), but the scientific jury is still
out as to the exact sequence of events surrounding the birth of the
universe.

The Path of Science

I believe the Greeks, more than the
Mesopotamians, the Egyptians or the Chinese, took the right
approach when they approached Truth as Truth, and let their
curiosity take them wherever it would.

However—and as this whirlwind journey
through science history shows—when Science finally gained traction
in the West, she was pragmatism and profit personified, and had
morphed from being curious about the Earth to a “What have you done
for us lately?” mentality which today has spiraled, and continues
to spiral, out of control.

That said, let us take a look the next
path.

:: Philosophy ::

I believe a good way to approach
philosophy—by now a vast subject—is to break it down into its three
main wellsprings: that of the West (Europe, and, later on,
America), that of China, and that of India.

Western Philosophy

Philosophy (again, from the
Greek
philosophia
,
“love of wisdom”), is defined as the rational and critical inquiry
into basic principles, and is often divided into four main
branches:
metaphysics
, the investigation of ultimate reality;
epistemology
, the study of the
origins, validity, and limits of knowledge;
ethics
, the study of the nature of
morality and judgment; and
aesthetics
, the study of the nature
of beauty in the fine arts.

However, as practiced by
the ancient Greeks, the term
philosophy
meant the pursuit of
knowledge of whatever kind, for its own sake. At that time,
philosophy
comprised all
areas of speculative thought and included not only the arts, but
sciences and religion as well.

Later, as special methods and principles
were developed in the various areas of knowledge, each acquired its
own philosophical aspect, giving rise to the separate cognitive
disciplines of art, of science, and of religion.

Greek Philosophy

As I briefly touched upon
earlier, western philosophy is generally considered to have begun
in ancient Greece as speculation about the underlying nature of the
physical world. In its earliest form it was indistinguishable from
natural science. Unfortunately, the writings of the earliest
philosophers are no longer available to us, except for a few
fragments cited by Aristotle in the 4
^th
century BCE (who did have
access) and by other writers of later times.

The Ionian School

The first Western
philosopher of any historical record was Thales, who lived in the
6
^th
century BCE Miletus, a city on the Ionian coast of Asia Minor.
Thales, who was revered by later generations as one of the Seven
Wise Men of Greece, was curious about most things, specifically
astronomical, physical, and meteorological phenomena.

His scientific investigations and
speculations led to the postulate that all natural phenomena are
but different forms of one fundamental substance. This fundamental
substance he believed to be water. Why water? He had observed
water’s evaporation and condensation and assumed this to be a
universal process, involving all forms and substances.

Anaximander was a disciple
of Thales, and a bright one at that. He concluded that the first
principle from which all things evolve is an intangible, invisible,
infinite substance that he called
apeiron
, “the boundless.” This
substance, he maintained, is eternal and indestructible. Out of its
ceaseless motion continuously evolve the more familiar substances,
such as warmth, cold, earth, air, and fire, generating in turn the
various objects and organisms that make up the recognizable
world.

Anaximander also taught that life as we know
it began in water, and that humans originated from fish, predating
Darwin by a good two thousand years.

The third great Ionian
philosopher of the 6
^th
century BCE, Anaximenes, returned to Thales’
assumption that the primary substance must be something familiar
and material, but he held this substance to be air rather than
water.

He also held that the observable changes
things undergo could be explained by rarefaction (thinning) and
condensation (solidification) of air. Thus Anaximenes was, in fact,
the first philosopher to explain observable differences in quality
in terms of differences in size or quantity, a method that later
grew fundamental to physical science.

As a whole, the Ionian school took the
initial, and radical step from mythological to scientific
explanation of natural phenomena. It also laid the groundwork for
the important scientific principles of the permanence of substance,
the natural evolution of the world, and—rightly or wrongly—the
reduction of quality to quantity.

The Pythagorean School

About 530 BCE at Croton (now Crotona), in
southern Italy, the philosopher Pythagoras founded a school of
philosophy far more religious and mystical than the Ionian school.
Pythagoras merged the mythological and the scientific.

The resulting system of philosophy
(Pythagoreanism) combined ethical, supernatural, and mathematical
beliefs with ascetic rules, such as obedience and silence and
simplicity of dress and possessions.

Pythagoras and his followers practiced a way
of life based on the belief that the soul is a prisoner of the
body, is released from the body at death, and migrates into a
succession of different kinds of animals before reincarnation into
a human being. For this reason, Pythagoras taught his followers not
to eat meat, for there was no way of telling whom you might be
eating.