Physical World Test - 5

The history of technology is the history of the invention of tools and techniques and is similar to other sides of the history of humanity. Technology can refer to methods ranging from as simple as language and stone tools to the complex genetic engineering and information technology that has emerged since the 1980s.

Technology is often a consequence of science and engineering, although technology as a human activity precedes the two fields. For example, science might study the flow of electrons in electrical conductors by using already-existing tools and knowledge. This new-found knowledge may then be used by engineers to create new tools and machines such as semiconductors, computers, and other forms of advanced technology.

Science and technology will continue to generate all sorts of new enhancers, and the quest for enhancement is not necessarily unfair or unethical. We humans are inveterate enhancers, striving to increase our intelligence and to improve our memory and powers of perception.

Thomas Newcomen's atmospheric engine was the first commercial true steam engine using a piston, and was used in 1712 for pumping in a mine. They became popular for mining and 104 were in use by 1733, eventually over two thousand of them were installed.

In1781 Scottish engineer James Watt patented a steam engine that produced continuous rotary motion. Watt's ten-horsepower engines enabled a wide range of manufacturing machinery to be powered. The engines could be sited anywhere that water and coal or wood fuel could be obtained.

The idea of wireless communication predates the discovery of "radio" with experiments in "wireless telegraphy" via inductive and capacitive induction and transmission through the ground, water, and even train tracks from the 1830s on. James Clerk Maxwell showed in theoretical and mathematical form in 1864 that electromagnetic waves could propagate through free space.

Over several years starting in 1894 the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi built the first complete, commercially successful wireless telegraphy system

The Indian physicist C.V. Raman helped the growth of science in his country. He received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1930 for the discovery that when light passes through a transparent material, some of the light changes in wavelength. This phenomenon is now called Raman scattering.

Meghnad Saha was an eminent Indian astrophysicist who gave the world the theory of ionization which explained the origin of stellar spectra.

Satyendra Nath Bose was an Indian physicist from Bengal specialising in theoretical physics. He is best known for his work on quantum mechanics in the early 1920s, providing the foundation for Bose–Einstein statistics and the theory of the Bose–Einstein condensate.

The Nobel Prize in Physics 1921 was awarded to Albert Einstein "for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect". Albert Einstein received his Nobel Prize one year later, in 1922.

Paul Dirac was one of the greatest theoretical physicists in history. He completely reshaped quantum mechanics with the astounding Dirac Equation.

The Dirac Equation explained the behavior of electrons and foretold the existence of antimatter. Dirac was also able to infer the existence of vacuum polarization, revealing that what we once believed was empty space is actually awash with short-lived particle-antiparticle pairs.