Friday, May 20, 2011

knowledge of dimensions

Here is a simple Question..following is a letter well known to everyone..


S

yes, this is 'S'. Now the question is whether this letter is a one dimensional figure or two dimensional. give your answers in the comments with argument in your support. 

Friday, May 13, 2011

Was Einstein the First to recognize Mass-Energy relationship?




Are not the gross bodies and light convertible into one another, and may not bodies receive much of their activity from the particles of light which enter their composition?
'Issac Newton, Query 30, Opticks'


In 1717 Isaac Newton speculated that light particles and matter particles were inter-convertible. After that there were many attempts in the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century—like those of J. J. Thomson (1881), Oliver Heaviside (1888), and George Frederick Charles Searle (1897)—to understand how the mass of a charged object depends on the electrostatic field. Because the electromagnetic field carries part of the momentum of a moving charge, it was also suspected that the mass of an electron would vary with velocity near the speed of light. Searle calculated that it is impossible for a charged object to supersede the velocity of light because this would require an infinite amount of energy.

Following Thomson and Searle (1896), Wilhelm Wien (1900), Max Abraham (1902), and Hendrik Lorentz (1904) argued that this relation applies to the complete mass of bodies, because all inertial mass is electromagnetic in origin. The formula of the mass–energy-relation given by them was m = (4 / 3)E / c2. Wien went on by stating, that if it is assumed that gravitation is an electromagnetic effect too, then there has to be a strict proportionality between (electromagnetic) inertial mass and (electromagnetic) gravitational mass. This interpretation is in the now discredited electromagnetic world-view, and the formulas that they discovered always included a factor of 4/3 in the proportionality.

'what is Physics'



Physics (from Ancient Greek: φύσις physis "nature") is a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, as well as all related concepts, including energy and force. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.

Physics is one of the oldest academic disciplines, perhaps the oldest through its inclusion of astronomy. Over the last two millennia, physics was a part of natural philosophy along with chemistry, certain branches of mathematics, and biology, but during the Scientific Revolution in the 16th century, the natural sciences emerged as unique research programs in their own right. Certain research areas are interdisciplinary, such as mathematical physics and quantum chemistry, which means that the boundaries of physics are not rigidly defined. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries physicalismemerged as a major unifying feature of the philosophy of science as physics provides fundamental explanations for every observed natural phenomenon. New ideas in physics often explain the fundamental mechanisms of other sciences, while opening to new research areas in mathematics and philosophy.

Source: Wikipedia.