The art of the Higgs boson

by the Zim & Zou design studio for the french magazine Le Monde - via Lucia Marino | io9.com

Extraction of square roots

Oppenheim A. (1955). 2553. Extraction of Square Roots, The Mathematical Gazette, 39 (329) 237. DOI: 10.2307/3608773

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At the end of his article on the extraction of square roots⁽¹⁾ Professor Haldane writes:

The methods here given are probably now of no practical importance. Had they been discovered in the 17th century, as they might have been, they would have saved a good deal of computation.

In point of fact Brook Taylor in 1717 gave "A general Series for expressing the Root of any Quadtratick Equation". It will be found towards the end of his paper

An attempt towards the Improvement of the Method of approximating, in the Extraction of the Roots of Equations in Numbers⁽²⁾.

In modern notation Taylor's solution of the quadratic equation \[xx - akx + akk = 0\] is \[x = k + \frac{k}{c} + \frac{k}{cc'} + \frac{k}{cc'c''} + \cdots\] where $c=a-2$, $c' = c^2 -2$, $c'' = c'^2 -2$, $\cdots$ He gives the example \[1 + \sqrt{2} = \frac{1}{2}-\frac{1}{2\cdot 6}-\frac{1}{2 \cdot 6 \cdot 34}-\frac{1}{2 \cdot 6 \cdot 34 \cdot 1154}-\frac{1}{2 \cdot 6 \cdot 34 \cdot 1154 \cdot 1331714} - \cdots\] and concludes

The Fractions here wrote down giving the Root true to twenty three Places⁽²⁾

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(1) Haldane J.B.S. (1951). The Extraction of Square Roots, The Mathematical Gazette, 35 (312) 89. DOI: 10.2307/3609330 (pdf)
(2) Taylor B. (1717). An Attempt towards the Improvement of the Method of Approximating, in the Extraction of the Roots of Equations in Numbers. By Brook Taylor, Secretary to the Royal Society, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 30 (351-363) 610-622. DOI: 10.1098/rstl.1717.0011

The electric science of Captain Swing

posted by @ulaulaman about @warrenellis comics #electromagnetism #Faraday #diamagnetism

Later that year [1830], there was a spate of riots by farm workers in the south of England who were reduced to starvation by the introduction of machinery that could do their jobs cheply and tirelessly. They destroyed threshers, burned workhouses and sent manifestos of fiery intent to the landlords and magistrates.
These letters were signed: "Captain Swing".

In this way Warren Ellis tells us the main inspiration for his story, Captain Swing and the Electrical Pirates of Cindery Island, drawned by Raulo Caceres: the protests by farmers against the introduction of machinery in country work. But Ellis' graphic novel is not an historical novel, but, first of all, a teslatopia (or a teslapunk novel) or an electrical romance of a pirate utopia thwarted, following Ellis' definition. If you want, from a more simple point of view, the Electric Pirates is a steampunk novel, but it is also a scientific comics. The fil rouge of the novel is, indeed, the electromagnetism research, and the diary of Captain Swing is a source of precious information that the reader could study in deep as soon as the closing of the book.
For example the reader could say himself if a ship could fly thanks to the electromagnetic force, or if the instruments illustrated in the pages of Captain's diary are true or not (in this last case the main source is probably Joseph Priestley's books, see for example The History and Present State of Electricity). Or we could ask if Ellis/Swing is lieing when he writes, for example, the following passage:

Ionic air propulsion⁽¹⁾. Electrostatic levitation⁽²⁾. Electrogravitics. The Biefeld-Brown Effect and the electro-fluid-dynamics⁽³⁾. Nothing here is invented. It simply appears to be uchronic, counterfactual, sitting in the break of a time out of joint.

In fact, many of the questions mentioned by Ellis are really studied by physics and electromagnetism.

Electromagnetism is the branch of physics that deals with the study of electric and magnetic fields. As demonstrated by James Clerck Maxwell, the two fields, electric and magnetic, are very closely related to each other and only in a static situation can, with good approximation, be considered separately.
In fact, however, the two concepts of electricity and magnetism were initially separated, and in particular the first observations about electricity date back to the Ancient Greece:

Thales first transcribed the induction of static electricity in 600 BC.

Only about one thousand of years we have a significative progress in the field:

Otto von Guericke built friction-machines for the accumulation of static electrical charge around 1650 AD.

Guericke, a prussian phisicist, is known primarily for his experiments on the air, which actually dates back to 1650 (according to the Britannica). In particular, he realized a famous experiment with a hollow sphere inside which was a vacuum: the horses tied to the two spherical caps that made the ball could not to separate them, thus demonstrating the tremendous pressure exerted by the air on the objects.
The invention cited by Warren Ellis come from 1663, which is the first electric generator in history.
The real high jump, however, comes with 1800s:

Upon thye founding date of the Metropolitan Police, Francesco Zantedeschi discovered electromagnetic induction (although, in this slow world, Michael Faraday would have been unaware of this when he published his more famous discovery of same, a year from now).

A simple experiment of electric induction (in this case electrostatic) is rub a pen on a knitted wool and then see his effects on some pieces of paper. Or you can try to do the same thing with a ball and a rod, using different materials to determine which of these is able to attract the ball after a suitable scrubbing:

We want a theory

We want a theory. An uncommon want
When every year and month sends forth a new one
Till after cloying the gazettes with cant
The age discovers it is not the true one.

Hannes Alfven from On the Origin of the Solar System

Rita Levi-Montalcini, artist of science

portrait by orticanoodles - source: deviantart | flickr

Rita Levi-Montalcini was born on the 22nd april 1909 at Turin, Italy. In 1938 she came in Belgium because of the italian racial laws. After the war, she came back in Italy, at Asti, where she prepared a little laboratory in order to study the nervous system of chickens. In 1947, with her friend Renato Dulbecco, went in USA where she worked until 1977. In 1986 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine with her pupil Stanley Cohen

for their discoveries of growth factors.

About the potential of the NGF, she wrote in her Nobel Lecture:

For instance, whenever cell death of specific neuronal populations may be linked to a decreased local availability of neurotrophic factors, such as NGF, its exogenous supply or stimulation of its endogenous production via pharmacological agents may offer a promising approach to presently incurable diseases.

About the role of the women in science, she said:

Humanity is made ​​up of men and women must be represented by both sexes.

In 1975 she was was supported by the italian farmaceutical industry Fidia, but in about a decade was discovered that the advetrised drug was harmful. About this story she said to Riccardo Chiaberge:

Of course, I must admit that I yelled to see my name linked to Fidia. But I thought it was the price to pay, I don't care about anything to get some help for research. If we prevent the industry to help the laboratory, we die.

She had aprecise opinion on the relationship between young people and technology:

Today, compared to yesterday, young people benefit from an extraordinary breadth of information, and the price is the hypnotic effect exerted by television screens disaccustoming them to reason (in addition robbing them of time to devote to the study, sports and games that stimulate their creative capacity). They create for them a definite reality that inhibits their ability to "invent the world" and destroys the charm of the unknown.

In this sense she was an example for all of us:

I lost a little the eyesight, much the hearing. At the conferences I don't see the projections and don't hear so good. But I think more now than when I was twenty. The body does what it wants. I am not the body, I am the mind.

She passed away on the 30th december 2012 at Rome, Italy.

I've never been able to keep a log. Everything in me is imagination, intuition. Nothing is scientific.
I am not a scientist, I'm an artist of science.

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Levi-Montalcini R. (1987). The nerve growth factor: Thirty-five years later, Bioscience Reports, 7 (9) 681-699. DOI: 10.1007/BF01116861 (pdf)
Quotes by Rita Levi-Montalcini (italian)
Biographies on Wikipedia: italian | english
An interview with Tullio Regge (italian)

Mickey Mouse at the CERN

The most famous laboratory of the year is certanly the CERN thanks to the discovery of a new boson that it seems equal to the boson predicted by Peter Higgs et al.
CERN was established in 1952 and formed in 1954. Currently the experiments are carried with the LHC (Large Hadron Collider), but the previous accelerator ring was LEP, Large Electron-Positron Collider, that was used from 1989 to 2000. In particular in 1985 Alessandro Bencivenni, an italian disney writer, went at CERN and, inspired by the announced LEP, he wrote a story setted at the swiss laboratory, Mickey Mouse and the nuclear accelerator (Topolino e l'acceleratore nucleare), never published in english, so I decided to translate the cartoons about the explanation of the device and the experiment.
The popularizer is Atomo Bleep-Bleep, a charachter created by Romano Scarpa in Mickey Mouse and the Delta Dimension (first italian edition: 1959; first english edition: 1981 in Great Britain). I hope to write something about Atomo Bleep-Bleep, Doctor Einmug and the Delta Dimension in a future post, but for now I hope you can enjoy with this extract from the story, drawned by Massimo De Vita (I must remember that copyright is Disney):

Genetics, evolution and Turing's patterns

posted by @ulaulaman about #Turing #genetics #biology #evolution #morphogenesis reaction-diffusion system

I've just written a post about the theory of patterns in nature started by Alan Turing, and I describe the reaction-diffusion system: in the system there are an activator and an inhibitor molecule of morphogenesis. The dynamics between activator and inhibitor generates tha patterns and we can describe it with the following mathematica relation: \[u_t = d \Delta u + f (\gamma, u)\] where $u$ is the position of the gene, $u_t$ the diffusion speed, $d$, $\gamma$ real constants.
It's really interesting observe that recently the Turing model about patterns was applied also to the study of the evolution of genes, in particular to study the generation of digit patterning.
The story start from the Hox genes:

Hox genes are a group of related genes that control the body plan of the embryo along the anterior-posterior (head-tail) axis. After the embryonic segments have formed, the Hox proteins determine the type of segment structures (e.g. legs, antennae, and wings in fruit flies or the different vertebrate ribs in humans) that will form on a given segment. Hox proteins thus confer segmental identity, but do not form the actual segments themselves.

So the team try to mute some of the Hox genes in order to see if the number of digits decrease, but they surprisingly observed that they can add more and more digits in their mutant mouses (they arrived at 14 digits!). And they can explain this behavour with the reaction-diffusion model: in the following picture you can see the experimental results (the first three rows) and the computer simulation that used Turing's model: