Posts Tagged ‘ physics

Bumptop – Physics on your desktop

I got a taste for Bumptop after my friend Vijay recommended TedTED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is an invitation-only event where the world’s leading thinkers and doers gather to find inspiration. But, videos of all the presentations at the event are available for free viewing. And the content on Ted is quite remarkably polished and innovations presented at TED are nothing short of praiseworthy. 

Bumptop is the dream child of Anand Agarawala and was created at the University of Toronto. Currently the project is in private beta and is available for download only on an invite basis and I was lucky enough to get an invite. Here is the video from TED.

The Beta version does almost most of what is shown in the video and is quite smooth and polished for beta version.

You get a 3d room interface where you put your desktop icons and then you can just grow and shrink those icons using shortcut keys. The shortcuts are very easy learn and the interface is quite intuitive. But, I really think that touch interfaces would be the right arena to utilise bumptop to their fullest potential. The project makes complete use of the mouse and allows you to organize files on your desktop in best possible manner.

Bumptop is actually a boon for people who tend to have a lot of files on their desktop and need to organize (or disorganize) them. The ability to stack documents, form grids/groups, view images by shuffling through them and allowing you hang priority docs on the walls, combined with the real life physics engine makes Bumptop a shining example of what true Innovation we can bring about even with the current technology.

The collision detection system is really great and you would appreciate the way icons/others dangle when you hang them on the wall.

Bumptop shows that innovation need not always be about new technology, it can be about using existing technology to do new things in newer ways.

However, I did find that it ran faster on my slow XP machine with just 1GB of RAM than on my Vista machine with loads and loads of RAM + a Graphics card (Yeah, maybe I should turn anti aliasing off)

Many of my friends asked me to give them an invite to Bumptop, but its not possible for a user to invite others and the only way to get Bumptop is to sign up for their invite at their site. 

While I was waiting for the invite to come by, I did realize the existence of certain clones of Bumptop. One of them was Real Desktop. Real Desktop is quite a good product but the free version is extremely limited in what it offers and once you get an invite to Bumptop, you’ll not go back to Real Desktop (even if you had paid for it).

And before I forget! Here is what my desktop looks like now

 

My bumptop interface

My bumptop interface

Celeritas

When I chose to blog about technology as well as physics, I did not realize that physics was quite an unpopular subject for bloggers and web 2.0 enthusiasts. Most probably since noone is interested in boring physics classes. Even in school I was least interested in Physics lessons, primarily because my school lessons focussed on the focal length of lenses and how mirrors reflected each other. Then atlast, I came across Einstein’s theories which intrigued me and made me look at physics with new and renewed interest.

I had discussed about tachyons in one of my earlier posts. Tachyons are theoritical particles which could move at a speed faster than light. However, these particles merely exist in theory because it is impossible for any particle to exceed the speed of light. If a particle were to exceed the speed of light, then it would in fact be able to fly back in time, since it would have arrived before it arrived it had left. But, there is no way any body could exceed the speed of light since, it simply would not be allowed. Let us assume there was an engine which could possibly accelerate to light speeds (299,792,458 miles per second) But after reaching the speed of light, it simply would stop accelerating anymore. So now, the engine is pushing out energy and the body is not moving any faster. Where does the energy go? It gets converted to mass and the mass of the body starts growing to gigantic proportions, but still the body would not move any faster.

The example The speed of light which nothing can overtake is represented by a c which stands for ‘Celeritas‘, which is the latin word for swiftness. This post would really need a more elaborate explanation under the shadow of the all encompassing E = MC² which you could watch out for. or rather not.

E=MC²

The equation forms the very foundation of theory of invariance as proposed by Einstein. It lays the foundation for the energy created or energy required by/for the movement of a body. This blog would be continued soon…
This topic also would deal with Tachyons

A tachyon is a particle which can move at speeds exceeding the speed of light (the C in the formula). I would write more on it later when I get the time to do so..

But for now, here is a wonderful animation on how a tachyon would look like when it is in motion. Even though it is a particle whose existence has not been proved, yet the animation makes it as real as possible.

The Time is now

there are two things I must write about. About “time” and something else which I forgot. Most probably it was related to IT but I don’t remember anything now. Yeah…got it. I wanted to write about outsourcing. Now the only problem is, I have to read about both to write about them, so I guess both these blogs will have to wait till I am ready…ready to write them…

I write about time not because I love to write about it, but because I love time itself. I love the very concept of the all encompassing, omnipotent, omnipresent “time”.
It is not easy to write this blog, since study of time requires study of far more complex things such as quantum physics, the relativity theories, atoms, dimensions and so on.
But when this post will be done, I want to be really proud of having written something like this. So, I am going to work on this post, one day at a time.

I did read a little bit on the general and specific theory of relativity and as it goes on, I would like to make it really simple for people who are going to read it. The theory of relativity in simple words means that velocity, time, space all are relative to position, velocity, time of the person measuring/looking at them. That was just a statement I made to sum up the whole of the concept.

This is explained by an example by Brian Greene The speed at which you see things move is relative to your own state of motion. Assume that we are looking out of a car window, we see trees, lamp posts move by whereas the car’s dashboard remains static. However, to a bystander, the car’s dashboard seem to be moving whereas the lamp post next to him remains static. I usually hate these seemingly simple examples which only make complex things seem more complex. However, in the case of the theory of relativity I had to make an exception. Now if we were to exaggerate this example to increase the speed to billion miles per second, then the real impact of relativity would come into play and the time and distance calculated from inside the car and outside would be drastically different. And distance is merely a product of time and speed. The second aspect of relativity would deal with the fact that unlike other objects, it is not possible to apply this rule for light. Light is a form of energy which consists of particles known as photons. The cardinal rule is that light is never static. It goes on at a constant speed of 670 million miles per hour no matter where the person watching it stands/moves. i.e. it is sort of immune to the fact that if you run faster it would take much more time for light to catch up with you. All these seem to be loud and gaudy concepts to understand time, so let me touch upon time as well and make it look as gaudy as I possibly can.

Time in itself cannot be defined since time can be expressed only by way of time. Even if I were to tell you that time consisted of days, hours, minutes, seconds etc. it still does not explain it. Since a second is after all a gap of time, which is an specific interval between two states. Now that didnt explain time at all..So thats it, time is inexplicable. Time as we have seen already is different for different people. The movement of time slows down/speeds up relative to our motion/state of rest.

Einstein did not want to name his theory “relativity” he wanted to name it the theory of invariance. This was because he wanted to stress upon the invariance of the speed of light…I would also like to add to the fact that there were two theories of relativity (general and specific) and it was the specific theory which came first. The specific theory was insufficient to explain relativity when there was movement in the frames and hence a theory which could explain when the frames where in movement as well.