Author: tejasvala

Game Of Thrones(GOT) season 1 Review

Game Of Thrones is an American television series created for HBO by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss released in 2011. This series is based on a novel ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’, a series of fantasy novels by George R.R. Martin. The show got popularity soon after it is released. This show is shot in UK, Canada, Croatia, Malta, Morocco and Spain. It was released as TV show but now available in online at HBO website. The show is full of fantasy, and best for viewers to imagine and feel the fantasy world.

There are total 10 episodes of approximately 55 minutes. HBO had ordered a television pilot  in November 2008; filming began the following year. However, it was deemed unsatisfactory and later reshot with some roles recast. In March 2010, HBO ordered the first season, which began filming in July 2010, primarily in Belfast, Northern Ireland, with additional filming in Malta.

There are total 10 episodes of approximately 55 minutes. HBO had ordered a television pilot  in November 2008; filming began the following year. However, it was deemed unsatisfactory and later reshot with some roles recast. In March 2010, HBO ordered the first season, which began filming in July 2010, primarily in Belfast, Northern Ireland, with additional filming in Malta.

The story is primarily upon continent Westeros, with one storyline occurring on another continent to the east, Essos. Like the novel, the story focuses on Nobleman Eddard Stark also called Ned, the Warden of North and ruler of Winterfell. He asked to be ‘Hand’ of the King of Seven Kingdoms Robert Baretheon, also he was his best friend. They won many battles together before Robert became King, and only one Robert trusts is Ned. Later on Ned seeks to find the mystery behind the murder of his predecessor Jon Arryn. He also finds out that the son of Robert is not actually his. He uncovers the dark secret of Lannister family, which includes Robert’s queen, Cersei, that his predecessor died trying to expose. Ned fooling tells this to Cersei(Robert’s wife), and this leads to the murder of Robert. But Robert before dying orders a letter to make Ned the king of Seven Kingdoms till his son(Robert’s) come to a proper age. Ned is killed at the order of Cersei’s tyrannical teenage son, King Joffrey Baratheon.

Meanwhile, in Essos, the exiled Viserys Targaryen, son of the former king, forces his sister Daenerys to marry a Dothraki warlord in exchange for an army to pursue his claim to the Iron Throne. The season ends with Viserys dead and Daenerys becoming the Mother of Dragons.

The story is not only this much, I have given a very very brief from all 10 episodes. There is more to find out by seeing this show. Game of Thrones features a large ensemble cast. Critics praised the show’s production values and cast.

The first season won two of the thirteen Emmy Awards for which it was nominated: Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series (Dinklage) and Outstanding Main Title Design. It was also nominated for Outstanding Drama Series. U.S. viewership rose by approximately 33% over the course of the season, from 2.2 million to over 3 million by the finale.

However this show is also criticized for its foul language, nudity, high violence and sexual violence. So this is show is highly recommended for adults and one who can see violence. Here violence is not only killing, but it is like to see a surgeon operation. These have showed organs after being cutted by swords, what a head will look if one cuts into half. So I recommend not to watch if you start screaming just seeing blood as there is lot more than just blood.

But this show is must watch. For its locations, natural beauty, fantasy beauty and more.

Game of Thrones: https://www.hbo.com/game-of-thrones

The Conspiracy of “Bulbs”

Do you know for how long a light bulb can last? 1000 hours, 1500 hours, 3000 hours? What if I say there is an light bulb lasted for more than 120 year and still counting, you will definitely say are you kidding me?, mine doesn’t last for more than 1000 hours. Or you may ask which machine has manufactured it? But what if I say it is hand made. Read on full article to know why life span of light bulbs are made to decrease by some giant light bulb manufacturers…

In Livermore Fire station 6 there is a light bulb active from more than 120 years hand made. The light doesn’t have a switch but it has battery back an a power generator. The bulb is never switched off as by cooling and heating up again there act stress on filament which decreases the life span of bulb.

When everyone is trying to make a filament they failed the filament burned with contact of oxygen, so in 1840s Warren De La Rue told to put the filament in vacuum so if there is no contact of oxygen and no burn. In 1879 Thomas Edison invented a perfect light bulb by making filament of carbon, from then onwards everyone tried different filament to increase the life span and then come up with tungsten. And in 1920s the life of bulbs were at peak lasting from 2000 hours to 2500 hours normally.

But at these time the sales were at least for the bulb manufacturers for example OSRAM sold 63 million bulbs in 1923, and in 1924 only 28 million. So the giant manufacturers of that come with a meeting. In 1924 at Geneva, Switzerland before christmas the giants Philips, International General Electric, Tokyo Electric, OSRAM from Germany, UK Associated Electric(AEI) formed a cartel named Phoebus Cartel after the name of Greek God of light.

They agreed to decrease the life of bulbs to 1000 hours, the same way engineer discovered to increase, they told their engineers to decrease the life of bulbs. But, due to lack of trust they agreed to send bulbs from every factory to a lab for test. If the bulb lasts for 1000 hours is fine, but if it lasts more than 3000 hours then there is a fine of 200 Swiss Francs for every 1000 bulbs sold.

There again one question of will every manufacturer will follow or not? So they divided the area of sales. They were successful in there plan. The life of light bulbs decreased and there increased tremendously. They sold with same price to increase the profit.

-Sales – life of bubs

The cartel was made to last till 1955 but it ended in 1930s. However there were allegations on cartel, but they said that cartel in established for improvements in the bulb. The screw thread in bulbs are introduced by them.

The light bulb of Livermore is made before the formation of cartel that’s why it is there.

These is not the end of this case as there is still this type of work is going on.

In 2003 the video of Casey Neistat was gone viral as he tried to protest against apple. Apple launched IPod having non removable memory which lasts only for 18 months, and after that you have to give 250$ to refurbish it. So there was a case in court against this which Apple settled outside court.

Can we ever be able to travel with speed of light?

From more than a century humankind is asking about could we ever be able to travel with speed of light, Is travel with speed of light is possible?. As space enthusiasts, could space ships shown in movies star trek and star wars be possible, can we make warp drives?

Let us first discuss about speed of light. It is a cosmic speed limit. Speed of light is fastest speed of which any two poles in space can communicate with each other. It is a speed at which light travels. In one second a beam of light can make 8 rotations. The standard speed of light if we convert to km/hr than speed of light is 1,079,252,848.8 km/hr(1.07 billion km/hr). Or we can say 299,792,458 meter/sec. So again question arises can this speed be achievable. If we can make to travel with speed of light then to reach to our nearest star Proxima Centauri it will take 4.2 earth years. So if we travel 5 times speed of light then to reach proxima centauri it will take nearly 1 year.

In 1994 a Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre published a theory, in which he showed how a warp drive is possible with Albert Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. He said that in order to make a warp drive it will require a huge amount of negative energy. Negative energy equivalent t mass of Jupiter.

Alcubierre said that if the lift hand side of Einstein’s equation is for curvature of space-time, right hand side is newton’s gravitational constant with T is stress energy factor, then there requires a negative energy in right side to bend fabric of space-time. Alcubierre determined that the ship needed to stay inside a flat space-time bubble, which is such that it can move with any arbitrary speed.

But, Alcubierre’s theory is as real as fiction. As we know that negative energy is not possible and does not exists. Anti matter exists and is different from negative energy. Anti matter is a regular matter with opposite charge but with it has positive mass.

In 2021 paper by physicist Erik Lentz of Gottingen University showed that space time warp bubble solution is possible by positive energies and theoretically move at any arbitrary speed.

Again we have question that is warp drives be possible? The answer is Yes.

In recent papers published by Advanced propulsion laboratory at Applied Physics authors Alexey Bobrick and Gianni Martire showed that how warp drives are possible without negative energy. They showed that we can travel with some fraction of speed of light, but to travel faster than speed of light you would need a superluminal matter. In other words, you would need a matter that travels faster than speed of light. Accelerating anything with mass to speed of light requires an infinite amount of energy. This would be true for any warp engine design, but is impossible.

Gianni and Bobrick showed that there are four types of warp drives, of which Alcubierre showed class 3 type. They showed that Class 1 type of warp drive is physically possible with positive energy and real matter and they don’t travel with speed of light. These classification is based on speed inside the bubble(Vin) and speed outside the bubble(Vout).

These can be achieved by time dilation. Gianni and Bobrick proposed two ways of time dilation, either you go really fast with 90% of speed of light or you put yourself into a strong gravitational field. The stronger the gravitational speed the slower the time passes for passengers. If we make a ship of super dense material, perhaps close to mass of a neutron star then gravitational field will be strong enough for time dilation. They designed a shape, if the ship has diameter of 620 meter with mass of 10% as of sun then time for the passengers inside the ship will be 1/10. The passengers will travel to Proxima Centauri in 9 Earth years but for passengers inside ship will feel as of 10 months.

But to move such a massive ship we need a powerful engine. If we convert its 13% mass to energy than we can get enough energy. The one way is fusion as it converts 1% of mass to energy. The one Bobrick and Gianni proposed that if we take advantage of Gravitational Accretion Energy. This is disklike flow of dust, gas and plasma orbiting around a massive astronomical object. The friction and loss of angular momentum creates huge amount of energy that potentially be harnessed. Accretion disk can convert 10% of any given mass into energy which is highly sufficient.

Now the question is no longer “If” humanity will achieve warp travel, now the question is “When”.

Credit: Arvin Ash: https://youtu.be/PA66ah9b0U4 Reference Papers: Bobrick and Martire: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2102.06824.pdf Website: https://appliedphysics.org/ Lentz: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.07125.pdf

The Black Hole

“Black Hole” almost everyone has heard this term but, what exactly it is? How it is formed? Is a black hole is danger? what if we pass near to black hole?

The idea of a body so massive that even light cannot escape was given by astronomical pioneer John Michell in a letter published by him in november 1784. And since after this an excitement was filled between astronomers and physicists about a body which is invisible. And in December 1967 in a lecture of John Wheeler one of his student reportedly suggested phrase ‘Black Hole’, which Wheeler adopted for his brevity.

Black hole was first spotted in 1971. But after 235 when it was first mentioned by John Michell in 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope(EHT) saw and captured an image of black hole in center of Galaxy M87 53.49 million light years away from earth. The images before this are just art work based imagination and properties of black hole done by astronomers and physicists to define black hole.

Black hole image
Image of black hole captured by Event Horizon Telescope in 2019

How Black Hole is formed? Let us first understand how a star is made. From cloud from Nebula(made of hydrogen and 25% helium) due to density compresses together and forms a shape some what circular, and this object after many million years becomes star one of like sun. The core of star burns hydrogen to be active, when after million years the fuel of star burns out then due to its own gravity and density it starts to compress itself. And if that star is bigger than our sun than it may form a neutron star or the star makes a negative gravity and starts to pull every mass near it. If we compress a massive body bigger than our sun into a size of a city say Mumbai, then it will become black hole. The gravity of this black hole so much increases that even light cannot escape from its horizon making it invisible.

A black can also be size of our sun but its gravity is 1 crore times more than sun. Albert Einstein in his theory of special relativity said that near the black hole the time will run slow. When a star becomes black hole it makes changes in fabric of space-time. And the movement will happen in only linear direction for a person inside it.

What if s person goes inside Black Hole? If a person goes near black hole than time will run slow for him compared to a person on earth. And as a person goes inside the black hole than he will feel so much gravity i.e. gravity 1 crore time more than our sun, that he can die. When a matter goes inside a black hole than due to gravity the atoms are separated and slowly it is vanished. But let say somehow a person survives than for the person it is like having a boon of immortality. If we put a black hole same as the size of sun and replace it with sun then probably nothing change will be happen, it cannot affect us. But due to lack of sunlight our earth will freeze and will only be a giant snowball.

How to find a Black Hole? When a black hole tries to swallow a massive body than its own then it belch just like animals and it gives some portion of light. Black hole has gravity much higher that light like x-rays cannot escape, but when there is a material very close to horizon of black hole, matter is heated at millions of degrees as it is pulled towards black hole and glows in x-rays. Black hole can also be found by coronas. Black holes don’t give any light themselves, but they are often encircled by glowing materials and making it to shine with different types of light.

A supermassive black hole is depicted in this artist's concept
Corona coming out of a black hole

Types of Black Holes: There are four types four black holes. 1) Stellar-mass black holes As star reaches to the end of their lives, most will inflate, lose mass, and then will cool down to be a white dwarfs. But those with 10 to 20 times as massive as our sun, destined to either become a super-dense neutron star or stellar-mass black holes. Thousands of these stellar-mass black holes may lurk within our own galaxy. 2) Super massive black holes Super massive black hole are the ones predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity, can have masses equal to billion of suns; these cosmic giant creatures hide in the center of galaxies. The milky way hosts its own black hole called Sagittarius A* as is more than four million times massive than our own sun. 3) Intermediate Black holes Astronomers also suspect that there is class of so-called intermediate black holes exists in the universe, although evidence for them is so far debatable. 4) Miniature black holes The tiniest member of the black hole family, so far theoretical. These black holes may have swirled to life soon after the universe formed by big bang, some 13.7 billion years ago and quickly evaporated.

Answer to some questions about black holes Is it possible for a black hole eat entire galaxy? No. There is no chance that a black hole whatever is in size can eat a whole galaxy, because the gravitational reach of black holes(even super massive black holes) is not large enough to eat entire galaxy. What if sun turned it a black hole? The sun will never turn into a black hole as it is not massive to explode into a black hole. Instead sun will become a white dwarf. Have black holes have any influence on our planet? No. Even if we put a black hole in place of our sun then also it will not make a difference, earth will continue its rotation, but due to no sunlight it will we disastrous event on earth. Which is farthest black hole we found? The most distant black hole is located 13.1 million light years away from earth called “Quasar”. This black hole is made 690 million years after big bang.

We have found many black hole and learnt many things about them, yet many discoveries are to be made. And black holes will always amaze us.