April 1, 2007

Understanding Science...

What we are doing is just trying to understand science, which is already understood by great scientists. We aren't doing any new inventions or discoveries. But, understanding science is the first step, which involves real inventions, discoveries or refinements of scientific theories and formulas. Each and every person goes through the initial steps of learning and understanding science, but a very few have the goal and the desire to do efforts for the final step. The one who gets success is considered as a great person. Many examples can be cited here: Albert Einstein, Madam Curie, S. Chandrashekhar, Homi Bhabha, Isaac Newton, Galileo Galilei, Wright Brothers, Edward Teller, Vainu Bappu, and the list is endless. I am sure that you must be familiar with majority of the names.

What is your opinion about these great men and women? Why are they great? Is it because that they have God gifted capabilities to unravel the secrets of Nature? What I think is that they all were hard thinkers. They themselves identified their field of interest, and then they worked hard to understand even the most intrinsic points of the field. Once they got complete idea of what is known and what is unknown, then their way of work became absolutely clear, thus leading to fantastic theories and solutions.My advice and message this time to the entire young generation is as follows: With so many examples of great people, such an excellent technological advancement and almost borderless countries, what one must do is to first identify his/her field of interest and work hard to achieve the mastery in that field. The biggest power is knowledge. A person with good knowledge will never sit idle but will always remain active. No matter of what age he is or how much poor or rich he may be.

Deep Thinkers

Why is Science so interesting, exciting and is like a never ending mystery? This question always wanders in the minds of people who are deep thinkers. One thing that is for sure is that the progress of Science once initiated cannot be ever stopped. It will go on finding new routes during the course of time and often dividing to give birth to new branches of knowledge. The best analogy of the above mentioned sentence would be thousands of roots of a single tree.

The database of knowledge that humans today have must be 100 times more intense than what we were knowing just 10 years ago. I do not know what level of Science awareness we shall have 10 years down the line.

Information is streaming continuously from all directions, from deep space and also from deep microscopic world of bacteria, viruses, atoms, quarks and God knows what is there at the base of the most smallest piece of element known to us.

Currently our latest spacecraft in the space is MESSENGER which is going near the planet Mercury and the Sun and on its way is feeding us with whatever information it collects. So we have spacecrafts that are going near the Sun and also spacecrafts which are trying to go as far as possible from the Sun. The Voyagers are almost at the edge of our Solar System. They had left us in 1977 and are still drifting towards the interstellar space away from the Sun. Currently they are wandering in a area where no human-object has ever gone and thus what pieces of information they send is invaluable for the humans. You shall read more about Voyagers in this issue of Kids Science. You have already read about MESSENGER, Cassini-Huygens Spaceprobe and Mars Rover in the previous issues.

In the year 1905, the most renowned scientist Albert Einstein had published five papers that revolutionized Science. Next year, 2005, marks 100 years of the publication of his famous papers.

Considering this, next issue of Kids Science shall be a Commemorative Issue which shall cover various aspects of Einstein's life and work.