Tag: Physics

A Costly Trip to the National Cryptologic Museum: Enigmas and Espionage | July 02 2025, 14:56

I went to the National Cryptologic Museum yesterday. Indeed, this trip will cost me $1000 because a rock hit the windshield of the new Tesla on the way. Anyway, let’s talk about the museum.

It’s very small. Located on the premises of the National Security Agency. The museum basically consists of three small rooms. One is dedicated to German Enigmas and there exhibits Alan Turing’s Bombe decryption machine, — a device as big as a kitchen in Lobnya, used for systematic decryption of messages encrypted by the Germans using “Enigma.” After the war, Churchill, for reasons of secrecy, ordered all physical traces of the program, including the Bombe machines, to be destroyed, so it’s quite a rare thing. Moreover, there’s only one working Bombe machine in the entire world, somewhere in England, and even that was barely restored. The Enigmas themselves were produced in large numbers, and the museum has two working ones; you can press the buttons and encrypt something.

In the room with computer equipment stands an old Cray, as well as a decommissioned nuclear deterrence hardware server rack taken out of service 15 years ago. It’s not very clear what’s remarkable about this – well yes, old computers, that’s all. The Cray is actually exhibited many places.

Unfortunately, there are no longer exhibits from the Star Gate project — like the blue box shown in the attached photos. The Star Gate project was used by the US government during the Cold War. Many of the psychic spies were based at Fort Meade, tasked with gathering intelligence, detecting enemy agents, and identifying vulnerabilities in the US using “remote viewing.”

Never heard of “remote viewing”? It’s the mental observation of a distant place where a person has never been, in order to gather information about an individual, an object, or specific data. As absurd as it may sound, it’s claimed that the program was quite successful and used until 1995 🙂

Specifically, this little blue machine, PSIFI, is part of that program. For example, it was used to study the impact of consciousness on random processes — like altering the behavior of random number generators through thought, collecting statistics on attempts at psychokinesis — with “hits”, “trials”, “gated hits”, “gated trials” etc., suggesting successful impacts compared to an expected random distribution, biofeedback — the lower part of the panel contains controls and inputs, apparently for electromyography and other biosignals. Overall, a good addition to the UFO research program.

Understanding Road Grade: The Math Behind the 10% Incline Sign | June 30 2025, 19:48

It turns out that the incline (incline, or grade) – the steepness of a road or slope – has quite an obvious definition, but I never really thought about it. It means the ratio of the projection of a line on the terrain to the vertical plane to the projection of the same line on the horizontal. In other words, the magnitude of the incline equals the tangent of the angle between the rise of the slope and the horizontal (the tangent of the angle of inclination).

Thus, a “steep climb” sign of 10% indicates just about 5.71 degrees of inclination. This is arctan(0.1).

It also turned out that formally among specialists when reading the notation, the “%” sign is pronounced as “hundredths.”

Galactic Etymology: Tracing the Milky Origins in the Night Sky | June 29 2025, 12:57

I am looking at photos and reading material about the Milky Way and noticed that the word galaxy (any) essentially means “milky” from Greek. Κύκλος Γαλαξίας. Essentially, lac from lactose, and gala from galaxy essentially come from the same Proto-Indo-European ģlákts. Unexpected.

Exploring Xplor Park: An Engineer’s Marvel in Riviera Maya | June 29 2025, 05:41

I returned from Mexico — visited Xplor Park by Xcaret in Riviera Maya. The park is already 18 years old, but damn, it’s an engineering feat, not just a park. As an engineer, I was walking around with my mouth open.

The park is the size of Moscow’s “Neskuchny Garden”. A significant part consists of kilometers of natural karst caves, formed millions of years ago at the site of the Chicxulub impact crater (the very one that ended the era of dinosaurs). Above the caves are dense jungles. High above the jungles — kilometers of zip lines. The water in the caves is from a natural underground stream, which is filtered through limestone plus some technical structures. Bats fly around, but obviously, they are not wild and are working for food. No wildlife (other than tourists and bats) is present, so it’s pretty well isolated from the outside world. In these kilometer-long caves, completely covered with stalactites and stalagmites, we swam, rafted, and even drove through in amphibious vehicles with gasoline engines (meaning, the ventilation is well-thought-out).

In front of us, three Mexican women failed to control their vehicle and crashed into a tree. Literally — the front wheels of the buggy were above my head. We picked them up walking along the track, sat them back, and about 5-10 minutes down the road, park workers took them away. The girls have something to remember.

The ticket includes a very, very good buffet restaurant. But pictures are essentially a must-buy — a very thoughtful system designed to extract about 100 dollars from a visiting family. Helmets are embedded with a chip, the system classifies the pics on the fly, and at the exit, you can see all your photos and buy them right there. And on the way back to the hotel, you can post on Facebook or Instagram.

Well, we’re back home now, back to work from Monday.

Risks of High-Pressure Activities on Eye Health and Hearing | June 28 2025, 23:52

Interesting. I learned, for example, that the human retina is not really attached to the vascular tunic, but is held in place only mechanically by intraocular pressure. Because of this, those who jump from heights or engage in diving, and generally anything that increases intraocular pressure, are at risk of retinal detachment.

(By the way, about pressure, I had a slight barotrauma in my left ear today during airplane landing: after landing there was a lingering feeling of stuffiness and muffled sounds, and while in the air it even hurt a bit. That is, some traces of sensation remained several hours later, but probably, by tomorrow morning I will recover fully).

https://youtu.be/QmX60IgWCGk?si=GrWzDtuZTpFeig-X

Navigating the Cosmos: Newton, Halley, and the Birth of Modern Science | June 03 2025, 03:01

I’m currently re-reading A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. An old book from 2003. For instance, the author celebrates that Pluto was finally recognized as a planet by the IAU. So, there’s this interesting story about scientific startups in the 17th century.

Everyone knows from school that Isaac Newton is the father of classical mechanics and gravity concepts, and authored a fundamental work that underpins all subsequent physical science: “Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy,” or simply “Principia.”

There was also Halley—the one after whom the comet was named, and then there was Hooke, who discovered the cell (and Hooke’s law of elasticity and loads of other stuff).

So in 1684, Halley, discussing the problem of planetary orbits with Robert Hooke and Christopher Wren, asked, “What force makes the planets move in elliptical orbits?” Hooke claimed it was a force inversely proportional to the square of the distance, but he could not prove it strictly. Halley went to Cambridge to ask Newton directly—and to his astonishment, Newton said that he had already proven it. Moreover, he promised to send a detailed account. Actually, he got a bit carried away and instead of simply answering the question, he wrote three volumes of “Principia” (and deliberately wrote it in a complicated way to discourage the uninitiated).

As the work on “Principia” was nearly complete, Newton and Hooke disputed over who first discovered the inverse-square law of force, and Newton refused to release the key third volume that made the first two volumes sensible. Thanks only to tense diplomacy and the most generous doses of flattery from Halley, the fussy professor eventually agreed to release the final volume. Without Halley’s interest and prodding, Newton probably would not have formalized his discoveries into a cohesive work.

The Royal Society had promised to publish the work but then declined, citing financial difficulties. The year before, the society had funded a costly flop called “History of Fishes,” and suspected that a book on mathematical principles would hardly stir market excitement.

Halley, whose financial situation was modest, paid for the publication from his own pocket. Newton, as was his habit, contributed nothing. To make matters worse, just then, Halley had taken a position as the society’s clerk, and was informed that the society could no longer pay him the promised salary of 50 pounds a year.

Instead, they decided to pay him with copies of the History of Fishes. The society handed him 50 copies of the same History of Fishes” (apparently intended for fireplace use).

About several hundred copies of “Principia” were released—a rather large print run for such an expensive book, yet the publication aroused no interest from the reading public. The book sold very poorly, and the publishing did not pay off at all. Even in 1739, 53 years after the publication, an inventory check found the Society still had 126 copies left, and these were being sold at huge discounts, given away, or virtually given away for free.

Ironically, one of the most influential texts in the history of humankind was considered virtually a commercial failure at the time.

And it’s funny that since its publication in 1687, there was a calculation error in the text that wasn’t noticed until 1987, 300 years later, by a student, Robert Garisto, a senior at the University of Chicago.

In sentence eight (the book used such numbering) Newton tried to confirm his theory by calculating the mass, the force of gravity at the surface, and the density of known planets. To calculate mass, he needed to know the angle between the line from the center of the Earth to the Sun and the line from a point on the Earth’s surface to the Sun.

Modern measurements give this value as about 8.8 arcseconds (one second is 1/3600 of a degree). Newton thought it was 10.5 seconds, but mysteriously used 11 seconds in the actual equation. This error was discovered by Garisto when he was redoing the calculations as part of a regular class assignment.

This Robert Garisto is now an editor of Physical Review Letters. He recently made headlines a second time when his journal published a scientific paper with 5,154 authors 🙂