The Knowledge Centre

  Teleportation, or the ability to transport a person or object instantly from one place to another, is a technology that could change the course of civilization and alter the destiny of nations. It could irrevocably alter the rules of warfare: armies could teleport troops behind enemy lines or simply teleport the enemy’s leadership and capture them. Today’s transportation system—from cars and ships to airplanes and railroads, and all the many industries that service these systems—would become obsolete; we could simply teleport ourselves to work and our goods to market. Vacations would become effortless, as we teleport ourselves to our destination. Teleportation would change everything.   Teleportation is also part of every magician’s bag of tricks and illusions: pulling rabbits out of a hat, cards out of his or her sleeves, and coins from behind someone’s ear. One of the more ambitious magic tricks of recent times featured an elephant disappearing before the eyes of a startled audien

  Our Universe started with a big bang and at that instant the main ingredients of the universe were created, which are known as space-time. Space has three dimensions and time has only one dimension. Since space has three dimensions, we can go in three directions left, right and up or at any point in space but on the other hand time has only one dimension due to which we can go in only one direction in time with a constant rate, which is future. However, there remains a question that can we travel to any point in time like we can go anywhere in space? Is time travel possible? The short answer is “yes”. Time Travel   Time is one of the great mysteries of the universe. We are all swept up in the river of time against our will. Time travel has been the main topic for science fiction writers. But the first serious attempt to explore time travel in fiction was H. G. Wells’s classic The Time Machine, in which the hero is sent hundreds of thousands of years into the future. In that distant

  At the time of ancient Greeks, it was believed that all matter in the Universe was made up of four basic elements - earth, air, water and fire. Furthermore, it was also believed that matter was continuous , that is, one could divide a piece of matter into smaller and smaller bits without any limit: one never came up against a grain of matter that could not be divided further. However, some Greeks, such as Democritus, believed that all the matter was made up of small particles, which could not be further divided, and these tiny particles were called atoms. (The word atom means “indivisible” in Greek.) However, our understanding of nature have been changed by years of research and now we have a better explanation of how our Universe works. There are four fundamental forces which dominate the Universe and on the basis of these forces the Universe works. Here is a brief explanation of these forces. Gravitational Force   The gravity is the weakest of all the forces. It is a universal fo

  Since the dawn of humanity, humans have been looking up at the sky and are being fascinated. They wondered where do all these objects like stars, moon and sun come from and how they worked. In the past many people tried to answer these questions and explained the working of the cosmos. These explanations were not based on any evidence or observations. But now, we are living in a golden age of science and technology. We have answered these questions on the basis of evidence and observations. But now, not only humans look up at the stars but they want to go there and settle there. The moon landing was the  first step in this quest, that was successfully achieved. The Earth will not remain as it is, forever. In the future, it will be inhabitable for life. So, w e have to find a new home for ourselves.  Now, our next step is to land humans on the Ma rs, which is hoped to done in the near future. We can colonize Mars and make human colonies there. But, in the near future solar system will

    Our Universe is full of most strange and mysterious objects. One of these objects are neutron stars. Neutron stars are among the objects having most extreme density and gravity. After black holes neutron stars are the one with most density and gravity. Neutron stars were first predicted by Swiss  astronomer Fritz Zwicky in 1933, but they seemed so fantastic that they were  ignored by scientists for decades. In 1933, with Walter Baade, he coined the word “supernova” and correctly predicted the existence of n eutron stars. We will discuss briefly about neutron stars and how they are formed. Illustration Of A Neutron Star What Is A Neutron Star?    In the aftermath of a supernova explosion, there is a tiny remnant called a neutron star. The density of neutron stars is unbelievably high and violent. Due to very high density, the gravity becomes extremely strong. The mass of neutron star could be equal to one, two or three suns but compressed to a diameter of only 25 kilometres. It is s

   The Universe is big, so big that we can't imagine it's vastness. The Universe is expanding and not only expanding but the expansion is being accelerated. The diameter of visible Universe is approximately 95 billion light years, which contains billions of galaxies and each galaxy contains billions to trillions of stars. We can't see across 95 billion light years because light from that part of the Universe have not reached us yet. So, there is a lot of Universe that we can't see. It appears that the Universe has a quite big size. But, there remains a question that will the Universe remain forever? or the Universe will end? The short answer is "yes" the Universe has an ending. We will discuss some possible scenarios in which the Universe will end. Image Of Universe By Hubble Space Telescope Big Crunch   One of the possible scenarios the Universe could end is "big crunch". The Universe is expanding and there is a mysterious force speeding up the expa

     Are we the only living species in the entire Universe? The observable Universe is about 90 billion light years in diameter. There are at least 100 billion galaxies in the observable Universe each with 100 to 1000 billion stars. Recently, we have found that planets are also very common, which orbit these stars and there are probably trillions of habitable planets. Which means there is a lot of opportunity for life to develop and exist. But the question is, where is it? And why we have not seen it yet?    Even if there are alien civilizations in the other galaxies there is no way we will ever know about them. Basically, everything outside of our local group is out of our reach forever because of the expansion of the Universe. Even, if we had really fast spaceships, it would take billions of years to reach our nearest galaxy. So, finding life there would be impossible for us. So, lets focus on our home galaxy Milky Way. Possibility of Life in Milky Way   Our home galaxy, the Milky W