NAME: Rangelie G Magpantay DATE: October 2,

2021
SECTION CODE: CAS-06-101P
Science, Technology and Society

Direction: Outline the significant events in the History of Science and Technology from the Big
History of Modern Science by Hannu Rajaniemi’s TED talk.
I. The Big
A. Stars as a measuring tool to measure the universe
 We can see a thousand of stars with our naked eye.
 10,000 stars can be seen as 3 tea spoons of sand.
 Around 19 hundred, astronomers already have powerful telescopes.
 Millions of stars can be seen as a small bucket of sand.
 Before Leavitt died she spotted a pattern in the stars that become a new way
to measure how far the stars were.
 After Leavitt died, Edwin Hubble used her method and discovered that there
is other far away galaxies just like our Milky Way Galaxy.
 70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars! Can be seen as 10,000x of all the
sand in the earth.
 Our universe is getting bigger and galaxies are moving far away from each
other in a tremendous speed.
B. Theory of Relativity
 Einstein discovered the Theory of Relativity that says that space is really just
distances between points and that those distances change depending on
what you have bet those points.
 Our phones use GPS which is based on Einstein's equations.
 Einstein’s equations predicted that are universe is expanding for 13.8 billion
years now, so our universe started out very small and from that moment of
expansion started the Big Bang Theory.
 The tiny little ripples grew with the universe into seeds that became stars and
galaxies.
 E=mc 2 wherein E means energy, m is mass and c 2 is speed of light.

II. The Small
A. Atoms
 The tremendous number of stars can be compared to the number of atoms in
just three droplets of water.
 In 1898, Marie Curie discovered Radium which radiates so much energy and
she used it to treat bone cancer but eventually she died because of too much to
Radiation.
B. Nucleus
 In 1911, Ernest Rutherford discovered nucleus.
 The nucleus of an atom is made out of particles called protons orbited by a
cloud of electrons.
 From the discovery, scientists come up with an idea to explain the structure of
the atom. It is called quantum mechanics.
C. The Stubborn Hungarian
 Leo Szilard (the stubborn Hungarian), a man became close with Einstein, has
invented a new type of fridge which emits gases that are poisonous.
 During 1993 in London, he realized that there could be a chain reaction
wherein when atom splits, it would release neutrons that could split more
atoms and release more neutrons which can already be used to make atomic
power.
 This has been used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki wherein atomic power and
weapons were made which caused terrible things to happen.
 Slizard himself was horrified, spending his life on campaigning about nuclear
weapons Physics to Biology.
 To conclude, there will always be a dark side to our understanding of the big in
the small and vice-versa.
D. Transistor
 What triggered the big explosion was a small device called transistors which
was built by a team led by William Shockley in Bells Labs during 1947. Also, it
is the simplest building block of computers It can store 1 or 0 just like in atomic
bombs.
 Eugene Wigner said that there are some materials which can be made to
sometimes conduct electricity and not so gives 1 and 0, and one of those
materials is silicon.
E. Modern Transistor
 Two billion transistors can be made with two grains of sand.
 In 1947, there was just one transistor. Today, there are 3 times 10 to the power
of 21 transistors.
 In ten years there will be more transistors than there are stars in the known
universe.
F. Modern Computers
 We can see things that we never seen before.
 Computer are now storing data and analyzing it for us.
 Computer are revealing a world that is much more complex than we thought.
 We can now read DNA through the use of computers.
 The cell was found out that it is actually at least 50 times more complex.
 The cell is more like the large hadron collider in terms of complexity.
G. Full Complexity
 We are using transistors to build complexity.
 We use transistor in every single device we build and we connect them all
together.
 1977 to 2007’s internet is like a chain reaction.
 Complex systems can be fragile and get cascading failures.
  Cascading failures one thing failing off to another.

H. Complexity of Nature
 Einsteins are now playing computer games.
 Foldit, a computer game that is a best way to find a shape of a biological
molecule.
 Zooniverse, where anyone can find cancer mutations or new kinds of
galaxies in huge sets of data.
 Iceland tried to crowd source the drafting of the constitutions by social
media.
 Einstein said that things should be as simple as possible but no simpler.