Thomas Edison’s 100-Year Prediction

Almost every people in the world know Thomas Alva Edison, an inspiring inventor from the US who was famous with his invention which became a benchmark of the beginning of modern era: the bulb lamp. He was also the one who found camera and direct current electric excitation.

In 1911, Miami Metropolis asked Edison for a brief prediction on a hundred year in the future, which meant the year 2011. As quoted from the Washington Post, Edison said that in 2011, electricity will replace steam power as train main power. Also, he predicted that air transportation would be a daily transportation. Moreover, Edison also predicted that steel would get cheaper and cheaper and thus make it a common material for building construction.

All of those predictions are now proven, but there was one prediction that struck all of the heaps. He predicted that there would be a two-inch book with thousands of pages. And guess what? We now have iPad and other e-book readers.

However, not all of Edison’s predictions were accurate. His inaccurate prediction was that human would find a way to transform iron into gold. Unfortunately, that prediction is still trapped in human imagination.

Technology of Antimatter

Do you have any idea of what antimatter is? Or, have you even heard of it before? Let me give a hint: it had been mentioned several times in Hollywood movies, such as Star Trek series, or a more recent Angels and Demons (actually, the novel with the same title written by Dan Brown was the one introduced me to antimatter.) If you still out of clue, this posting, which is devoted to briefly explain about antimatter, will [hopefully] help you to understand it.

Introduction

Antimatter is a matter consisting of elementary anti-particles, which have contradictory characteristic with particles. Put it simple, antimatter is the negative side of what we generally know as matter. Philosophically, antimatter is what balances the existence of matter. If a matter is +1, then antimatter is -1, and thus +1 - 1 = 0. To make it less vague, everything that our senses can detect is made of matters: air, water, stone, soil, everything!

The Discovery

The concept of antimatter was stimulated by Paul Dirac in 1927, when he developed a relativistic equation for the electron, known as the Dirac equation. But the real concept of antimatter was confirmed experimentally by Carl D. Anderson in 1932.

In 1995, European Council for the Nuclear Research (Conseil European pour la Reserche Nucleare - CERN) which is headquartered in Switzerland, claimed that they had successfully made a first particle of antimatter in the world.

Characteristic

Antimatter is the strongest energy source has ever known by human. It can produce energy with 100% efficiency, compared to just 1.5% efficiency of nuclear reaction. This means, antimatter produces no remnant, unlike nuclear which will leave a big amount of radiation. A single droplet of antimatter can produce a 24 hours electrical power for New York City. A gram of antimatter contains the explosive power of a ten kiloton nuclear bomb, the same as a bomb put Hiroshima to the ground.

Antimatter is not without any weakness. There is a fatal weakness of antimatter. It is extremely unstable and flammable. It will explode and annihilate everything within the range when it comes in contact with any matter, even with air.

Antimatter is said to be the most expensive substance in existence, with an estimated cost of US $300 billion per milligram. This is because the production is very complicated and time-consuming.

Production

Antimatter is being produced at CERN laboratory by using Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which is claimed as the biggest machine in the world with its 8-miles-thick and 27-miles-long circular tunnel. In LHC, two types of particles are accelerated so fast that they reach 180,000 mile in a second (almost close to the light velocity.

Preservation

For its extremely unstable nature, to preserve it, an antimatter trap is used. In the trap, antimatter is suspended in a magnetic field to avoid contact with any matter. These applied forces suspend the antimatter in the middle of the vacuumed container, usually a tube.

The answers from the research conducted on antimatter result on another questions, especially of its position in this universe. Based on basic principles of symmetry, it was believed that the universe consist of both matter and antimatter in equal amounts. If it was true, where in the universe were those antimatters hidden? Some say Black Hole is one of its center, while other say Bermuda Triangle is one of its spot.

Zombie

There is no doubt that most of gamers and movie-lovers around the world are familiar with it, but I bet less than half of them aware that the origin of the word "zombie" was derived from Kikongo (Congo's language) word zumbi which means god or divine entity. There are just too many zombie-related video games and movies. Among them, the most famous franchise is clearly Resident Evil (Biohazard in Japan), which was produced by Capcom and made its debut in 1996 as one of Sony PlayStation's earliest 3-D video games.

The history of zombie emergence is arguable even today. Most people doubt their very existence other than a mere Hollywood fiction, whereas some believed the traces are left in some part of Africa. So, long time ago, the West African believed that dead people could be revived by a sorcerer through voodoo power. These "undeads" were then controlled as laborers to work at farm or garden.

In 1937, Zora Hurston, an African-American author, found a case of a woman who had died and been buried yet appeared in a village in Haiti. She found out that the awakening of the dead woman was due to the use of some medical secrets. However, she was not able to finish her investigation as she could not find any further information.


In 1982, another investigation – again, in Haiti -- was done by Wade Davis, a Harvard ethnobotanist. He concluded that a living human can be turned into a zombie by using two special powders. The powders were coup de poudre (French for powder strike) and datura. By inserting these powders into the vein, a victim can be turned into a death-like state in which a shaman is able to control him/her. From his research, he wrote two books to explain this phenomenon, The Serpent and the Rainbow (1985) and Passage of Darkness: The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie (1988). However, his works had been heavily criticized. Terence Hines, an expert in neurology, doubted Davis’ claim that the powders can induce the death-like state. He also stated that Davis’ reports of Haitian zombies is viewed as overly credulous.

The description and concept of zombie we know today are assumed to had been greatly influenced by George A. Romero's film Night of the Living Dead. In this 1960's film, he related zombie with vampire which resulted on a new hybrid of powerful yet messy monster with a never-satisfiable hunger on human flesh. He was inspired by Richard Matheson, the first author of the genre with his first novel I Am Legend (1954), which had been adapted several times by Hollywood producers.