Descending to New Ocean Depths

Transport for Tomorrow.

One thing is certain about the public transport of the future: it must be more efficient than it is today. The time is coming when it will be quicker to fly across the Atlantic to New York than to travel from home to office. The two main problems are: what vehicle shall we use and how can we plan our use of it? There are already some modern vehicles which are not yet in common use, but which may become a usual means of transport in the future. One of these is the small electric car: we go out into the street, find an empty car, get into it, drive to our destination, get out and leave the car for the next person who comes along. In fact, there may be no need to drive these cars. With an automatic guidance system for cars being developed, it will be possible for us to select our destination just as today we select a telephone number, and our car will move automatically to the address we want. For long journeys in private cars one can also use an automatic guidance system. Arriving at the motorway, a driver will select the lane¹ he wishes to use, switch over to automatic driving, and then relax — dream, read the newspaper, have a meal, flirt with his passenger — while the car does the work for him. Unbelievable? It is already possible. Just as in many ships and aircraft today we are piloted automatically for the greater part of the journey, so in the future we can also have this luxury in our own cars. A decade ago, the only thing electronic on most automobiles was the radio. But at present sophisticated electronics is playing a big part in current automotive research. For example, in every gasoline-powered² car that General Motors Corporation makes there is a small computer continuously monitoring the exhaust. The device, about the size of a pack of cigarettes, adjusts the vehicle carburetor fuel intake³ to get the best fuel economy. Ford cars are equipped with an electronic instrument panel that, among other things⁴, will calculate how far one can drive on the fuel left in the tank. It will also estimate the time of arrival at destination and tell the driver what speed he has averaged⁵ since turning on the ignition. According to specialists these features made possible by microelectronics are only the beginning. Radar may control the brakes to avoid collisions, and a display screen may show the car's position on the road. Recently a radar to be mounted on lorries and cars has been designed in the USA. The radar aerial looks like a third headlight placed directly above the bumper. Having summed up the information about the speed and distance of various objects ahead, the computer detects all possible dangers and their nature. A third component in the system is a monitor on the instrument panel. The radar only observes objects ahead of the vehicle. It is automatically turned on when the speed exceeds ten miles an hour. The green light on the panel indicates that the system is on. The yellow light warns of stationary objects ahead, or something moving slower than the car. The red light and buzzer warn that the speed should go down. Another red light and sound signal make the driver apply the brakes. A Japanese company is designing a car of a new generation. When completed, the new model will have a lot of unusual characteristics. The car's four-wheel control system will ensure movement diagonally and even sideways, like a crab, at right angles to the longitudinal axis. This is especially important when leaving the car in parking places. To help the driver get information while concentrating on the road, the most important data will be projected on the wind screen. A tourist travelling in such a car will not lose his way even in Sahara with its impassable roads: a navigation Earth satellite will indicate the route. A new ceramic engine has been developed in Japan. Many important parts as pistons, pressure rings⁶, valves and some others have been made of various ceramic materials, piston rings⁷ made of silicon materials being in many respects better than those of steel. They withstand temperatures up to 1,000 °C. Therefore, the engine does not need a cooling system.

A New Era for Aircraft

Aviation experts expect that today's aircraft will begin to be replaced with some new form of supersonic transport in a few years time. A 21st century hypersonic aircraft may open a new age of aircraft design. The designers of this country displayed the project of such a suI personic passenger liner among the prospective models at one of I: the latest Aerospace Salon held on the old Le Bourget airfield¹ in I Paris. An elongated fuselage with a sharp nose and without a horizontal stabilizer makes it look more like a rocket. The speed matches the looks². This plane will fly at a speed five to six times above the speed of sound, e.g., it will cover the distance between Tokyo and Moscow in less than two hours. The diameter of the fu-selage will be 4 meters and the overall length 100 meters, with the cabin accomodating 300 passengers. The future superplanes of such a class will have no windows, but the passengers can enjoy³ watch- ing the panorama of the Earth on the TV monitor at the front of the cabin. They will fly so fast that ordinary aircraft windows would make the structure too weak to withstand the stresses at such a speed. At high velocities the air resistance in the lower atmosphere is so great that the skin is heated to very high temperature. The only way out is to fly higher. Therefore, airliners' routes will mainly lie in the stratosphere. In general, to build a reliable hypersonic plane one has to over- come a whole set of technological and scientific difficulties. Apart from creating highly economical combined engines and heat-insulating materials⁴, designers have to make such an amount of thermodynamic computations that can't be performed without using supercomputers. One of the ways to make planes as economi-cal as possible is lightening the aircraft by substituting new com-posite materials for conventional metal alloys. Accounting for⁵ less than 5 per cent of the overall aircraft weight now, the percentage of composite material parts will exceed 25 per cent in new generation models. An extensive use of new materials combined with better aerodynamics and engines will allow increasing fuel efficiency by one-third⁶. Because of the extreme temperatures generated by the atmosphere friction, a hypersonic craft will also require complicated pooling measures. One possibility is using cryogenic fuels, such as liquid hydrogen, as both coolants⁷ and propellants. The fuel flow-ing through the aircraft's skin would cool the surfaces as it vaporizes before being injected into combustion chamber. In addition, specialists in many countries are currently working on new propeller engines considered much more economical and less noisy than jets. The only disadvantage is that propeller planes fly slower than jet planes. However, it has recently been announced that specialists succeeded in⁸ solving this problem. As a result a ventilator engine with a propeller of ten fibre-glass blades has been built, each being five meters long. It will be mounted in the experi-mental passenger plane.

We know little about the ocean yet. The dream of exploring under the waves is almost as old as seagoing. Legend says that Alexander the Great submerged himself in a round glass container, and Leonardo da Vinci designed a submersible vehicle in his notebooks centuries before Jules Verne wrote «Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea». If their dreams had been realized and such a craft had been constructed, mankind would have known about the secrets of Ocean much earlier. However, already during the Swiss National Fair in 1964 a submersible vehicle took thousands of people deep into Lake Geneva. Not long ago, the crafts that penetrated the ocean depths were almost as primitive as the marine life they watched around them. However, non-military deep sea ships, so-called submersibles, were progressing rapidly. Russian, French, Japanese and American scientists are developing crafts that can submerge deeper, stay longer and find out more than earlier apparatuses. Soon, one of the most advanced crafts, a one passenger submerging ship, will be tested. It may be able to take explorers and technicians deeper than ever before (up to 3,300 feet) and perform difficult underwater tasks with extreme precision. This new submersible is essentially a spherical transparent plastic hull¹ mounted on a metal platform. It looks like an underwater helicopter and can manoeuvre itself in its water environment with some of the versatility² of a helicopter due to the use of a cycloid rotor³instead of conventional marine-propeller screws⁴. It is expected that this apparatus will move around the ocean like a sports car. However, the breakthrough⁵ that will make this particular craft quite different from other manned submersibles is a mechanical hand called the sensory manipulator system⁶. Miniature video cameras on the «wrist» of the manipulator provide it with vision and microphones enable the submersible to «hear». This manipulator system is designed to lift up to 120 pounds and will also be able to perform such accurate scientific work as collecting samples of ocean-floor minerals and marine life. When demonstrated, it lifted crystal glasses, drew pictures and wrote with a pen. Some scientists are trying to develop the world's deepest manned submersible. When completed, it will be capable of submerging to the depths of 21,000 feet. Its crew will be in a pressure-resistant titanium-alloy cabin. This craft will be driven by a battery-operated electric motor and will work for up to nine hours. It will record images with colour television and stereo cameras and will collect samples by manipulating two robotic arms. If such crafts are constructed on a large scale, we shall be able not only to spend our holidays enjoying the underwater life, but also grow and cultivate sea plants, fish and pearls. It will be possible provided scientists, designers and politicians from all over the world join their efforts and solve the most important problems in this field.

Laser

In the "War of Worlds" written before the turn of the last century H. Wells told a fantastic story of how Martians almost invaded our Earth. Their weapon was a mysterious «sword of heat». Today Wells' sword of heat has come to reality in the laser. The name stands for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation. Laser, one of the most sophisticated inventions of man, produces an intensive beam of light of a very pure single colour. It represents the fulfilment of one of the mankind's oldest dreams of technology to provide1 a light beam intensive enough to vaporize the hardest and most heat-resistant materials. It can indeed make lead run like water, or, when focused, it can vaporize any substance on the earth. There is no material unamenable2 to laser treatment and laser will become one of the main technological tools quite soon. The applications of laser in industry and science are so many and so varied as to suggest magic3. Scientists in many countries are working at a very interesting problem: combining the two big technological discoveries of the second half of the 20th century — laser and thermonuclear reaction — to produce a practically limitless source of energy. Physicists of this country have developed large laser installations to conduct physical experiments in heating thermonuclear fuel with laser beams. There also exists an idea to use laser for solving the problem of controlled thermonuclear reaction. The laser beam must heat the fuel to the required temperature so quickly that the plasma does not have time to disintegrate. According to current estimates, the duration of the pulse has to be approximately a billionth of a second. The light capacity of this pulse would be dozens of times greater than the capacity of all the world's power plants. To meet such demands in practice, scientists and engineers must work hard as it is clear that a lot of difficulties are to be encountered on route4. The laser's most important potential may be its use in communications. The intensity of a laser can be rapidly changed to encode very complex signals. In principle, one laser beam, vibrating a billion times faster than ordinary radio waves, could carry the radio, TV and telephone messages of the world simultaneously. In just a fraction of a second, for example, one laser beam could transmit the entire text of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Besides, there are projects to use lasers for long distance communication and for transmission of energy to space stations, to the surface of the Moon or to planets in the Solar system. Projects have also been suggested to place lasers aboard Earth satellites nearer to the Sun in order to transform the solar radiation into laser beams, with this transformed energy subsequently transmitted to the Earth or to other space bodies. These projects have not yet been put into effect5, because of the great technological difficulties to be overcome and, therefore, the great cost involved. But there is no doubt that in time6 these projects will be realized and the laser beam will begin operating in outer space as well.

Superconductivity

According to the prominent scientist in this country V.L. Ginz-burg the latest world achievements in the field of superconductivity mean a revolution in technology and industry. Recent spectacular breakthroughs1 in superconductors may be compared with the physics discoveries that led to electronics and nuclear power. They are likely to bring the mankind to the threshold of a new technological age. Prestige, economic and military benefits could well come to the nation that first will master this new field of physics. Superconductors were once thought to be physically impossible. But in 1911 superconductivity was discovered by a Dutch physicist K. Onnes, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1913 for his low-temperature research. He found the electrical resistivity of a mercury wire to disappear suddenly when cooled below a temperature of 4 Kelvin (—269 °C). Absolute zero is known to be 0 K. This discovery was a completely unexpected phenomenon. He also discovered that a superconducting material can be returned to the normal state either by passing a sufficiently large current through it or by applying a sufficiently strong magnetic field to it. But at that time there was no theory to explain this. For almost 50 years after K. Onnes' discovery theorists were unable to develop a fundamental theory of superconductivity. In 1950 physicists Landau and Ginzburg made a great contribution to the development of superconductivity theory. They introduced a model which proved to be useful in understanding electromagnetic properties of superconductors. Finally, in 1957 a satisfactory theory was presented by American physicists, which won for them in 1972 the Nobel Prize in physics. Research in superconductors became especially active since a discovery made in 1986 by IBM2 scientists in Zurich. They found a metallic ceramic compound to become a superconductor at a temperature well above3 the previously achieved record of 23 K. It was difficult to believe it. However, in 1987 American physicist Paul Chu informed about a much more sensational discovery: he and his colleagues produced superconductivity at an unbelievable before temperature 98 K in a special ceramic material. At once in all leading laboratories throughout the world superconductors of critical temperature 100 K and higher (that is, above the boiling temperature of liquid nitrogen) were obtained. Thus, potential technical uses of high temperature superconductivity seemed to be possible and practical. Scientists have found a ceramic material that works at room temperature. But getting superconductors from the laboratory into production will be no easy task. While the new superconductors are easily made, their quality is often uneven. Some tend to break when produced, others lose their superconductivity within minutes or hours. All are extremely difficult to fabricate into wires. Moreover, scientists lack a full understanding of how ceramics become superconductors. This fact makes develop ing new substances largely a random process. This is likely to continue until theorists give a fuller explanation of how superconductivity is produced in new materials