Episode 14: Demystified (01:06:35)
This week we explore six new words as part of our second “Say what?” feature episode (see Episode 3 for the first episode). It is our hope that by demystifying terms and words that are often heard in media and around campus with little to no explanation, we can pique your interest and hopefully open up a new avenue of exploration for you to go on. Today we get a bit out of our comfort zone and take a multi-disciplinary approach to our words, rather than just all computer science words, so hang on!
Our first approach is the “God Particle”, the mysterious mass-giving sub atomic particle that the Fermilab and CERN are racing to discover first. Although our podcast ends in a black hole, most likely a higgs-boson collision will not. We delve into the Standard Model of Particle Physics like only amateur scientists with extreme interest can!
We return to our computer science comfort zone to talk about the CLI (it was an ambush!) and foo and bar, and Ben drops the f-bomb without thinking about it. These terms may crop up, and since the IEEE can’t demystify them, we give it a go!
We move onto a multidisciplinary topic- transistors. These little guys have a pretty interesting history thanks to William Shockley, who won a nobel prize for them, but who didn’t do much in the way of inventing them. The true inventors, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, had to share credit with him since he was their boss at Bell Laboratories. We also talk about semiconductors and Moore’s law.
Going even smaller, Nanotechnology is our fifth word we demystify. This array of technologies is another multidisciplinary topic that can have huge repercussions for our future and will most likely start a scientific revolution (teleportation, anyone?). Finally, we close out with yet another controversial science topic- Parallax, but not for the reasons you think!
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