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Wonder

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Ideas and discoveries from science, art, nature and language.

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Wonder

For the pleasure of learning something you did not know, from an unfamiliar artist to a surprising discovery.

WonderTechnology

By one widely cited estimate, about 13 sextillion transistors (13 followed by 21 zeros) had been made by 2018, more than any other object in history. A transistor is a tiny electronic switch, and computer chips are built from billions of them.

The first transistor was built at Bell Labs in the United States in 1947 by John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, working in William Shockley's group; the three shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics. Transistors replaced the fragile glass valves of early electronics. A transistor switches an electric current on or off, and those on and off states are the 1s and 0s computers work with. Almost all transistors made today are of a type called the MOSFET, invented at Bell Labs in 1959 by Mohamed Atalla and Dawon Kahng. The 13 sextillion figure is an estimate by the industry analyst Jim Handy, published by the Computer History Museum in 2018. A single advanced chip can now hold more than 100 billion transistors, and billions more are made every day.

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An MRI scanner uses a powerful magnet and pulses of radio waves to make hydrogen atoms in the body give off faint signals, which a computer turns into detailed pictures of the brain, muscles and organs. Unlike X-rays and CT scans, it uses no ionising radiation, the kind that can damage cells.

Most of the body is water and fat, both rich in hydrogen, and the nucleus of each hydrogen atom behaves like a tiny magnet. The scanner's magnet is usually tens of thousands of times stronger than Earth's magnetic field, and inside it these nuclei line up. A radio pulse knocks them out of line; as they settle back they send out weak radio signals. Different tissues settle at different speeds, which gives the images their contrast. The method grew out of nuclear magnetic resonance, a laboratory technique, and 'nuclear' was later dropped from the name because it worried patients, though no radioactivity is involved. Paul Lauterbur and Peter Mansfield, who worked out in the 1970s how to turn the signals into pictures, shared the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The loud knocking during a scan comes from rapidly switched magnetic coils.

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A nuclear power station makes electricity from fission, the splitting of heavy atoms such as uranium. The heat released boils water, and the steam spins turbines, just as in a coal or gas plant. Nuclear power supplied about 9 per cent of the world's electricity in 2023.

When an atom of uranium-235, the form of uranium that powers most reactors, absorbs a neutron, one of the particles found in an atom's nucleus, it splits in two, releasing heat and two or three more neutrons. These can split further atoms, a process called a chain reaction. Control rods made of materials that soak up neutrons are moved in or out to keep the reaction steady. The fuel is extremely concentrated: a kilogram of typical reactor fuel holds about 120,000 times as much energy as a kilogram of coal, and the plant gives off almost no carbon dioxide while running. The first plant to feed a power grid opened at Obninsk, near Moscow, in 1954, and Britain's Calder Hall followed in 1956. The difficulties are long-lived radioactive waste, high building costs and the need for strict safety, as the Chernobyl accident in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011 showed.

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In 1877 Thomas Edison built the phonograph, the first machine that could both record sound and play it back. A needle pressed the vibrations of a voice into a sheet of tinfoil wrapped round a turning cylinder, and running a needle along that groove again brought the sound back.

Edison hit on the idea while looking for ways to record telegraph and telephone messages at his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey. He announced the invention on 21 November 1877 and was granted a patent in February 1878. Years later he recalled that the first words he recorded were the nursery rhyme 'Mary Had a Little Lamb'. In December 1877 the machine was shown at the offices of Scientific American, where it greeted the editors and asked how they liked the phonograph. Twenty years earlier the Frenchman Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville had built a device that traced sound as wavy lines on soot-blackened paper, but it could not play them back; one of his 1860 tracings was only turned into sound in 2008. Tinfoil wore out quickly, so later machines used wax cylinders and then flat discs.

Thomas Edison, 1877Read card
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Light bulbs that glow when electricity heats a thin thread, or filament, inside them existed before Thomas Edison. In 1879 his team at Menlo Park, New Jersey, made one with a carbon filament that lasted, then built the generators, wiring, meters and power stations that made electric light practical for homes and offices.

In 1802 the chemist Humphry Davy made a strip of platinum glow with electricity, and over the next 75 years many inventors tried to turn that glow into lasting light. In England, the inventor Joseph Swan showed a working carbon-filament lamp to an audience of more than 700 in Newcastle in February 1879, and his house in Gateshead became the first in the world lit by light bulbs. Edison's team made its first successful test on 22 October 1879, when a bulb glowed for about 13 and a half hours; filaments of carbonised bamboo later lasted more than 1,200 hours. Edison's bigger achievement was the system around the bulb. In September 1882 his Pearl Street Station in New York began supplying electricity to 82 customers. In Britain, Edison's and Swan's companies later merged as Ediswan.

Thomas Edison, 1879Read card
WonderScience

In 1928, at St Mary's Hospital in London, Alexander Fleming saw that a stray mould had stopped bacteria growing around it on a lab dish, and later named its active substance penicillin. From 1939 an Oxford team led by Howard Florey and Ernst Chain purified it and proved it could cure infections.

Fleming came back from a holiday in September 1928 to find a dish of Staphylococcus bacteria spoiled by a Penicillium mould, with a clear ring around it where the bacteria had died. He published his findings in 1929 but could not make the substance pure or stable enough to use as a drug. In Oxford, Florey, Chain, Norman Heatley and colleagues learned to grow the mould and extract penicillin, and in May 1940 showed that it protected infected mice. In February 1941 they gave it to their first patient, an Oxford policeman; he improved, but the supply ran out and he died. American factories then scaled up production, and 2.3 million doses were ready for the Normandy landings in 1944. Fleming, Florey and Chain shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. In his Nobel lecture Fleming warned that taking too little penicillin could make bacteria resistant to it.

Alexander Fleming, 1928Read card
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On 8 November 1895, in his laboratory at the University of Würzburg in Germany, Wilhelm Röntgen found invisible rays that pass through skin and flesh but are stopped by bone and metal. He called them X-rays, X for unknown, and in 1901 received the first Nobel Prize in Physics.

Röntgen was passing electricity through a glass tube covered in black cardboard when he noticed a coated screen on a nearby bench begin to glow. For weeks afterwards he almost lived in his laboratory, studying the new rays. About six weeks after the discovery he made an X-ray image of his wife Anna Bertha's hand, showing her bones and her ring, and his paper 'On a New Kind of Rays' appeared on 28 December 1895. News spread within days, and doctors were soon using X-rays to look at broken bones. Röntgen refused to patent the discovery so that everyone could benefit from it. Many languages, including German and Turkish, still name the rays after him, which is why an X-ray is a 'röntgen' in Turkish.

Wilhelm Röntgen, 1895Read card
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On 2 December 1942, under the stands of a disused American football stadium at the University of Chicago, a team led by Enrico Fermi started the first controlled nuclear chain reaction. Their reactor, Chicago Pile-1, was a carefully built stack of graphite blocks and uranium.

In a chain reaction, each uranium atom that splits releases particles called neutrons, which go on to split more atoms. Fermi, an Italian physicist who had moved to the United States, worked with a team of about 30, including Leo Szilard and Leona Woods. They stacked some 45,000 graphite blocks, with uranium set among them, in a squash court beneath the stands of Stagg Field. The pile had no radiation shielding or cooling, because it ran at only about half a watt. After about four and a half minutes the team stopped it by putting control rods back in. The work was secret, part of the Manhattan Project, the wartime American programme to build an atomic bomb. Arthur Compton, the physicist in charge of the work in Chicago, reported the success by telephone in code: 'The Italian navigator has landed in the New World.'

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On 25 June 1967, Our World became the first live television programme broadcast around the globe by satellite. Broadcasters in 14 countries each sent a live segment, and an estimated 400 to 700 million people watched, the largest television audience up to that time.

The idea came from the BBC producer Aubrey Singer, and the European Broadcasting Union coordinated the project. Four communications satellites, two over the Atlantic and two over the Pacific, linked the countries, and the master control room was at the BBC in London. The rules were strict: everything had to be live, and no politicians or heads of state could appear. Eastern Bloc countries, including the Soviet Union, pulled out four days before the broadcast in protest at the West's response to the Six-Day War. The two-hour show featured the conductor Leonard Bernstein and the painter Joan Miró, among others, but it is best remembered for Britain's segment, in which the Beatles performed 'All You Need Is Love' for the first time.

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ENIAC, finished in 1945 at the University of Pennsylvania, was the first programmable, general-purpose electronic computer. It filled a large room and weighed about 27 tonnes, and each new problem had to be set up by rewiring cables and turning switches, a job that could take weeks.

John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert designed ENIAC for the US Army, to calculate the firing tables gunners used to aim artillery. Until then such tables were worked out by hand by 'human computers', many of them women. ENIAC's 18,000 or so vacuum tubes, glass valves that switch electric current on and off, let it make about 5,000 additions a second, roughly a thousand times faster than earlier electromechanical machines. It was unveiled in February 1946, and the press called it a 'giant brain'. Six women worked out how to program it: Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Fran Bilas and Ruth Lichterman. Their role was overlooked for decades; in 1997 they were inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame. ENIAC stayed in use until 1955.

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Encryption turns readable data into scrambled code that only someone with the right key can turn back. It protects online banking, card payments and private messages; the padlock many browsers show beside a web address means the page reached you encrypted.

People have hidden messages for thousands of years. Julius Caesar is said to have shifted each letter a fixed number of places along the alphabet, and in the 9th century the Arab scholar al-Kindi showed how to crack such codes by counting how often each letter appears. Modern encryption rests on mathematical problems that even very fast computers cannot solve without the key. For centuries the hard part was sharing a key safely. In 1976 Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman published a way for two strangers to agree on a secret key over an open line, the basis of what is called public-key cryptography; British government mathematicians had found similar ideas in secret a few years earlier. Your browser and your bank use this method, in a fraction of a second, every time you log in.

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Ordinary computers store information in bits that are either 0 or 1. Quantum computers use qubits, which can be in a combination of 0 and 1 at once, called a superposition, until they are measured. For certain problems, such as simulating molecules, they could be far faster than any ordinary computer.

In 1982 the physicist Richard Feynman suggested that computers built on quantum physics could simulate nature far more efficiently than ordinary ones. In 1994 the mathematician Peter Shor showed that a large quantum computer could break some of the encryption that protects the internet today, which drew wide attention to the field. The hard part is building one. Qubits are extremely fragile: heat or vibration can easily upset their state, a problem called decoherence, so some machines are cooled to about 0.02 degrees above absolute zero, the lowest temperature possible. Today's quantum computers are still small and make many errors, and they are not faster at everyday tasks such as browsing the web or sending email. Researchers hope they will help design new medicines, materials and batteries.

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In his 1950 paper 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence', Alan Turing proposed the imitation game: a judge exchanges typed messages with a hidden person and a hidden machine. If the judge cannot reliably tell which is which, the machine has done well. It became known as the Turing test.

Turing, a British mathematician, had described the basic idea of a programmable computer in 1936 and was one of the leading codebreakers at Bletchley Park during the Second World War. In the paper, published in the philosophy journal Mind, he argued that 'Can machines think?' was too vague to answer, because 'machine' and 'think' are so hard to define, and replaced it with a game whose results anyone could observe. He predicted that by about 2000 an average judge would have no more than a 70 per cent chance of spotting the machine after five minutes of questions. He also answered objections one by one, including Ada Lovelace's view that machines can only do what they are told. The test is still debated: passing it shows convincing conversation, not necessarily understanding.

Alan Turing, 1950Read card
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No single company or government owns the internet. It is tens of thousands of independent networks, run by phone companies, universities, businesses and others, that agree to pass data to one another using shared rules called protocols.

Data travels in small chunks called packets, each labelled with its destination, which may take different routes before being put back together. The core rules, known as TCP/IP, were proposed in 1974 by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, and the ARPANET, the American research network the internet grew from, switched to them on 1 January 1983. Today the rules are developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force, an open community anyone can join by contributing, while ICANN, a non-profit organisation, coordinates domain names and the numerical addresses that identify connected devices. A message from Istanbul to London may pass through several companies' cables and routers, the machines that send packets on their way, in a fraction of a second.

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DNA data storage writes digital files into synthetic DNA, using its four chemical letters, A, C, G and T, in place of a computer's 0s and 1s. A single gram could in theory hold about 215 million gigabytes, but writing and reading DNA is still far too slow and costly for everyday use.

Computers store everything as 0s and 1s. DNA storage translates those into sequences of A, C, G and T, builds the matching strands chemically, and reads them back with the same sequencing machines used in genetics. In 2012 George Church's team at Harvard stored a whole book this way. In 2013 Nick Goldman and colleagues at the European Bioinformatics Institute stored all of Shakespeare's sonnets and an audio clip of Martin Luther King's 'I Have a Dream' speech. The 215 million gigabyte figure comes from DNA Fountain, a method published in 2017 by Yaniv Erlich and Dina Zielinski. Kept cool and dry, DNA can last for thousands of years, which makes it attractive for archives, but in that study writing just two megabytes cost about 7,000 dollars.

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On 4 October 1957 the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite: a polished metal ball 58 cm wide that sent out radio beeps anyone with a receiver could pick up. Its success shocked the United States and started the Space Race.

Sputnik weighed 83.6 kg and circled Earth every 96 minutes. It was launched from Tyuratam in Soviet Kazakhstan, now the Baikonur Cosmodrome, on an R-7 rocket built under the chief designer Sergei Korolev. Radio amateurs around the world tracked its simple signal, and scientists used the way its orbit changed to measure the density of the upper atmosphere. The batteries ran out after 22 days, and on 4 January 1958, after about 1,440 orbits, the satellite burned up as it fell back into the atmosphere. In the United States the launch caused alarm that the Soviets were ahead in technology. America launched its first satellite, Explorer 1, on 31 January 1958 and created NASA later that year. In Russian, 'sputnik' means travelling companion as well as satellite.

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A single optical fibre, a glass strand about as thin as a human hair, can carry dozens of separate data streams at once. Each travels on its own wavelength of infrared laser light, a method called wavelength-division multiplexing, which lets one pair of fibres carry more than 16 trillion bits of data a second.

Engineers speak of each signal having its own colour, although the wavelengths used are infrared and invisible to the eye. At the sending end one device combines the beams into a single fibre, and at the far end another splits them apart again, much as a prism splits white light. The idea was first published in 1970, and early laboratory systems combined just two signals. It spread in the 1990s together with the erbium-doped fibre amplifier, a short stretch of fibre laced with the rare-earth metal erbium that boosts all the wavelengths at once without turning them into electrical signals; teams at the University of Southampton and Bell Labs first demonstrated it in 1986 and 1987. Between 1992 and 2001 the capacity of fibre systems doubled about every six months. Telecoms companies can still add capacity by upgrading the equipment at each end instead of laying new cable.

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The World Wide Web and the internet are not the same thing. The internet is the global network that links computers together; the web is one service that runs on it: pages you move between by clicking links.

The internet is the network itself: undersea and underground cables, mobile masts, Wi-Fi and routers, the devices that pass data along, all following a shared set of rules called TCP/IP that lets any two connected machines exchange data. The web is one application that uses it. Web pages are written in a language called HTML, each has its own address, or URL, and a browser fetches them using rules called HTTP. Email, video calls, online games and many phone apps travel over the same network without using the web at all. The internet's roots go back to ARPANET, a US research network set up in 1969; the web was proposed by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1989 and first ran there at the end of 1990.

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The Hubble Space Telescope has photographed galaxies whose light set out more than 13 billion years ago. One of them, GN-z11, found in 2015, appears as it was only about 400 million years after the Big Bang, so astronomers can see the universe when it was young.

Light travels at a fixed speed, so looking far into space also means looking back in time. Hubble, a joint project of NASA and the European Space Agency, was launched on 24 April 1990; once a flaw in its main mirror was corrected in 1993, it began sending back sharp images of the distant universe. In December 1995 it stared at one tiny patch of sky for ten days, and the resulting Hubble Deep Field showed about 3,000 galaxies. GN-z11, reported in 2016 by a team led by Pascal Oesch, remained the most distant galaxy known until the James Webb Space Telescope found even earlier ones in 2022. The universe itself is about 13.8 billion years old.

NASA, 1990Read card
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A GPU, or graphics processing unit, is a chip with thousands of small cores that do the same calculation on many numbers at once. Built to draw video game images, it turned out to be ideal for artificial intelligence, and today's GPUs perform trillions of calculations a second.

Nvidia marketed its GeForce 256, released in 1999, as the first GPU. Drawing a game frame means working out the colour of millions of pixels with similar maths, so GPUs were built to do many simple sums side by side, rather than a few complex ones in turn as a computer's main processor (CPU) does. In 2007 Nvidia released CUDA, software that let programmers use GPUs for any kind of calculation. The turning point for AI came in 2012. AlexNet, a neural network (a program, loosely modelled on the brain, that learns from examples) trained by Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever and Geoffrey Hinton on two gaming GPUs in Krizhevsky's bedroom, won the ImageNet image-recognition contest by a wide margin. Training an AI model means repeating the same kinds of multiplication billions of times, exactly the work GPUs do best.

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Computers store everything, from text to photos and music, as binary code: long strings of just two digits, 0 and 1. Each digit is a bit, and eight bits make a byte, which can take 256 different values, enough to stand for any letter on a keyboard.

Computers use two digits because an electronic switch is easy to read reliably as either on or off, with current flowing or not; telling ten voltage levels apart would cause far more errors. The German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz published an account of binary arithmetic in 1703. In 1937 Claude Shannon, then a master's student at MIT, showed that switching circuits could carry out logic, and his famous 1948 paper on information used the word 'bit', short for binary digit, which he credited to his colleague John Tukey. Whether a pattern of bits means a letter, the colour of a pixel or a sound depends on the agreed format: in the common ASCII code, for example, 01000001 is a capital A.

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Cloud computing means storing files and running programs on computers in large, distant data centres instead of on your own device. Providers rent out that capacity by the hour or by the gigabyte, so anyone from a small start-up to a large bank can use as much computing power as it needs without buying machines.

The idea is older than the name. In 1961 the computer scientist John McCarthy suggested that computing might one day be sold like water or electricity, as a public utility, and in the 1960s organisations already shared one large, expensive central computer, or mainframe, among many users through a method called time-sharing. Engineers had long drawn the telephone network, and later the internet, as a cloud in their diagrams, and the phrase 'cloud computing' appears in a 1996 business plan at the computer maker Compaq. The modern industry took off in 2006, when Amazon Web Services began renting out storage (S3) and computing power (EC2) to any business or developer, who paid only for what they used.

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In 1609 and 1610 Galileo built improved telescopes and saw mountains on the Moon, Venus going through phases like our Moon, and four moons circling Jupiter. These discoveries undermined the old view that the Earth sits still at the centre of the universe.

Galileo first saw Jupiter's moons on 7 January 1610 and announced them that March in a short book, Sidereus Nuncius (The Starry Messenger). He named them the Medicean stars after his future patron, Cosimo II de' Medici; today they are called Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. The phases of Venus were an even stronger argument. In the model of the ancient astronomer Ptolemy, Venus always stays between the Earth and the Sun, so it could never appear fully lit. Galileo watched it pass through a complete set of phases, which only makes sense if Venus orbits the Sun. The debate did not end there: in 1633 the Roman Inquisition found him 'vehemently suspect of heresy' for defending a Sun-centred universe, and he spent the rest of his life under house arrest.

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The Jacquard machine, patented by the French weaver Joseph-Marie Jacquard in 1804, read weaving patterns from a chain of punched cards. Changing the cards changed the pattern, an idea that later shaped the first computers.

Before Jacquard, patterned silk was woven on a draw loom, where an assistant, often a boy, lifted the right threads by hand for every row: slow and tiring work. Jacquard, from Lyon, built on earlier devices by Basile Bouchon (1725), Jean-Baptiste Falcon (1728) and Jacques de Vaucanson (1740). Each card stood for one row of the design: where there was a hole, a thread was lifted; where there was none, it stayed down. In 1839 a silk portrait of Jacquard was woven using about 24,000 cards. Charles Babbage owned one of these portraits and planned to program his Analytical Engine with punched cards, and in 1890 Herman Hollerith used machines that read punched cards to count the United States census.

Joseph-Marie Jacquard, 1804Read card
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