science.txt

the tutorial which explane using of Unix operating system.

The Electronic Telegraph  Thursday 28 September 1995  Science

This summer the Royal Observatory at Herstmonceux
found new life as a science centre. Andro Linklater
celebrates a partial victory for the heritage

THE SIGHT of a child's top spinning unsupported in mid-air should have been
surprising. Rotating there in space, it not only defied the rules of gravity,
it defied common sense, and at least three Fellows of the Royal Society gazed
at it in something close to wonder.

But this was Fabricators' Week at the Herstmonceux Science Centre, with
exhibitors from science centres all over Europe arriving to demonstrate
prototypes of experiments they hoped to produce as hands-on displays - a tube
of rocket-propelled rubber balls, a solar-powered toy car, a model of planetary
movement. They had a much tougher audience in mind. Would it astonish a child?

"Well I certainly found it surprising," Prof Michael Berry FRS, an expert in
gravitational physics and the top's demonstrator, said a trifle indignantly.
"The physics of why the top doesn't topple over are extraordinarily complex,
and so far as I know, no one has ever demonstrated the experiment before."

So challenging are the physics indeed that Berry has written a paper on the
spinning top, invented by Bill Hones of Seattle, for the scientific journal
Nature. Its position in mid-air was maintained by the straightforward method of
positioning a magnet beneath it with reverse polarity, but its stability was
acquired in far more complicated fashion, through the interaction of the
magnetic field and the forces created by its spin. In technical terms, it had
become an adiabatic trap.

"A child brought up on cinema special effects might think it quite normal to
have a top spinning in space"

But Prof Richard Gregory, another FRS and emeritus professor of
Neuro-Psychology at Bristol University, was not convinced that this was enough
to surprise a more blas