BLACK HOLES – A MYSTERY…

Imagine matter packed so densely that nothing can escape. Not a dust particle, not a planet and not even light! That’s what black holes are — a spot where gravitational pull is so huge that nothing can escape!

Think of a star ten times more massive than the Sun squeezed into a sphere of very small radius. This results in a very strong gravitational field such that even light cannot escape. Since according to Einstein’s theory, nothing can travel faster than light it implies that no other object can escape a black hole.

 
Do black holes really exist?

It was a matter of confusion and discussion for a long time that do black holes really exist. The mathematical conclusions of Einstein’s theory of relativity showed the possibility of the existence of black holes. But we didn’t have strong advancements in astronomy to detect black holes. With the technological improvements and sophisticated instruments it is now possible to detect black holes.

 
How a black hole is detected?

Black holes cannot be detected directly with telescopes that detect x-rays, light, or other forms of electromagnetic radiation. This is because since light cannot escape a black hole, light from black hole can’t reach earth! We can, however, detect the presence of black holes by detecting their effect on other matter nearby. If a black hole passes through a cloud of interstellar matter, for example, it will draw matter inward. A similar process can occur if a normal star passes close to a black hole. In this case, the black hole can tear the star apart as it pulls it toward itself. As the attracted matter accelerates and heats up, it emits x-rays that radiate into space.

 
Origin of the term ‘Black Hole’ :

Although the term was not coined until 1967 by Princeton physicist John Wheeler, the idea of an object in space so massive and dense that light could not escape it has been around for centuries. Most famously, black holes were predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

 
One Star’s End is a Black Hole’s Beginning :

Most black holes form from the remnants of a large star that dies in a supernova explosion. Smaller stars become dense neutron stars. If the total mass of the star is large enough (about three times the mass of the Sun), it can be proven theoretically that no force can keep the star from collapsing under the influence of gravity. However, as the star collapses, a strange thing occurs. As the surface of the star nears an imaginary surface called the “event horizon,” time on the star slows relative to the time kept by observers far away. When the surface reaches the event horizon, time stands still, and the star can collapse no more – it is a frozen collapsing object.

 
Black holes are not limited!

scientists estimate that there are as many as ten million to a billion black holes in the Milky Way alone.
 

Worm hole – a boon if it really exist!

A popular science-fiction topic concerns what happens if somebody falls into a black hole. Some people believe these objects are a sort of worm hole to other parts of the Universe, making faster-than-light travel possible. Worm hole is a kind of shortcut through the space-time curve. A wormhole is much like a tunnel with two ends, each in separate points in space-time. If we are able to detect the presence of worm hole, we could probably reach to a very distant point in space in a short time!

 

Black holes are used all the time in science fiction!

There are so many movies using black holes that it’s impossible to list them all. Interstellar‘s journeys through the universe includes a close-up look at a black hole. Event Horizon explores artificial black holes — something that is also discussed in the Star Trek universe. Supernova and The Black Hole movie also features black hole.

STEVE JOBS – A VISIONARY…

“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.”

-Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs – an entrepreneur, marketer, and inventor who was the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Apple Inc.

Steve Jobs’ vision sparked the PC revolution and made Apple an icon of business in America and the world.

 

iPhone 6

 
 

Childhood:

Jobs adoptive parents, Paul Jobs and Clara Jobs, married in March 1946. After Clara had an ectopic pregnancy, she could no longer bear children. They decided to adopt a child. Jobs’s biological parents met at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where his Syrian-born biological father, Abdulfattah Jandali was an undergraduate and then graduate student, and where his biological mother,  Joanne Schieble, studied for a degree in speech language pathology. Jandali met and became involved with Schieble. She became pregnant, but her fundamentalist father vehemently refused to let her marry Jandali. Schieble went to California to have her baby.

Jobs was born in San Francisco, California on February 24, 1955 and named “Steven Paul”. Schieble wanted Jobs to only be adopted by college graduates. When Schieble learned that Clara Jobs had not graduated from college and Paul Jobs had only attended high school, she initially refused the adoption. She later signed the final adoption papers only after Paul and Clara promised her that the child would attend college.

A few years later, the family moved to Mountain View, California. Paul worked as a mechanic, and taught his son rudimentary electronics. Paul showed Steve how to work on electronics in the family garage, demonstrating to his son how to take apart and rebuild electronics such as radios and televisions. As a result, he became interested in and developed a hobby of technical tinkering. Clara was an accountant who taught him to read before he went to school.

 
 

High School and College:

Jobs attended Homestead High School in Cupertino, California. At Homestead, Jobs became friends with Bill Fernandez, a neighbor who shared the same interests in electronics. Jobs also met his first girlfriend, Chrisann Brennan, at Homestead in 1972. He was a senior, she was a junior, and they continued to have an intermittent romantic relationship until 1977. During his period at homestead, his two closest friends were Chrisann and Steve Wozniak, a computer and electronics whiz kid, who was nicknamed “Woz.” Bill Fernandez introduced Woz to Jobs. In 1969 Wozniak started building a little computer board with Fernandez that they named “The Cream Soda Computer“, which they showed to Jobs; he was really interested. Wozniak has said that they called it the Cream Soda Computer because he and Fernandez drank cream soda all the time while they worked on it.

Jobs graduated from Homestead in 1972. He enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Reed was an expensive college which Paul and Clara could ill afford. They were spending much of their life savings on their son’s higher education. Jobs planned to drop out of Reed because he didn’t want to spend his parent’s money on it. He continued to attend by auditing classes including a course on calligraphy. In a 2005 commencement speech for Stanford University, Jobs said: “If I had never dropped in on that single calligraphy course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.”

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”

-Steve Jobs

 
 

Origin of Apple:

In 1972, Steve Wozniak designed his own version of the classic video game Pong. After finishing it, Wozniak gave the board to Jobs, who then took the game down to Atari, Inc. in Los Gatos, California. Atari thought that Jobs had built it and gave him a job as a technician. In the summer of 1973, Jobs moved back to the San Francisco Bay Area and was renting his own apartment. Brennan states by this point that their “relationship was complicated. I couldn’t break the connection and I couldn’t commit. Steve couldn’t either.”

Jobs traveled to India in mid-1974  with his Reed friend (and later Apple employee) Daniel Kottke, in search of spiritual enlightenment. In India, they spent a lot of time on bus rides from Delhi to Uttar Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh.

After staying for seven months, Jobs left India and returned to the US. Jobs then returned to Atari, and was assigned to create a circuit board for the arcade video game Breakout. Atari offered US$100 for each TTL chip that was eliminated in the machine. Jobs had little specialized knowledge of circuit board design and made a deal with Wozniak to split the fee evenly between them if Wozniak could minimize the number of chips. Much to the amazement of Atari engineers, Wozniak reduced the TTL count to 46, a design so tight that it was impossible to reproduce on an assembly line. According to Wozniak, Jobs told him that Atari gave them only $700 (instead of the $5,000 paid out), and that Wozniak’s share was thus $350. Wozniak did not learn about the actual bonus until ten years later, but said that if Jobs had told him about it and explained that he needed the money, Wozniak would have given it to him.

Wozniak had designed a low-cost digital “blue box” to generate the necessary tones to manipulate the telephone network, allowing free long-distance calls. Jobs decided that they could make money selling it. The illegal sales of “blue boxes” went well, and perhaps planted the seed in Jobs’s mind that electronics could be fun and profitable. Jobs, in a 1994 interview, recalled that it took six months for him and Wozniak to figure out how to build the blue boxes. Jobs said that if there would not be the blue boxes, there would have been no Apple. He states it showed them that they could take on large companies and beat them. Jobs convinced Wozniak to start a company. Apple Computer was born on April 1, 1976  in the garage of Jobs’s parents. They received funding from a then-semi-retired Intel product marketing manager and engineer Mike Markkula. Although the Apple I sold mainly to hobbyists, it generated enough cash to enable Jobs and Wozniak to improve and refine their design. In 1977, they introduced the Apple II – the first personal computer with color graphics and a keyboard. Designed for beginners the user-friendly Apple II was a tremendous success, ushering in the era of the personal computer. First-year sales topped $3 million. Two years later, sales ballooned to $200 million.

 

Apple 1

 

Apple 2

 

Apple Macintosh

 
 

The season of dark days for Steve Jobs:

Apple’s success attracted the attention of the computer giant IBM, which until then was still only selling mainframe computers to large companies. A crash project was started and in August 1981, the IBM PC entered the personal computer market. It was the biggest threat yet to Apple, whose reputation was being put into question after the flop of the Apple III in 1980. Most hopes rested on a business computer project, called the Lisa.

Steve Jobs was a big believer in the Lisa computer initially. It was he who came up with the name. Indeed, in 1978, his ex-girlfriend from high school Chrisann Brennan gave birth to a little girl, who she named Lisa. Steve denied paternity.  While in denial, he came up with the name Lisa for the new computer Apple was building.

The following year, a tour of the computer research lab Xerox PARC made a huge impression on Jobs especially the graphical user interface (GUI) and the mouse. Jobs became obsessed with the GUI which was a lot easier to use than the command-line interfaces of the day. He insisted the Lisa had a GUI and a mouse, too.

However Apple suffered huge losses due to increased competition. For Jobs, this spelled serious trouble. He clashed with Apple’s board of directors and, in 1983, was expelled from the board by CEO John Sculley, whom Jobs had handpicked to help him run Apple. Stripped of all power and control, Jobs eventually sold his shares of Apple stock and resigned in 1985.

 
 

Startup of new company:

Later that year, using a portion of the money from the stock sale, Jobs launched NeXT Computer Co., with the goal of building a breakthrough computer that would revolutionize research and higher education. Introduced in 1988, the NeXT computer boasted a host of innovations, including notably fast processing speeds, exceptional graphics and an optical disk drive.  However, the NeXT was too expensive to attract enough sales. Jobs also bought Pixar Animation Studios to improve software.

 
 

Jobs return to Apple:

Within days of Pixar’s arrival on the stock market, Apple bought NeXT for $400 million and re-appointed Jobs to Apple’s board of directors as an advisor to Apple chairman and CEO Gilbert F. Amelio. It was an act of desperation on Apple’s part. Because they had failed to develop a next-generation Macintosh operating system, the firm’s share of the PC market had dropped to just 5.3 percent, and they hoped that Jobs could help turn the company around. At the end of March 1997, Apple announced a quarterly loss of $708 million. Three months later, Amelio resigned and Jobs took over as interim CEO. Once again in charge of Apple, Jobs struck a deal with Microsoft to help ensure Apple’s survival. Under Jobs’ guidance, Apple quickly returned to profitability, and by the end of 1998, boasted sales of $5.9 billion. Over the next decade, the company rolled out a series of revolutionary products, including the iPod portable digital audio player in 2001, an online marketplace called the Apple iTunes Store in 2003, the iPhone handset in 2007 and the iPad tablet computer in 2010.

 

iPod

iPad

 

 

Health issues:

Despite his professional successes, Jobs struggled with health issues. In mid-2004, he announced in an email to Apple employees that he had undergone an operation to remove a cancerous tumor from his pancreas. In January 2011, following a liver transplant, Jobs said he was taking a medical leave of absence from Apple.

Eight months later, on August 24, Apple’s board of directors announced that Jobs had resigned as CEO and that he would be replaced by COO Tim Cook. Jobs said he would remain with the company as chairman. “I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know,” Jobs said in a letter announcing his resignation. “Unfortunately, that day has come.”

Jobs passed away on October 5, 2011, due to  respiratory arrest related to pancreatic cancer.

Jobs may seem to have passed away too early but as its said, Life should be great rather than long.

Such a great journey with all kinds of happiness and struggles!

He left us a great legacy.

INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT THE TAJ MAHAL PALACE HOTEL

If you ever visit Gateway of India and turn around, you would be mesmerized by a beautiful seven stories tall structure with a central dome.

This is “The Taj Mahal Palace Hotel”. 

Yes friends, it’s the same historic and iconic Taj Mahal Palace Hotel built by the Tata Group which has its name worldwide for its best in class service. Really, Tata Group has one of the highest contributions in the economic development of India and also in enriching the lives of people.

Popular history says that Jamsetji Tata once went to the Watson’s Hotel (another historic construction) in Bombay along with one of his European friend for a lunch. But he was denied entry as he was not a “white” and the hotel was restricted to “whites only”. This developed a strong burning desire in the mind and heart of Jamsetji Tata to build a world-class hotel in India for Indians. He made his dream come true and finally The Taj Mahal Palace Hotel opened on 16 December,1903.

The Taj Mahal Tower, an additional wing of the hotel, was opened in 1973.

 
 

It was designed by an Indian. It is believed that Sitaram Khanderao Vaidya and D.N. Mirza drew up the original plans of the hotel. However, English architect W.A. Chambers also contributed to the design of the iconic central dome. The Taj Mahal Tower was designed by Melton Bekker.

 
 

For more than 50 years after it was built, the hotel’s 240-foot-high dome was the first clear marker of Bombay harbour that could be seen from the sea – the Gateway of India wasn’t built until 20 years later. The dome is still an official triangulation point, along with a chimney and a rocky island, for ships of the Indian Navy to fix their position in the harbour.

The building was also the first in Bombay to be lit by electricity.

The city’s first licensed bar.

India’s first all-day dining restaurant.

The country’s first international discotheque.

 

 

 
 
It hasn’t always been a hotel!

During World War I, the Taj was converted into a 600-bed hospital.

 
 

The hotel had become a social and a political center. It has hosted many events for famous personalities.

Banquets for King George V and Queen Mary were held here twice. Edward, Prince of Wales visited here.

May other notable personalities who visited Taj Palace were Mahatma Gandhi , Jawaharlal Nehru, Lord Louis Mountbatten (the first governor-general of Independent India who held an inaugural speech here for the leaders), Bill Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, The King & Queen of Norway, The Duke & Duchess of Kent, Roger Moore, The Duke of Edinburgh, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Hilary Clinton, Michelle Obama, Barrack Obama as well as many other personalities.

 
 

For the first time in India, the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel imported German elevators, American fans and Turkish baths. It was the first in India to install and operate a steam elevator.

 
 

Because the courtyard faces inward, away from the sea, there’s always been a rumour that the hotel was constructed back-to-front, that the architect approved the layout when on holiday without noting the direction the structure was facing and jumped to his death from the fifth floor when he returned and realized his error. In truth, it seems the Taj was built facing away from the harbour because Tata wanted most of the rooms to face towards the sea, a practice unheard of in India.