How does light travel? Detailed answer

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How does light travel? Detailed answer

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How does light travel?

Light is one of the biggest mysteries of the world we live in. For hundreds of years, scientists have been specifically studying it, but they still do not know exactly what it is. The only thing that succeeds is to describe light in terms of its behavior. We know that light is one of the forms of existence of energy. Just as is the case with some other forms of energy - heat, radio waves, X-rays - its speed, frequency and wavelength can be measured. In many other respects it behaves in the same way as these forms of energy. We know the speed of light, it is about 300 kilometers per second.

Thus, in a year, light rays (in vacuum) travel about 9 kilometers. Astronomers call this distance a light year, and it is the main unit of measure for the vast expanses of space. Many theories have been created trying to explain what light is and how it exists.

In the XNUMXth century, the famous English scientist Isaac Newton suggested that light consists of small particles - "corpuscles", something like tiny bullets flying out of the light source, like from the muzzle of an automaton. However, his "corpuscular" theory of light was unable to explain some of the features of its behavior.

Around the same time, another scientist - Christian Huygens - developed the wave theory of light. His idea was that a reflecting body that emits light creates vibrations or waves around itself, similar to circles of waves that diverge on the calm surface of a pond if a stone is dropped into it.

Disputes between supporters of these two theories did not stop for two centuries.

As certain features of light became known, the idea of the corpuscular nature of light seemed to begin to die out. However, the development of science continued, and, in the end, scientists came to the conclusion that the nature of light can only be explained by combining the two theories. Experimental studies have shown that each of them can be valid.

The beginning of the unified theory was laid by the French physicist Louis de Broglie, who introduced the concept of a wave-particle. Thus, there is simply no exact and unambiguous answer to the question of what light is.

Author: Likum A.

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New Nvidia Quadro GPUs 20.08.2014

Nvidia has unveiled a new generation of Nvidia Quadro GPUs. As Nvidia told CNews, the new line becomes an enterprise-level platform for visual computing, providing application performance and data processing speed up to two times faster than the previous generation.

The new solutions are the result of Nvidia's close collaboration with customers in a variety of industries in response to increasing image resolution and model complexity, moving resources to the cloud, and the need to provide remote access to data, including from mobile devices.

Overall, the new line of Quadro GPUs - K5200, K4200, K2200, K620 and K420 - allows users to: Work with data arrays and projects twice the size of the previous generation; remotely work with graphics on a Quadro-based workstation from virtually any device, including PCs, Macs and tablets; run an average of 40% faster in applications such as Adobe CC, Autodesk Design Suite and Dassault Systemes SolidWorks 2014 compared to the previous generation of Quadro; Easily switch between GPU-based local rendering and Nvidia Iray-powered cloud services.

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"The new generation of Quadro GPUs not only demonstrates a significant increase in compute and graphics processing speed for large datasets, it expands the concept of visual computing from a graphics card in a workstation to a connected environment," said Jeff Brown, Vice "Nvidia's President of Professional Visualization Solutions. "The new Quadro line allows users to work on projects from a local workstation, a remote mobile device, or collaborate using cloud services."

Retail prices for the new line of Nvidia Quadro GPUs will remain the same as the previous generation ($100 - $2000+).

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