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Zbigniew Koziol
PHYSICISTS AND THE REAL WORLD
by Lukasz Turski
Centre for Theoretical Physics
Polish Academy of Sciences
First published in Delta, 1996.
(WWW links have been introduced by the Editor of Virtual Physics)
The Editors of Delta have been kind enough to invite me to take part
in the discussion they have organize to celebrate their 250th issue. I
have been asked to answer one of the seven questions. The choice of
questions reflects a deeply pessimistic opinion of the Editors as to the
state of science, and physics in particular, in the present world. When
reading scientific literature one may end up with a feeling that this
opinion is shared by many scientists. If this is so, then one more
question should be added to the list. The question is the following: if
all the things you are concerned about are true, then how did it happen
that science, physics included, has found itself at the end of the 20th
century in a state of social alienation, while a hundred years ago it was
regarded as respectful and trustworthy? I shall try to answer this very
question.
The answer is very bitter, perhaps too bitter for many my
colleagues to take it without anaesthesia. The science of
the end of the 20th century and physics in particular, is
now suffering the consequences of departing from one of the
fundamental principles, which is the obligation to speak
truth and not to give false testimony to untruth. Being
unfaithful to our doctoral oath we have offered the masters
of this world access to our knowledge and to our skills,
getting in reward miserable pennies (particularly miserable
in the times of real socialism in Poland and also miserable
in the II Republic, even though now the penny has become
`hard currency') and vain glory. Even now, when the
political structure of the world has undergone considerable
changes - temporarily or not - I have been observing with
disgust a display of hypocrisy which accompanied the
struggle for the construction of a supercollider.
Among basic sciences physics occupies a distinguished
position. It is the first and, up to now, the only
scientific discipline which has been able to amalgamate
both quantitative and qualitative research methods into one
coherent cognitive tool. This does not mean, however, that
other disciplines are `worse'. More and more of them,
traditionally called `the humanities', follow the example
of physics and turn to qualitative methods, too. At the
present stage of development these sciences are regarded by
many as more `important' than physics. This point is quite
well illustrated by the case of contemporary economic and
management sciences. None of the two would survive without
mathematical methods, many of them created to meet the
needs of physics and by physicists.
Why then has physics lost so much in the eyes of an
`average' citizen? I believe this is due to three reasons.
The first of them, of a very global character and
applicable to many other scientific disciplines, I have
mentioned at the beginning. A specific `sin' of physics was
a dishonest presentation of safety issues relative to the
exploitation of nuclear energy. This is why people gave
faith to histerical protests and scared by the Chernobyl
disaster (which was primarily due to human incompetence) -
rejected the use of nuclear energy. We have missed the time
when we could have educated our co-citizens sufficiently as
not to consider nuclear science as some kind of esoteric
knowledge on the sinister powers of darkness. This
intellectual superstition is supported by questions like
the one on the creations of the human mind, which
elementary particles and fields are supposed to be. I
deeply hope that none of the Editors does not seriously
consider the electrons which carry the text of this article
over a telecommunication cable to be a creation of the
human mind (even though the contents of the article - the
information contained in the electronic beam - is a
creation of MY mind).
The second reason is that scientists, and physicists in
particular, have lost a clear sight of the motivation for
doing research.We come to know the world which surrounds us,
because - as George Mallory, the moral conqueror of Mount
Everest, has put it - it exists. But then we have to
transmit the acquired knowledge to others. Hence we must
teach, teach and teach again. We must teach wisely and
well. At each step we must show the benefits brought to
humanity by the progress of science - and indeed these
benefits have been numerous. (In fact, cosmic flights have
probably been less beneficial in this respect than other
achievements.) They must be presented cleverly, for even an
`uneducated' person possesses nowadays an important
practical knowledge. Who, if not us, is going to tell him
that the foil used to save lives of shocked victims of car
accidents as well as the waterproof material used for
making thin mattresses for sleeping in tents are byproducts
of cosmic projects. If we do not tell him that, he will see
no reason to care for the whole cosmic game.
Finally, the third reason is the feeling of superiority
characteristic of many physicists, which leads many of us
to remain in the state of splendid isolation. The tax
payers are expected to pay for our research, but we have no
obligation to teach them nor to help them understand what
is going on around them, nor even to tell them the truth
about parascience. How many physicists would dare to stand
face to face against a sorcerer, a fortune-teller or a
charlatan? Not many, I am afraid, whereas it is not so very
difficult to convince people that parascience, contrary to
what the last question suggests, is not taking the lead
over science. There is no reason for not telling people
that a well-known healer and hypnotist turned to a hospital
for help when he injured himself with a circular saw -
instead of trying to cure his wounds by conjurations. It is
just a question of will.
I am an optimist, nothing is lost yet, much work has to be
done with respect to new generations so as to make the
Editor's questions sound senseless for them. I believe that
if you keep the standard of Delta high, you will
see that the condition of science will change for the
better at the turn of the century.
Lukasz Turski
Centre for Theoretical Physics
Polish Academy of Sciences
The Linux/GNU Operating System
- A Physicist's Perspective
by Michal Spalinski
received May 25, 1996
Institute of Theoretical Physics
Warsaw University, Hoza 69, 00-681 Warsaw, Poland
Content
Introduction
- Freely available software
- Commercial software
- Availability
- Web resources
- Linux User Groups
Linux is a high quality, robust
operating system of the Unix family. It is freely available, and runs
on personal computers based on the Intel 386/486/Pentium processors.
It is developed by a large group of programmers scattered around the
world, working under the coordination of Linus Torvalds. Strictly
speaking, this group of people is responsible for developing the
system kernel, while the remaining software which is necessary for the
kernel to be useful is the work of numerous individuals working on the
GNU project under the
auspices of the Free Software Foundation. Together, the kernel and the
supporting software, form a Linux/GNU distribution. These
distributions are available freely (in particular, free of charge) by
ftp from many repositories all over the world. There are also
commercial companies which distribute the same thing on CD ROM. For
users which require it, there are commercial companies which provide
support for Linux, which is a service that has to be paid for. However
the operating system itself and the immense amount of supporting and
application software is available for free.
Linux makes it possible to turn even cheap, old 386 machines with as
little as 4MB RAM and an 80 MB hard disk into workstation - style user
environments. The performance of a PC running Linux is significantly
higher than that of the same PC under DOS (not to mention MS Windows),
so even a 386 SX is quite usable running X and standard software. This way one can have the same
working environment on a laptop/notebook PC, or on a PC
at home as on a UNIX workstation at the office. Indeed, in cases when
a workstation is not available, but a PC is, it makes little sense not
to turn it into a workstation running Linux, especially since there is
no problem with keeping DOS/Widows on another disk partition and
choosing the operating system at boot time. In the case of a
networking environment one can even boot Linux from a floppy disk and
use the PC as an X-terminal.
The fact that with Linux essentially any PC in use today can be turned
into a Unix workstation has great educational importance: those who
are interested in gaining a "hands on" knowledge of Unix can
administrate their own Unix machine. It gives access to
standard Unix software, usually only found on workstations, to any
student with a PC.
Although the main interest for most people at the moment is in Linux
running on Intel CPUs, ports of Linux to the DEC Alpha, Power PC and
Sun Sparc are well under way. This, as well as recent Posix
certification is responsible for the
growing use of Linux outside academia, in business and industrial
environments.
An important factor which accounts for the expansion of
Linux is the superiority of Unix in the network environment. As the
Internet becomes ubiquitous, so does Unix, as a secure and robust
platform for Internet and Web development. The ease with which one can
set up WWW servers, search engines and database interfaces on Unix
platforms also contributes to the growing popularity of Linux.
Most of the software normally found on workstations at Physics
Departments around the World is freely available, and is usually a
part of a Linux/GNU distribution. The majority of this software comes
from the GNU
Project, but lots of specialized software is written at various
academic and research institutions (eg. the numerical analysis
laboratory Yorick,
written at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, or Octave, a Matlab style
program written at the University of Wisconsin), and is also freely
available, at least for academic purposes.
Some common examples of the available software are:
-
- Editors
- Emacs
- Vi
- Joe
- Nedit
- Tkedit
- Text processing
- TeX/LaTeX with all existing macro packages
- Groff
- Plotting Tools
- Programming languages
- C (GNU)
- C++ (GNU)
- Fortran (GNU, f2c)
- Modula 2 (Mocka, GP)
- Modula 3 (DEC SRC)
- Lisp (GNU, CLISP, XLISP)
- Scheme (MIT, SCM, Gambit, ...)
- and many others.
- Numerical Analysis Tools
- Yorick (a high performance package for numerical calculations, plotting and animation).
- Octave (a Matlab style package)
- Scilab
- Matlab (a rather old version - newer versions are commercial).
- Numerical Analysis Libraries: all the packages in Netlib (LINPACK, LAPACK, EISPACK etc are usable under linux with the f2c package).
- Symbolic manipulation systems
- Web browsers
- Nestcape
- Mosaic
- Arena
- Chimera
There is an
index of
software packages that have been tested on Linux. This huge list of packages
is however not exhaustive, because essentially all software which is
distributed on the Internet in source form can be compiled on Linux.
There are also various lists of software of special interest to the
scientific community:
-
Most of this software can also be compiled and used on other
flavours of Unix, so one is normally not tied to Linux in any way: a
numerical analysis program can be developed alternately on a notebook
or home computer running Linux and a workstation at the office -
using the same library packages, or graphical tools. This is a situation
much different from using a Unix workstation at the office and a
DOS/Windows notebook or PC elsewhere.
Most of this software is available already compiled (i.e. in the form
of executable, binary packages) as part of standard Linux/GNU
distributions, or can be downloaded from Linux/GNU software repositories.
Source code (usually in C) is normally also available.
There is a quickly growing number of well known commercial packages
running on other operating platforms which are being ported to Linux.
At the moment the following are already available:
This is list is by no means exhaustive - it only reflects what the
author is presently aware of.
There are three common ways to obtain a Linux distribution and install it:
- Buy a CD ROM with a complete distribution.
- Boot a bare-bones Linux off a floppy disk and install the full distribution on the hard disk via NFS (for this one must have a PC connected to the Internet).
- Download a complete distribution by ftp, copy it onto floppy disks, and install from the floppies (this requires 10 - 50 floppy disks, depending on what one wants to install).
When buying a CD with Linux it is important to avoid buying very old
versions (very old here means summer '95 or earlier). The thing to
watch for is that the distribution should be an ELF distribution: this
is a new binary standard which came into general use in mid-95.
Detailed installation instructions for the various distributions can
be found on the home pages of the various distribution maintainers:
- Caldera: makers of the Caldera
Network Desktop (commercial).
- Debian
- Linux-FT
- RedHat
- Slackware
There is extensive Linux documentation at the Linux Documentation Project Home Page.
There is a great number of Linux-related Web sites: it would make
little sense trying to list them here: below is a list of selected
starting points for further exploration of the Linux World:
There are Linux User Groups all over the world. Participating in the
activities of these groups makes it easier to keep up with the new
software packages and updates that are appearing each week. Such
groups also make it easier to find people who can help with specific
problems that one might encounter using a new operating system.
Maybe there is one near you?
Michal Spalinski
Institute of Theoretical Physics
Warsaw University, Warsaw, Poland
Copyright 1996, Michal Spalinski.
NEW RELEASE Web service:
"One-Shot World-Wide Preprints Search"
Release May 2, 1996
by Enrique Canessa, Trieste
This is a free prototype service for a global lookup search thoughout ALL
on-line scientific preprints repositories in the world.
The searching is now as easy as a mouse click!!!
By using the new "One-Shot World-Wide Preprints Search" you need no
longer connect your WWW browser to each different preprints repository
every time you want to search for a Title/Author.
Simply point your browser to:
Best of all, this prototype multiplies the power of available search
engines, like the one at CERN, by casting the widest possible information
"in un solo colpo" (in one hit). It's like having a personal assistant
who will do the multiple search for you, bringing back the information
you require from the list containing ("clickable") links to the sources.
In one-shot, the following repositories are presently searchable:
ICTP: In-house Preprints and Preprints Archive List
LANL: Physics Preprints
SISSA: European Mirror of LANL
CERN: In-house and Scanned Preprints
SLAC-SPIRES: High Energy Preprints Database
MathSearch: Mathematics and Statistics Archives
WPA: Working Papers Archive in Econom
... plus others.
Enrique Canessa
canessae@ictp.trieste.it
Virtual Physics:
a forum for virtual meetings of scientists and students involved in a research activity on
THE SOLID STATE PHYSICS AND SUPERCONDUCTIVITY
is available for a free subscription
in an e-mail version. To subscribe: send a request to the Editor.
Editors:
Dr. Zbigniew J. Koziol (Editor-in-Chief), WebEx@ra.isisnet.com, WebExperts Inc.,
2-6032 Compton Ave., Halifax, Nova Scotia, B3H 1E7 Canada, tel. (902) 423 2149
Dr. Michal Spalinski, Michal.Spalinski@fuw.edu.pl, Institute of Theoretical Physics,
Warsaw University, Hoza 69, 00-681 Warsaw, Poland, tel. (+48)(2) 628 3031
Virtual Physics URL address: http://www.isisnet.com/MAX/vp.html
To subscribe a F R E E e-mail
version or submit materials for publication, write to the Editor.
Copyright (C) 1996 by Zbigniew Koziol.
this copyright notice concerns the whole of the Virtual Physics
edition but not specific articles published there which are
property of their respective copyright holders
No responsibility is assumed by the publisher for any damage to
persons or property as a matter of the product liability, negligence
or otherwise, or from any use of methods, instructions or ideas
contained in the material herein. The opinions expressed in this
publication do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Editor
and certainly they have nothing to do with WebEperts Inc.
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