Catalogo Experimenta 06

EXPERIMENTA 06 - INTORNO AL FUTURO: VIAGGIO NELLE TECNOLOGIE INVISIBILI
10
INTRODUCTION edited by Piero Bianucci
How many machines are there that make life more comfortable and pleasant?
From the mobile phone to the car, from household appliances to CD
player to Internet. The network which, covering the entire planet, is the
biggest machine ever built by man, the list would be extremely long.
But inside the machines others are hidden, more mysterious because
they are invisible. The mobile phone contains three chips which in substance
are other computers concentrated in pieces of silicon smaller
than a coin. Still more invisible, because completely immaterial, is the
software which makes these three micro processors. The car is a collection
of devices conceived to guarantee safety and driving comfort.
The CD player can allow us to listen to favourite music because a laser
ray explores millions of minuscule cavities that codify digital data.
The screen of old televisions with cathode tubes is an accelerator of
electrons, that is to say, sub-atomic particles, similar to those used by
physicists to investigate the structure of material. In more recent televisions
we find screens of liquid crystals or plasma, other sophisticated
technologies developed by the most advanced research.
Even the most banal household appliances are machines that in their
turn contain other machines, operated by electricity. To have electricity
at our disposal at this point seems to be a foregone fact, it seems
impossible that in a time not even long ago, a century ago, man lived
without having this energy to hand. In our houses there are lots of
electric sockets that offer power of between 3 to 5 kilowatts according
to the contract stipulated with the supplier. It is difficult to have an idea
of what this signifies. A way of realising what it could be: since a young
and robust man working with his arms and legs could supply power of
about 200 Watts, the household appliances put at our disposal are the
equivalent of about thirty young and robust people. To give a concrete
idea: the constant production of between 3-5 kilowatts by a dynamo
would call for twenty champion cyclists able to pedal without stopping
24 hours through 24 hours. This fact makes us understand what the cost
of energy is (although to us it could seem high when the bill arrives)
whether in reality it is negligible in respect to the performance that
this energy allows. Not only: while a good athlete can produce his 200
Watts for about ten minutes and then necessarily must rest and refresh
himself, the household appliances that we nourish with electricity do
not know exertion or tiredness.
Machines that transform in work the electricity distributed by the outlets
of the homes are electric motors based on rotating magnetic fields
conceived by Galileo Ferraris in 1888. Those spread around our houses
are lots: they are hidden in the refrigerator, in the washing machine, in
the dish washer, in the mixer, in the hair dryer, in the CD player and DVD,
in the video player, in the electric razor, in the vacuum cleaner and so
on. Other “slaves” which work daily for us are the electric resistances (to
produce heat) or various types of apparatus to illuminates, (bulbs with
filaments, neon tubes, Led). But how many us are aware of all this?
“Experimenta 06”, entitled “Around the Future. Journey in the invisible
technologies”, suggests making the submerged technologies emerge in
our daily life, those “machines” which by now have become as familiar
as to not even be perceptible. Internet is the most clamorous case: we
all navigate between the most varied sites, we send e-mail, we chat,
we talk of blogs, we download music, images and films from the Great
Network. And yet we almost completely ignore what happens beyond
the outlet of the telephone wire.
But this is only the point of departure. Secondly “Experimenta 06”
explores some technologies that we will soon meet in the near future,