Electronics and technical progress

Large-scale application of electronic technique is a trend of technical progress capable of revolutionizing many branches of industry.

Electronics as a science studies the properties of electrons, the laws of their motion, the laws of the transformation of various kinds of energy through the media of electrons.

Electronics and radio electronics in our country have developed from the country’s only radio laboratory in Nizhny Novgorod into hundreds of research institutes, design offices and laboratories employing tens of thou-sands of people.

At present it is difficult to enumerate all branches of sci­ence and technology which are based on electronic technique. Without radio electro-nics we would not have cybernetics, cosmonautics and nuclear physics. It is no mistake, there­fore, to compare the birth of electronics to such great achieve­ments of mankind as the discovery of fire, the use of the wheel, and the penetration into the secrets of the atom.

Electronics makes it possible to raise industrial automa­tion to a higher level, to prepare conditions for the future technical equipping of the national economy. It revolutionized the system of control over mechanism and production processes. The use of electronic and cybernetic machines led to radical changes in the management of big economic organizations, large plants, and so on. Electronics greatly helps to conduct fundamental research in nuclear physics, in the study of the nature of matter, and in the real­ization of controlled thermonuclear reactions.

It was suggested that electronic telescopes should be used by astronomers to penetrate far into the unknown regions of the universe.

An ever greater role is being played by electronics in the development of the chemical industry.

Electronics includes many independent branches. The main among them are vacuum, semiconductor, molecular and quantum electronics.

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to conduct …………….. semiconductor ………...

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Mysterious devices or not

One of the most exciting fields of the twentieth century sci­ence was optical electronics.

One of the most interesting and often talked about devices of our modern space age has been these science fiction like laser and maser devices. Although these devices may have a mysterious and fantastic air about them they are basically nothing more than energy amplifiers. The mystery lies in how electrons can be am­plified in the laser and maser. Although science fiction writers, years ago imagined such things as “ray guns” and “swords of heat” it was only in 1960 that the first laser beam was actually created, its discoverer being Dr. Theodore H. Maiman.

The laser is basically a device that controls the way in which pho-tons are emitted by a light source, and it produces a beam having much greater intensity and coherence than one from any other source of light.

Early uses of the laser have been in optical radar, the cutting and welding of metals and as the basis of a branch of photo­graphy called holography, which produces three dimensional im­ages. Future uses of the laser beam may include carrying millions of radio and television frequencies in a thousandth of a second. The controlled light from the laser beam is to conventional sour­ces of light what nuclear power is to traditional explosives. Power densities many millions of times more intense than those on the surface of the sun can be produced, and yet laser beams can be so delicately controlled as to be used to operate on the human eye.

The laser’s potentialities in science and technology are for­mulated in terms of four basic categories: how the device offers advantages in welding, chemistry, spectroscopy, interplanetary signalling radar and communications.

It is academician N.G. Basov, the Russian physicist who is one of the founders of quantum radio physics. He worked out a thor­oughly new method of generating electromagnetic oscillations by means of quanta systems. He created the first in the world molecular generator (maser). He put forward the idea of applying semiconductors for lasers and developed the method of designing semiconductor lasers. N.G. Basov and A.M. Prokhorov, his collaborator became the Nobel Prize winners in 1964.

The existing applications of lasers are numerous. For high precision welding and machining three dimensional photography of undreamed realism, communications on earth through space for location, navigation and as an aid to gunnery they are already irreplaceable. They are moreover an entirely new tool for scientific research.

Mention should be made that their potential and future exploration is limitless.

Three dimensional television and cinema, wide and dramatic uses in surgery, X-ray laser beams and laser computers are only a few of the possibilities which must now be seriously con­sidered.

Certainly for many years to come lasers will continue to merit the description given to them immediately on their discovery – “A solution is in search of a problem”.

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often talked about devices ….. science fiction ……………… to lie in ……………………... to imagine ………………….. guns ………………………… sword ……………………….. welding …………………….. holography …………………. in terms of ………………….. machining ………………….. gunnery …………………….. to merit …………………….. in search …………………….

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