A bark is a sailing vessel with three masts. The three large British White Star liners "Titanic," "Olympic" and "Britannic" were the largest ships afloat for over twenty years between 1913 and 1935. Who were The Big Three during World War II?
Humans have been attempting to communicate across distances for a very, very long time—far before we even considered the potential of the cellphone. That is a morse code if you were alive in the 1850s or are a modern amateur radio operator. This form of communication was once essential to keeping things moving around the world.
Morse first created an encryption code that was comparable to the semaphore telegraphs that were already in use. It involved allocating three- or four-digit numbers to the words and entering them into a codebook. Words were transformed into these number groups by the sending operator. Using this codebook, the receiving operator changed them back to words. The creation of this code dictionary took Morse several months.
It was employed during the world wars to transmit widespread public messages. It might be used to send mail across continents. In a sense, texting was developed before Morse code.
We examine the Morse Code’s mechanisms and history in great detail in this extensive article.
What is the Morse Code? The Inventor Behind Morse Code:
There are two systems that are referred to as Morse codes. Morse Code uses a combination of dots, dashes, and spaces to represent alphabetic characters, numbers, and punctuation. The codes are sent as varying-length electrical pulses or similar mechanical or visual signals. The first, the “American” Morse Code, and the second, later, widely used International Morse Code are the two codes.
American artist and inventor Samuel F.B. Morse created one of the Morse code systems in the 1830s for electrical telegraphy in the United States. In order to accommodate letters with diacritical markings, a meeting of European nations developed a variation known as the International Morse Code in 1851.
How does Morse code work?
All letters in the International Morse Code are represented by combinations of dots and short dashes. The International Morse Code also substitutes constant-length dashes for the variable-length dashes used in the first Morse Code. For instance, three dots, three dashes, and three dots are used to express the universal distress signal “SOS”—three dots standing in for the letter “S” and three dashes for the letter “O.”
The Terror of Threes in the Heavens and on Earth Physicists have long explored how phenomena in groups of three can sow chaos. A new three-body problem, they warn, could lead to not only global races for new armaments but also thermonuclear war.
By William J. Broad June 26, 2023 | Updated 1:52 p.m. ET
Isaac Newton was baffled. He was already famous for discovering how gravity holds the universe together and for using that knowledge to predict the movements of celestial bodies, such as the moon’s path around the Earth. Now, by taking the sun’s gravitational tugs into account, he sought to improve his lunar predictions. Instead, it made them worse.
The setback, Newton’s friend Edmond Halley reported, “made his head ache, and kept him awake so often, that he would think of it no more.” Newton felt his defeat so keenly that he recalled it more than once in his old age.
Today it’s called the three-body problem. Famous in science and science fiction for orbital perturbations and chaotic phenomena, it’s recently become a concern of atomic experts and military planners. As Beijing rapidly expands its nuclear arsenal, they warn that the world of atomic superpowers is about to escalate to three from two. The outcome, they add, compared with the Moscow-Washington standoff, now 70 years old, could represent a dangerous new kind of unthinkable.
The looming era could encourage “states to resort to nuclear weapons in a crisis,” Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr., a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, recently warned. He cited the natural instabilities observed by physicists and astronomers as a portent.
Experts say the tripolar age could put human survival at risk. But they also cite a number of three-body lessons from nature — starting with Newton’s — that illuminate the issue and suggest possible ways forward. So far, however, no answer stands out. The world’s nuclear thinkers are finding the knotty topic to be as intractable as it was for Newton.
“We have a conceptual problem,”
Ernest J. Moniz
“We have a conceptual problem,” said Ernest J. Moniz, a physicist who as the secretary of energy in the Obama administration oversaw the U.S. nuclear arsenal. “We’ve got to change the traditional approach of equalizing weapons or strategic delivery systems, but how to do that is still unclear.”
“Things are changing very rapidly”
France A. Córdova
France A. Córdova, an astrophysicist and past director of the National Science Foundation, said the study of three-body phenomena in the natural sciences could nonetheless help reveal the military risks. “Things are changing very rapidly,” she said. “Anything that helps in understanding that is great.”
Security-minded hawks want to expand the American arsenal in response to China’s nuclear rise and the threat of Beijing’s closing ranks with Moscow. Doves see a window for three-body downsizing. They want to break the problem into smaller and more manageable parts. For instance, they argue that Washington should deal with the two superpowers independently and seek diplomatic bonds that reinforce two-body stability.
Recently, the Biden administration called for a further simplification. Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, argued that the American response should focus less on the quantity of the nation’s nuclear arms than on their quality. To deter attacks successfully, he said in a speech, the American military has no need for arms that “outnumber the combined total of our competitors.”
