Miscellaneous

This site was revised on 28th June 2018

The experience I gained at work in assembly language programming of the Motorola 6800 and 6809 microprocessors enabled me to write a program in 68000 assembler to extract the million or so prime numbers from the first 16 million natural numbers using the Sieve of Eratosthenes. It was then my intention to successively multiply these primes together, then and add 1, to hopefully obtain a massive prime number. After three days of running the  BCD multiplication program I realised two things. One was that the number may or may not be prime and I would have no way of verifying if it was prime. If it was not prime all I would be able to say that the factors were greater than the top of my million or so primes.  Consequently, I aborted the project. The programs were developed and run in the EASy68K environment, available for a PC from http://www.easy68k.com.

For a whiff of nostalgia, here is a photo of the Motorola 6800 MEK D2, with its full-house of 512 bytes of static RAM, that first got me involved with microprocessors. It is still working after 40 years!

The American Linus Pauling (1901 - 1994) was undoubtedly one of the scientific giants of the 20th century. He was a double Nobel prize winner for Chemistry and Peace. However, his work on the atomic nucleus was seemingly shunned by the scientific community and his Polyspheron Theory was never allowed by his peers to enter into the mainstream of physics or chemistry. His work on this subject seems to have buried in the past, much as Hoyle's Quasi Semi Steady State theory seems to have been buried. This theory predicted a cyclic universe, a type of model espoused by Roger Penrose with Conformal Cyclic Cosmology. Others too have pursued ideas of a cyclic universe.