Science Series, Volumes 1-2

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University of Missouri, 1912 - Science
 

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Page 78 - To form some conception of the degree of coarse-grainedness indicated by this conclusion, imagine a rain drop, or a globe of glass as large as a pea, to be magnified up to the size of the earth, each constituent molecule being magnified in the same proportion. The magnified structure would be coarser grained than a heap of small shot, but probably less coarse grained than a heap of cricketballs.
Page 92 - Yet I doubt not thro' the ages one increasing purpose runs, And the thoughts of men are widen'd with the process of the suns.
Page 83 - ... corpuscle arises from its charge. We know a great deal about negative electricity ; what do we know about positive electricity ? Is positive electricity molecular in structure ? Is it made up into units, each unit carrying a charge equal in magnitude though opposite in sign to that carried by a corpuscle ? Does, or does not, this unit differ, in size and physical properties, very widely from the corpuscle ? We know that by suitable processes we can get corpuscles out of any kind of matter, and...
Page 81 - Ramsay estimates that the neon in the air only amounts to one part of neon in 100,000 parts of air, so that the neon in 1/20 of a cubic centimetre of air would only occupy at atmospheric pressure a volume of half a millionth of a cubic centimetre. When stated in this form the quantity seems exceedingly small, but in this small volume there are about ten million million molecules. Now the population of the earth is estimated at about fifteen hundred millions, so that the smallest number of molecules...
Page 81 - ... able to detect them. Rutherford has shown that we can detect the presence of a single a particle. Now the a particle is a charged atom of helium ; if this atom had been uncharged we should have required more than a million million of them, instead of one, before we should have been able to detect them. We have already made considerable progress in the task of discovering what the structure of electricity is. We have known for some time that of one kind of electricity — the negative — and...
Page 5 - ... on Newton. Science may be compared to an asymptotic line, which is always approaching nearer and nearer to some curve but never reaching it except at infinite distance. Sometimes a single discovery may change the whole framework of a science. Thus Professor Soddy, speaking of radio-activity, says : It sounds incredible, but nevertheless it is true, that science up to the close of the nineteenth century had no suspicion even of the existence of the original sources of natural energy. . . . The...
Page 87 - ... other is about 100,000 times greater. The electrostatic potential energy in the smaller bodies is enormously greater than that in the larger ones; if one of these small bodies were to explode and expand to the size of the larger ones, we should have a liberation of energy large enough to endow an a particle with the energy it possesses. Is it possible that the positive units of electricity were, to begin with, quite as small as the negative, but while in the course of ages most of these have...
Page 89 - Let us picture to ourselves the aggregate as, like the ^Epinus atom of Lord Kelvin, consisting of a sphere of uniform positive electrification, and exerting therefore a radial electric force proportional at an internal point to the distance from the centre, and that the very much smaller negatively electrified corpuscles are moving about inside it.
Page 26 - With Earth's first Clay They did the Last Man knead, And there of the Last Harvest sow'd the Seed: And the first Morning of Creation wrote What the Last Dawn of Reckoning shall read.
Page 4 - ... possible development to mathematical logic, to allow to the full the importance of relations, and then to found upon this secure basis a new philosophical logic, which may hope to borrow some of the exactitude and certainty of its mathematical foundation. If this can be successfully accomplished, there is every reason to hope that the near future will be as great an epoch in pure philosophy as the immediate past has been in the principles of mathematics.

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