Elements of Libertarian Leadership by Leonard E. Read

Author:Leonard E. Read
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781610162623
Publisher: The Foundation for Economic Education, Inc.

Inside the Atom

There are all sorts of helpful exercises—such as an occasional rehearsal of the startling facts of life—that can induce an awareness of how little one knows. For example, while reading the above three paragraphs, there will have been created within the reader nearly one billion new red blood corpuscles. Astounding as this is, each of these billion corpuscles is a mystery in itself. For, “every substance is a system of molecules in motion and every molecule is a system of oscillating atoms and every atom is. . . .” Well, what is an atom?

One noted chemist in trying to make simple an answer to this question began by asserting that there were more atoms in his hand than there were grains of sand on all the beaches of the earth. To dramatize the nature of an atom he asked his listeners to take an Alice-in-Wonderland growing pill, one that would shoot them through the roof, past the clouds, through the stratosphere, past the moon, past the sun and some of the planets, until each person was enlarged by a factor of a trillion. Thus magnified, an atom of calcium from the bone of one’s thumb would be in manageable proportions for inspection.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.