The Upright Thinkers by Leonard Mlodinow

Author:Leonard Mlodinow [Mlodinow, Leonard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-90824-7
Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC
Published: 2015-05-04T16:00:00+00:00

Statue of Lavoisier, with the head of Condorcet

People often refer to “the march of science,” but science does not propel itself; people move it forward, and our forward progress is more like a relay race than a march. What’s more, it is a rather odd relay race, for those who grab the baton often take off in a direction that the prior runner did not anticipate, and would not approve of. That’s precisely what happened when the next great visionary of chemistry took over after the great run Lavoisier had achieved.

Lavoisier had clarified the role of elements in chemical reactions and promoted a quantitative approach to describing them. Today we know that to truly understand chemistry—and, in particular, if you want a quantitative understanding of chemical reactions—you need to understand the atom. But Lavoisier had nothing but scorn for the concept of the atom. It’s not that he was closed-minded or shortsighted. Rather, he opposed the idea of thinking in terms of atoms for an entirely practical reason.

Ever since the Greeks, scholars had conjectured about atoms—though sometimes calling them other names, such as “corpuscles,” or “particles of matter.” Yet, because they are so small, over the course of nearly two dozen centuries, no one had ever thought of a way to relate them to the reality of observations and measurements.

To get an idea of just how small atoms are, imagine filling all the world’s oceans with marbles. And then imagine shrinking each of those marbles down to the size of an atom. How much space would they take up? Less than a teaspoon. What hope could there be of observing the effects of anything that tiny?

As it turns out, plenty—and that miraculous achievement was first accomplished by a Quaker schoolteacher, John Dalton (1766–1844). Many of the great scientists of history were colorful people, but Dalton, the son of a poor weaver, was not among those. He was methodical in everything from his science to the way he took tea at five each afternoon, followed by a supper of meat and potatoes at nine.

The book Dalton is known for, A New System of Chemical Philosophy, is a meticulous three-part treatise, all the more astonishing for having been researched and written entirely in Dalton’s spare time. Part one, published in 1810, when he was in his midforties, is a mammoth work of 916 pages. Of those 916 pages, just one chapter, barely five pages long, presents the epoch-making idea that he is known for today: a way to calculate the relative weights of atoms from measurements you can do in the laboratory. That is the excitement and power of ideas in science—five pages can reverse the misguided theories of two thousand years.

The idea came to Dalton, like many ideas, in a roundabout way, and though it was now the nineteenth century, Dalton’s idea was inspired by the influence of a man born in the middle of the seventeenth century—again, here was the reach of Isaac Newton.

Dalton liked to take walks, and when

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.