Modern scientific ideas : especially in the idea of discontinuity / by Sir Oliver Lodge, F.R.S.

  • Lodge, Oliver, Sir, 1851-1940.
Date:
1927
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Modern scientific ideas : especially in the idea of discontinuity / by Sir Oliver Lodge, F.R.S. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    perceptible impurity, even if it be but a million millionth of the whole, must consist of an enormous number of atoms. The number of atoms in a pint of water is far greater than the number of pints in all the oceans of the world. The lavishness and prodigality of nature is prodigious, for it is an undoubted fact that of atoms of this size the whole world and all the visible material universe is composed. Another method of specifying their minute size, and therefore their enormous number, was devised by Sir William Crookes. The vacuum bulbs used in wireless tele¬ graphy, and sometimes for incandescent lamps, are ex¬ hausted almost as far as instrumental means will allow, so that only a residue of a millionth part of the normal quantity of air is left in them; and yet the number of atoms that remain in is still enormous. If we could imagine exhaustion carried impossibly further, so that every atom was removed, and if they were then allowed to troop back again, through a leak so small that only a million could enter every second, the effect of such a leak could hardly be perceived for months or years; and if the leak continued, at that rate of a million a second, till all the atoms had returned, the time required would be of astonishing magnitude—thousands of centuries—com¬ parable to the time that has elapsed since the geologic ages. Thus, our first lesson, the result of the work of last century, is that matter is essentially discontinuous; that it consists of atoms of known size and weight, but that they are astonishingly small and numerous, almost beyond the reach of imagination. These facts are not speculation; they are the common¬ places of modern science. Of these things our own bodies consist; every cell in a vegetable or animal body contains millions of billions of atoms; and the properties of a cell are so complex, the phenomena of life so mysterious, that in all probability this great number is needed to enable our bodily tissues to possess the structure they have and to carry out their respective functions. The human body