Читать книгу Inventors at Work, with Chapters on Discovery - George Iles - Страница 79

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So much for things to be observed in a country ramble, in a city store, or at the docks of a busy port. Apart from all such things is a world unseen, standing beneath the visible world, and equally worthy of study. Here knowledge is based upon inferences, upon what lawyers call circumstantial evidence. The chemist by means purely indirect studies the molecule and the atom, objects that far elude his microscope. A molecule is a part of a compound so small that it cannot be divided without becoming something simpler. Thus a sugar molecule is made up of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms; were these disjoined, the sugar, as such, would cease to be, just as a brick wall no longer exists when its bricks and their several slices of mortar are parted from one another as separate units. Small as molecules are they have not escaped the measuring rod of the physicist. Some years ago Lord Kelvin experimentally arrived at the estimate that the average molecule has a diameter of ¹⁄_760,000,000 inch. Such molecules when compared with masses of like form, and of a diameter of one inch; have 760,000,000 times as much surface. In the transmission of motion, with adhesion in play, surfaces count for much, as when a wheel in motion is brought into contact with a wheel at rest. Here may be an explanation of why electricity is conducted through a wire with a velocity far exceeding any speed we can mechanically impress upon the metal, because the molecules concerned have incomparably more surface than the wire as a mass.