Science
Related: About this forumI just stumbled into a very old paper by "Lord Rayleigh" contemplating water boiling in a pot.
John William Strutt, the 3rd Baron Rayleigh, commonly known as "Lord Rayleigh," was the winner of the 1904 Nobel Prize for his discovery of the gas Argon, which is now a very important gas with tremendous industrial application. (It is about 1% of air, by mass, but since it is non-reactive and colorless, no one before Rayleigh realized it was there. His discovery was actually incredible and relied on appreciation of very small differences in highly precise measurements of the density of nitrogen.)
"Lord Rayleigh" also discovered why the sky is blue, an effect to this day known as "Rayleigh scattering."
Recently I have been considering, in connection with understanding the physics of liquid plutonium, the physics of bubbles, a subject about which I know very little, when I came across a paper in one of my favorite journals. The paper is this one: New Modeling Strategies Evaluate Bubble Growth in Systems of Finite Extent: Energy and Environment Implications (Chatzis et al, Ind. Eng. Chem. Res., 2018, 57 (16), pp 56805689)
While this paper was partially about a subject I rather despise but still study (since one must know the enemy), the chemistry and physics of dangerous fossil fuels, I was inspired to go to the references and encountered a paper from the early 20th century, one by Lord Rayleigh.
Lord Rayleigh, O. M. F. R. S., VIII. On the Pressure Developed in a Liquid During the Collapse of a Spherical Cavity. London Edinb. Dubl. Philos. Mag. 1917, 34, 94 98, DOI: 10.1080/14786440808635681
I quote:
How beautiful is that?!!!
One of the world's greatest scientists stopping, at the height of his fame, to wonder about what happens to bubbles when water boils.
Of course that's probably very much connected with why he was a great scientist, because even bubbles and the sounds they made interested him.
This struck me as very wonderful, and I thought I'd write it down.
I hope you're having a pleasant weekend. This little find has made mine.
cyclonefence
(4,483 posts)that it didn't matter how insignificant its subject was. I think that disdain for disdain might be a mark of genius. Thanks very much for posting this.
Mayberry Machiavelli
(21,096 posts)Reading Richard Feynman's autobiography it really comes through, even though he's a physicist the guy is curious about everything around him, whether it's how ants find sugar in his home, to wondering about the properties of spinning plates which led him on the track to his Nobel winning research when he was in a scientific "slump".
NNadir
(33,455 posts)I first encountered this lecture in a textbook, Fahlman's Materials Chemistry in the Appendix. But of course, it's on the internet.
This lecture was in late 1959.
The irony is that I can and have carried Fahlman's book, and hundreds, if not thousands of other books and journal articles on a thumb drive that easily fits in my pocket, including thousands of papers on nanotechnology. I'm quite sure, in fact, that not two or three days go by on which I'm not involved with stuff on the micro, nano, or pico scale.
And this was in 1959...
This has to be one of the most remarkable historical examples of prescience ever demonstrated.
eppur_se_muova
(36,246 posts)including argon, neon, krypton, and xenon; Rayleigh received the Nobel in Physics for ... um, the discovery of argon. I didn't know anything like that (two Nobel Prizes in different fields for collaborators on the same research) had ever happened. I guess things were different back then.
By a remakable coincidence, just a few days ago I read the following:
The great experimental skill developed in this research later permitted Ramsay (with R. Whytlaw-Gray) to separate and weigh tiny quantities of the {previously discovered} radioactive gas emitted by radium and to determine its atomic weight. His ideas about radioactive decomposition (Elements and Electrons, London, 1912) were not generally accepted at that time.
-- Eduard Farber, Nobel Prize Winners in Chemistry: 1901-1961, Abelard-Schuman, London, 1963.
Certainly a reason to encourage the squirreling away of seemingly unimportant and disconnected facts in the hope they might turn out to be just the thing needed some day. If an observation saved for 45 years can pay off that big, I should start collecting windfalls any day now.
SCantiGOP
(13,862 posts)Can't remember who was responsible for this (paraphrased) quote. Might have been Oscar Wilde.