“If God did create the world by a word, the word would have been hydrogen,” said the astronomer Harlow Shapley. It was Shapley who discovered the shape and size of the Milky Way Galaxy.
Articles with Atoms
Glowing hydrogen within a discharge tube • Image by Alchemist-hp (FAL)
35 xenon atoms arranged by microscope • Image courtesy IBM
Looking at the small print
We don’t know who first imagined that the world was made of atoms.
Period table of elements, Houston Museum • Photo by Shadow Byrd (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Nature’s music
Somewhere on the wall of every high school or college chemistry laboratory hangs a periodic table of the elements. Every student of chemistry has an image of the table graven on his brain.
Photo by Bruce Christianson on Unsplash
Curious stuff, this water and ice
It has been a fine winter for skating. Cold, snowless days have given us lots of smooth black ice. I have spent many pleasant hours skating the ponds near my home in Easton.
A simulated interference pattern • Timm Weitkamp (CC BY 3.0)
The duality of the subatomic
“You can’t lose doing physics,” says physicist Mike Horne. “Either you have the thrill of stumbling upon something new or you have the pleasure of seeing accepted principles working perfectly.”
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Public Domain)
Matter’s nature
Since early in the history of western philosophy, matter has been cast as the dross of creation, the chaff, the bottom link of the chain of being, the lowest rung on a ladder of value that reached from the ponderous center of the earth to the highest heaven.