Explore the fascinating scientific milestones from February 1976, 1926, and 1876, revealing how our understanding of atoms, life, and technology has evolved over the past century and a half.
1976: Giant Atoms
The biggest atoms are not those of some heavy, transuranic element but quite light atoms in a highly excited state. Although the diameter of a normal atom is about 10–8 centimeter, some excited atoms have a diameter of 10–5 centimeter and are as large as certain bacteria. The energy state of an atom is denoted by its principal quantum number, designated n, which defines the probability of finding an electron at a particular distance from the nucleus. In the state of lowest energy, n is 1, and the electrons are effectively confined to a quite small volume. At higher energy states, n increases as electrons are likely to be found at larger distances from the nucleus. Interest in such inflated atoms has been aroused in part by new methods for creating, manipulating and detecting them. Atoms have now been prepared in the laboratory with n as high as 105. Such atoms are on the very brink of ionization, and with only a small input of energy, they fly apart.
1926: What Is Life?
We are so far from a perfect understanding of life that even active workers in biological research cannot agree as to the real nature of life—whether it is purely a matter of chemistry and physics and evolution and chance, or whether there will indeed prove to be an element of the nature of the ‘spark of life’ of the ancients, transcending mortal understanding. It is now generally known that the unit of living matter is the cell. The cell is the building stone, the brick, from which all plants and animals are constructed. Life may indeed be regarded as the resultant action of the cells of which the organism is composed. What more natural, then, than to concentrate attention on the single cell? There is little doubt that these microscopic objects hold the key to the full understanding of life.
Worldwide Wireless Net
The various colonies of the British Empire are being linked by a new short-wave beam transmitter, which concentrates radio energy as a searchlight reflects light in a definite and desired direction. Finishing touches on installations of this up-to-date system are being made near Montreal, by the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of Canada, for direct communication with England and Australia. These Canadian beams will be the first links to be forged in the worldwide wireless net. The Canadian Marconi Company will construct a beam station in the Dominion of Canada for communication with stations to be built in England. Each station is to be capable of communication at a speed of 100 five-letter words per minute each way, during a daily average of 18 hours.
Point of View: Is Science Callow?
What science needs most today is a true vision rising above spectrometers, cell walls, vapor tensions, microtomes and polarities, and seeing beyond them—as far as man can hope to see—the end toward which all these humbler things are but little steps. Such a vision is that of Professor Theodore D. A. Cockerell of the University of Colorado—biologist, zoologist, entomologist of note, but known, because of his writings, to all the biological world as ‘the Huxley of America’; a man who has made of a little corner of science a true philosophy, who has brought to those who care more for life itself than for a test tube full of green precipitate, a foreshadow of what science, under better guidance than that of our day, might mean to the ‘man in the street.’
1876: Shall We Undergo Dissection?
To yield up our lives for the advancement of Science is something that few of us would be willing to do, but to yield our bodies as a sacrifice on the altar of truth and knowledge, after we no longer have any use for them, is not a very hard thing; and therefore we are not surprised to read that a society has been formed in Paris, the members of which bind themselves, by a special testamentary disposition, not to be interred after death. Their bodies are to be delivered to the dissecting rooms of the various medical schools for dissection. We are not afraid that the whole world will follow this example and flood the market with useless corpses. There will still remain those who desire an old-fashioned burial.
For the fastest, most authoritative analysis of breaking tech and science news, stay tuned to onlytrustedinfo.com, where we transform headlines into deep, user-centric insights.
