banging invisibly this way and that in the soft pressure of wind against his face. The arithmetic bore out the guess. In Switzerland Daniel Bernoulli derived Boyle’s law by supposing that pressure was precisely the force of repeated impacts of spherical corpuscles, and in the same way, assuming that heat was an intensification of the motion hither and thither, he derived a link between temperature and density. The corpuscularians advanced again when Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, again with painstaking care, demonstrated that one could keep reliable account books of the molecules entering and exiting any chemical reaction, even when gases joined with solids, as in rusting iron.
“Matter is unchangeable, and consists of points that are perfectly simple, indivisible, of no extent”—that the atom could itself contain a crowded and measurable universe remained for a later century to guess—“& separated from one another.” Ruggiero Boscovich, an eighteenth-century mathematician and director of optics for the French navy, developed a view of atoms with a strikingly prescient bearing, a view that Feynman’s single-sentence credo echoed two centuries later. Boscovich’s atoms stood not so much for substance as for forces. There was so much to explain: how matter compresses elastically or inelastically, like rubber or wax; how objects bounce or recoil; how solids hold together while liquids congeal or release vapors; “effervescences & fermentations of many different kinds, in which the particles go & return with as many different velocities, & now approach towards & now recede from one another.”
The quest to understand the corpuscles translated itself into a need to understand the invisible attractions and repulsions that gave matter its visible qualities. Attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another , Feynman would say simply. That mental picture was already available to a bright high-school student in 1933. Two centuries had brought more and more precise inquiry into the chemical behavior of substances. The elements had proliferated. Even a high-school laboratory could run an electric current through a beaker of water to separate it into its explosive constituents, hydrogen and oxygen. Chemistry as packaged in educational chemistry sets seemed to have reduced itself to a mechanical collection of rules and recipes. But the fundamental questions remained for those curious enough to ask, How do solids stay solid, with atoms always “jiggling”? What forces control the fluid motions of air and water, and what agitation of atoms engenders fire?
A Century of Progress
By then the search for forces had produced a decade of reinterpretation of the nature of the atom. The science known as chemical physics was giving way rapidly to the sciences that would soon be known as nuclear and high-energy physics. Those studying the chemical properties of different substances were trying to assimilate the first startling findings of quantum mechanics. The American Physical Society met that summer in Chicago. The chemist Linus Pauling spoke on the implications of quantum mechanics for complex organic molecules, primitive components of life. John C. Slater, a physicist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, struggled to make a connection between the quantum mechanical view of electrons and the energies that chemists could measure. And then the meeting spilled onto the fairgrounds of the spectacular 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, “A Century of Progress.” Niels Bohr himself spoke on the unsettling problem of measuring anything in the new physics. Before a crowd of visitors both sitting and standing, his ethereal Danish tones often smothered by crying babies and a balking microphone, he offered a principle that he called “complementarity,” a recognition of an inescapable duality at the heart of things. He claimed revolutionary import for this notion. Not just
“Matter is unchangeable, and consists of points that are perfectly simple, indivisible, of no extent”—that the atom could itself contain a crowded and measurable universe remained for a later century to guess—“& separated from one another.” Ruggiero Boscovich, an eighteenth-century mathematician and director of optics for the French navy, developed a view of atoms with a strikingly prescient bearing, a view that Feynman’s single-sentence credo echoed two centuries later. Boscovich’s atoms stood not so much for substance as for forces. There was so much to explain: how matter compresses elastically or inelastically, like rubber or wax; how objects bounce or recoil; how solids hold together while liquids congeal or release vapors; “effervescences & fermentations of many different kinds, in which the particles go & return with as many different velocities, & now approach towards & now recede from one another.”
The quest to understand the corpuscles translated itself into a need to understand the invisible attractions and repulsions that gave matter its visible qualities. Attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another , Feynman would say simply. That mental picture was already available to a bright high-school student in 1933. Two centuries had brought more and more precise inquiry into the chemical behavior of substances. The elements had proliferated. Even a high-school laboratory could run an electric current through a beaker of water to separate it into its explosive constituents, hydrogen and oxygen. Chemistry as packaged in educational chemistry sets seemed to have reduced itself to a mechanical collection of rules and recipes. But the fundamental questions remained for those curious enough to ask, How do solids stay solid, with atoms always “jiggling”? What forces control the fluid motions of air and water, and what agitation of atoms engenders fire?
A Century of Progress
By then the search for forces had produced a decade of reinterpretation of the nature of the atom. The science known as chemical physics was giving way rapidly to the sciences that would soon be known as nuclear and high-energy physics. Those studying the chemical properties of different substances were trying to assimilate the first startling findings of quantum mechanics. The American Physical Society met that summer in Chicago. The chemist Linus Pauling spoke on the implications of quantum mechanics for complex organic molecules, primitive components of life. John C. Slater, a physicist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, struggled to make a connection between the quantum mechanical view of electrons and the energies that chemists could measure. And then the meeting spilled onto the fairgrounds of the spectacular 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, “A Century of Progress.” Niels Bohr himself spoke on the unsettling problem of measuring anything in the new physics. Before a crowd of visitors both sitting and standing, his ethereal Danish tones often smothered by crying babies and a balking microphone, he offered a principle that he called “complementarity,” a recognition of an inescapable duality at the heart of things. He claimed revolutionary import for this notion. Not just
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