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Chemical
Miscellany free dawload themes nokia
Some chemical howlers
(From Carl Davis, 'As Junior Scientists see it' Catholic
School Journal. Dec. 1969 16-17)
"Some oxygen molecules help fires to burn while
others choose to help make water, so sometimes it is
brother against brother."
"While molecules in gases and liquids bounce around
from place to place, in solids they just lie there and
vibrate."
"We say the cause of perfume disappearing is
evaporation. Evaporation gets blamed for many things
people forget to put the top on."
"To most people solutions means finding the answer,
but to chemists solutions are things that are still all
mixed up."
"Glycerin is sociable with almost everything except
nitrogen"
"After chemists went to all the trouble to learn how
to mix iron and oxygen, they only came up with
rust."
"Many things about chemistry that were once thought
to be science fiction now actually are."
"One way to tell whether a sweater is made of wool
is to hold it over a flame. It it burnt slowly it was
wool."
"A scientific fact was only a theory as a
child."
"Frankincense is radioactive"
(from a question on group I chemistry)
A Joule among men
James Prescott Joule (1818-1889) was born in Salford,
Lancashire and was taught at one time by John Dalton.
Apart from this he had no formal education and was
largely self-taught in science, and in later life found
it difficult to keep up with the new science of
thermodynamics, which he helped to found, because of his
lack of mathematics.
He came from a wealthy
brewer's family (Joule's Stone Ales) and so was free to
indulge his scientific curiosity. His father died in 1833
and he had to help in running the family business. Some
of his first experiments were done in the laboratory at
the family brewery. He is famous for his mechanical
equivalent of heat, Joule's Law and the Joule-Thomson
effect. He had trouble getting his results accepted
because he was considered to be a brewer and not a
scientist! Not only did he make his living 'in trade' but
he also had no university education. His paper on his
findings on the relation of heat and work was rejected by
the scientific journals and the Royal Society and he had
to present it in a public lecture and get it published in
a Manchester newspaper. However, William Thomson, George
Stokes and later Michael Faraday took notice of his work
and he was accepted into scientific circles. He was
elected to the Royal Society in 1850, received its Copley
Medal (1866) and was President of the British Association
for the Advancement of Science in 1872 and 1887. He
remained a brewer and towards the end of his life got
into economic difficulty and was given a pension by Queen
Victoria in 1878.
One famous anecdote of his devotion to science and
accurate measurement, relates to his honeymoon. When he
and his wife visited a waterfall he took a thermometer to
measure the temperature of the water at the top and the
bottom! Unfortunately his wife died only six years later
in 1853.
How does one pronounce his name? A discussion in
C&ENews (25/10/93) relates that in the North of
England where he lived, Joule is pronounced to rhyme with
jowl, although most of us would probably pronounce is
like jewel or jool. The Joule brewery used to take
advantage of this confusion of pronunciation in its
advertising, which went something like this:
"Do you pronounce it
Joule's to rhyme with schools,
Joule's to rhyme with Bowls,
or Joule's to rhyme with Scowls?
Whatever you call it, by Joule's
or Joule's
or Joule's, its GOOD!"
(This takes some working
on to pronounce it properly!)
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