Explanation of World Science Paper

Explanation of World Science Paper

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Explanation of World Science Paper

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Atoms, Elements, and Germs: Science Reveals the Universe

A new scientific revolution easily kept pace with the technological advances of the age. Ever since the ancient Greeks, Europeans had assumed that all matter was made up of four “elements”: earth, air, fire, and water. Not until the 1780s, when Antoine Lavoisier (1743–1794), the father of modern chemistry, began to study the nature of fire was that notion finally abandoned. A lawyer, and also France’s chief tax collector, Lavoisier was an ardent scientist as well.

Testing the properties of oxygen, only just isolated, Lavoisier showed that fire was not an element but a compound of more basic ingredients. His research led to the conclusion that in nature no matter was ever lost (the law of the conservation of matter). Lavoisier ended his distinguished career by drawing up a list of 32 known elements, preparing the way for advances by his successors.

In 1808, John Dalton (1766–1844), an English physician who experimented with gases decided that each of Lavoisier’s elements was composed of identical atoms and that each element could be distinguished from another by its atomic weight. His calculation of the weights of various atoms led to a theory about how elements form compounds.

When, in 1869, Russian chemist Dimitri Mendeleev (1834–1907) put all known elements in order of atomic weight, he found they grouped themselves into several families sharing common properties. Since some families were missing some elements, he assumed (correctly) that these would subsequently be discovered, or even created, by humans.

Mendeleev’s periodic table of the elements, the foundation of physical chemistry, remains one of the greatest achievements of nineteenth-century science. Shortly after mid-century the German botanist Ferdinand J. Cohn (1828–1898) discovered microscopic plants he called bacteria, which he suggested were the causes of many diseases. Scottish surgeon Joseph Lister (1827–1912) created new antiseptic practices that helped fight infection by killing these bacteria.

Hungarian Ignaz Semmelweis (1818–1865) realized that childhood fever was caused by germs carried from patient to patient by doctors who saw no need to wash their hands or instruments. Semmelweis died of a wound infected during an operation long before the medical profession accepted his findings, but today’s antiseptic practices are based directly on his findings.

This germ theory of disease was finally proven by Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) in France and Robert Koch (1843–1910) in Germany. A paper on “Germ Theory and its Application to Medicine and Surgery” read by Pasteur before the French Academy of Sciences on April 29, 1878, dealing with his experiments on the anthrax virus and septicemia bacterium is usually taken to mark the public debut of germ theory.

A crude but occasional effective inoculation against smallpox, originally developed in China, had been known in Europe for centuries. But only during Pasteur’s fight against anthrax (a disease affecting sheep) in the 1870s did he begin to understand why vaccinations worked. Applying his insights to humans, Pasteur developed an effective smallpox vaccine using a mild form of the disease.

Persons who received the vaccination escaped the more severe effects of the disease which killed a majority of its victims. Pasteur always emphasized the practical applications of his theoretical experiments. We see this every time we pick up a container of pasteurized milk, although Pasteur first developed the process of boiling to kill bacteria to help France’s beer industry.

So eager was Pasteur to further knowledge of science that he used his prestige to institute evening university classes for working men. In Germany, Robert Koch, who had been a field surgeon during the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871), pioneered research into other “germs,” eventually discovering the organisms that caused eleven different diseases, including cholera (1884) and tuberculosis (1882).

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1905 for his development of the “scratch test” for exposure to tuberculosis, still in use today. He also developed many of the techniques still used to grow bacteria in a laboratory. These medical discoveries began to have an immediate impact on the lives of people in industrial societies as governments suddenly found themselves in the business of keeping things clean.

Great Britain passed laws in 1875 requiring local authorities to maintain sewers, forbade the building of any new houses without a toilet, and outlawed selling foods colored or stained to look fresher than they were. Jacob Riis (1849–1916) emigrated from Denmark to the United States as a young man.

Working as a police reporter for newspapers in New York, and then with his photograph-filled book, How the Other Half Lives (1890), he publicized the terrible living conditions in the slums that housed an ever-growing population of workers. Riis’s work inspired stronger public health and housing laws.

The city even went so far as to buy up land in upstate New York to keep development from contaminating the source of the city’s water supply. Some historians of science believe the greatest advances of the century were made in physics. Many of these grew out of the process of industrialization.

Working to improve techniques for boring metal cannon in 1798–1799, the American Benjamin Thompson (1753–1814) demonstrated that the activity generated a limitless amount of heat. Since no material body could be produced in unlimited quantities, his experiments proved that heat was a kind of energy, not a material thing.

Using these findings, Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894) of Germany was able to formulate the law of the conservation of energy (1847). A counterpart of Lavoisier’s law of the conservation of matter, Helmholtz’s Law held that, although energy could be converted from one form into another, there could be no addition to, nor subtraction from, the total amount of energy in the universe.

Because this law applies not only to heat, but also to electricity, magnetism, and light, it was one of the most important scientific generalizations of the nineteenth century. But advances in physics were not limited to theory; many of them had an immediate impact on everyday life.

In Great Britain, Michael Faraday (1791–1867) helped develop the dynamo, a machine that allowed the transmission of electric current over long distances. Faraday’s ingenuity made possible public lighting systems, telephone networks, and the development of the electric motor.

By the century’s end, however, physicists were challenging the accepted nature of the universe itself. Not only were atoms not the smallest units of matter in the universe, many of them were also structurally unstable.

Physicists themselves were startled in 1895 when Wilhelm Röntgen (1845–1923) of Germany reported a strange ray he detected while sending electric current through a glass tube from which most of the air had been removed.

Röntgen named what he saw the “X-ray” because he was uncertain of the ray’s exact nature, although he believed it was a form of electromagnetic radiation like light but of a shorter wavelength. Future experiments proved his belief correct.

For his discovery, Röntgen was later awarded the very first Nobel Prize in Physics (1901). In France, Henri Becquerel (1852–1908) discovered that uranium compounds also gave off a form of radiation; the papers he published in 1896 gave modern physics a new direction. Maria Skl⁄odowska-Curie (1867–1934) coined the term “radioactivity” in 1898 for the phenomenon first observed by Becquerel.

Building on Becquerel’s work, she and her husband Pierre (1859–1906) demonstrated that radioactivity was an atomic property of uranium and isolated two more radioactive elements, radium and polonium.

The Curies and Becquerel shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903. In Britain, Joseph John Thomson (1856–1940) built on Röntgen’s work to give humanity a glimpse inside the atom with his discovery of the electron in 1897 for which he was later knighted.

At the same time Ernest Rutherford (1871–1937) suggested that each atom had a central, positively charged nucleus, which was separate from its negatively charged electrons. Radioactivity was caused by electrons escaping from unstable atoms. X-rays, radioactivity, and the electron theory challenged one of the most dearly held beliefs of science, the idea that matter was indivisible and continuous.

The work of Röntgen, Becquerel, the Curies, Thomson, and Rutherford cleared the way for a new understanding of the universe. The universe was neither solid nor stable, but composed of energy only precariously bound into atoms.

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The single, simple “theory of everything” the Scientific Revolution thought it had found in Sir Isaac Newton’s law of gravity receded further and further into the distance. The greatest challenge to that theory came from Albert Einstein (1879–1955).

The son of a German Jewish electrical engineer in Switzerland, Einstein gave little evidence of genius during his school days. Unable to find a university post, this graduate of the Swiss Polytechnic Institute supported his family as a patent office clerk.

Yet in 1905, at the age of 26, he published three articles in the same issue of the Annals of Physics that altered the history of the century (and won him the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics).

The third essay became the theory of special relativity. Science had already shown that light moved in a straight line and at a constant speed no matter the vantage point. But from this fact, Einstein drew seemingly outrageous conclusions.

He demonstrated that, when observed, a moving clock ran more slowly than a stationary one and a moving object shrank in the direction of the motion of light. He used the example of two strokes

Explanation of World Science Paper

Explanation of World Science Paper

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