United States or Sweden ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Our age is one of unprecedented responsibility. As Mr. Lippmann has so well said: Never before have we had to rely so completely on ourselves. No guardian to think for us, no precedent to follow without question, no lawmaker above, only ordinary men set to deal with heartbreaking perplexity. All weakness comes to the surface.
Perhaps, however, we find ourselves already in conditions where the too great simplicity of the distribution of the molecules deprives the principle of its value. M. Lippmann has in the same way shown that, on the kinetic hypothesis, it is possible to construct such mechanisms that we can so take cognizance of molecular movements that vis viva can be taken from them.
For they had killed his firstborn! * Vol. XXIII December 1910 No. 6 By WALTER LIPPMANN Within a week of the death of Professor William James of Harvard University, the newspapers had it that Mr. M. S. Ayer of Boston had received a message from his spirit. This news item provoked the ridicule of the people who don't believe in ghosts, but the joke was on Mr. Ayer of Boston.
Walter Lippmann once reminded us, "You took the good things for granted. Now you must earn them again. For every right that you cherish, you have a duty which you must fulfill. For every good which you wish to preserve, you will have to sacrifice your comfort and your ease. There is nothing for nothing any longer." Our challenges are formidable.
The mechanisms of M. Lippmann are not, like the celebrated apparatus at one time devised by Maxwell, purely hypothetical. They do not suppose a partition with a hole impossible to be bored through matter where the molecular spaces would be larger than the hole itself. They have finite dimensions. Thus M. Lippmann considers a vase full of oxygen at a constant temperature.
Most of the literature which is gripping that great intellectual no-man's land of the silent readers, is basing its appeal, and its story, on the rather uncolored and bald facts which come from Freud, Trotter, Robinson, Dewey, E.B. Holt, Lippmann, Morton Prince, Pierce, Bailey, Jung, Hart, Overstreet, Thorndike, Campbell, Meyer and Watson, Stanley Hall, Adler, White.
"It is a nice question," remarks Walter Lippmann, "whether the use of God's name is not misleading when it is applied by modernists to ideas so remote from the God men have worshipped.
We might also, as M. Lippmann has suggested in an extremely ingenious way, decide to obtain measures of time which can be considered as absolute because they are determined by parameters of another nature than that of the magnitude to be measured. Such experiments are made possible by the phenomena of gravitation.
Develop those in his grandson, give him the training of a National Academy of Technical Arts, bring out the repressed courage and self-confidence, and you will produce well, let us say, the Chief Pilot of the Aëro Transportation Department, the man to whom Congress will vote an honorary pension for winning the first Washington-to-Buenos Ayres race in a three-hundred-foot Lippmann Stabilized quadroplane, carrying fifty passengers and two tons of mail and baggage."
The marvellous application M. Lippmann has made of these waves to completely solve the problem of photography in colours is well known.