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Updated: May 28, 2025
They must await a fuller knowledge of molecular conditions in general than is at present available a knowledge to which the low-temperature work itself seems one of the surest channels. Even further beyond the reach of present explanation are the facts as to magnetic conditions at low temperatures.
Since about the middle of the century this view, known as the mechanical theory of heat, has been the constant guide of the physicists in all their experiments, and any one who would understand the low-temperature phenomena must keep this conception of the nature of heat clearly and constantly in mind.
But like the gap that separated Nansen from the geographical pole, it is a very hard road to travel. How to compass it will be the study of all the low-temperature explorers in the immediate future. Who will first reach it, and when, and how, are questions for the future to decide. And when the goal is reached, what will be revealed?
Such are some of the strictly scientific results of the low-temperature work. But there are other results of a more directly practical kind neither more important nor more interesting on that account, to be sure, but more directly appealing to the generality of the non-scientific public.
It is one merit of the low-temperature work, I repeat, to have called attention to the possibilities of heat insulation in application to "the useful purposes of life."
It would not be strange, then, in view of past triumphs, if the final goal of the low-temperature workers should be first reached in the same laboratory where the outer territories of the unknown land were first penetrated three-quarters of a century ago. There would seem to be a poetic fitness in the trend of events should it so transpire.
Meantime there is another line of application of the ideas which the low-temperature work has brought into prominence which has a peculiar interest in the present connection because of its singularly Rumfordian cast, so to speak, I mean the idea of the insulation of cooled or heated objects in the ordinary affairs of life, as, for example, in cooking.
But it does not remain long in this condition. In contact with the oxygen from the air it is soon oxidized, burned up to furnish the energy necessary for the motion and irritability of the body. We are all of us low-temperature engines.
But more novel still was Dewar's experiment of inserting a small jet of ignited hydrogen into the vessel of liquid oxygen; for the jet continued to burn, forming water, of course, which was carried away as snow. The idea of a gas-jet burning within a liquid, and having snow for smoke, is not the least anomalous of the many strange conceptions that the low-temperature work has made familiar.
That is why the low-temperature work must be regarded as one of the most important scientific accomplishments of our century. At the very outset it was this work in large measure which gave the final answer to the long-mooted question as to the nature of heat, demonstrating the correctness of Count Rumford's view that heat is only a condition not itself a substance.
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