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For instance, the smallest conceivable quantity of water is a molecule, while the smallest conceivable quantity of either of the two elements of which water is composed, is an atom. In every molecule of water, therefore, there are three elementary atoms, two of hydrogen and one of oxygen.
Exclude a single molecule of hydrogen from the ring, or vary the relative positions of two molecules only, and the charm is broken; an element of disturbance has been introduced, of which the utmost that can be said is that it may not prevent the ensuing of a long series of very nearly perfect cycles before similarity in recurrence is destroyed, but which must inevitably prevent absolute identity of repetition.
He estimates that if a ball, say of water or glass, about "as large as a football, were to be magnified up to the size of the earth, each constituent molecule being magnified in the same proportion, the magnified structure would be more coarse-grained than a heap of shot, but probably less coarse-grained than a heap of footballs."
If you want to compress it, a uniform impulse must be communicated to all the particles of the substance, so as to diminish the interval that separates them in an equal degree. If you wish to expand it, we should try to bring a uniform eccentric force to bear on every molecule; for unless we conform accurately to this law, we shall have breaches in continuity.
Cherub!... the thunderous rapture of the seraphim. What are seraphim? Perhaps a whole constellation. But perhaps that constellation is only a chemical molecule. There’s a constellation of the Lion and the Sun. Don’t you know it?” “Brother, sit down,” said Alyosha in alarm. “For goodness’ sake, sit down on the sofa! You are delirious; put your head on the pillow, that’s right.
Let us then be content with contemplating nature, who, being self-existent, must in her essence possess motion; which cannot be conceived without properties, from which result perpetual action and re- action; or those continual efforts which give birth to such a numerous train of circumstances; in which a single molecule cannot be found, that does not necessarily occupy the place assigned to it, by immutable and necessary laws that is for an instant in an absolute state of repose.
And in fact, unless we are satisfied to imagine the atoms of a gas as mathematical points endowed with inertia, and as, according to Boscovich, endowed with forces of mutual, positive, and negative attraction, varying according to some definite function of the distance, we cannot avoid the question of impacts, and of vibrations and rotations of the molecules resulting from impacts, and we must look distinctly on each molecule as being either a little elastic solid or a configuration of motion in a continuous all-pervading liquid.
Here we would be among familiar forms, describing familiar motions: the forms, for example, of the earth and the moon and of their motion about the sun; of the atom, as we imagine it, the molecule and the cell. For is not the sphere, or ovoid, the unit form of nature; and is not the spiral vortex its characteristic motion, from that of the nebula in the sky to the electron in the atom?
A molecule of potassium chlorate is always composed of just one atom of potassium chloride and three atoms of oxygen. Never is there any variation of these proportions in the same element, and a chemist will, without handling the elements, merely by mathematical calculation, unerringly produce new combinations, relying on the absolute constancy of the relations of atoms and molecules.
The induction balance affords also some reasons for believing that the molecules not only form a closed circle of attractions, as at B, but that they can mutually react upon each other, so as to close a circle of attractions as a double molecule, as shown at A. The experimental evidence, however, is not sufficient to dwell on this point, as the neutrality obtained by superposition is somewhat similar in its external effects.
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