Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 27, 2025
We're going to visit a friend of mine, Matthew Breen. A young man, still unknown, who, in my opinion, is one of our greatest physicists. Matt is a kind of savage, so he may take to you. If he does and if he's feeling in a good humor he may show you some laboratory stunts that will afford you plenty of distraction. Come along you're wearing out my rugs with your infernal pacing up and down!"
Hence physicists condemn the unphysical; financiers have only a superficial toleration for those who know little of stocks; literary persons despise the unlettered; and people of all pursuits combine to disparage those who have none. But though this is one difficulty of the subject, it is not the greatest.
Buffon was still alive, and the great sailors were every day enriching with their discoveries the Jardin du Roi; the physicists and the chemists, in the wake of Lavoisier, were giving to science a language intelligible to common folks; the jurisconsults were attempting to reform the rigors of criminal legislation at the same time with the abuses they had entailed, and Beaumarchais was bringing on the boards his Manage de Figaro.
I am speaking, of course, of the magnetism of the physicists and not of the magnetism of the Mesmers and Cagliostros. Assuredly we possess nothing remotely like it. What need would the mariner have of a compass, were he himself a compass?
But it is no simple question of convenience and simplicity which leads us to reject the one supposition and to accept the other; it is right in this case to listen to the voice of common sense, and those physicists who have an instinctive trust in the notion of an absolute length are perhaps not wrong.
Indeed, we think the wide-spread prevalence of the philosophic way of looking at things would be in many respects a great misfortune for the race, and we acknowledge that a rigidly trained philosopher would be unfit for most of a minister's functions; but we have only to describe a minister's education in order to show his exceeding unreadiness for contentions such as some of his brethren are carrying on with geologists and physicists and biologists.
The action of the waves on metallic powders has, however, remained some what mysterious; for ten years it has been the subject of important researches by Professor Lodge, M. Branly, and a very great number of the most distinguished physicists.
Physicists have tried to calculate the age of the sun from the rate of its dissipation of heat, and have assigned, at the most, a hundred million years to our solar system; but the recent discovery of a source of heat in the disintegration of such metals as radium has made their calculations useless.
In order to appreciate his deliberations and their result, it will be necessary to say that Professor Hoskins van Huysman was one of the most distinguished physicists in America, and he had also gained distinction in applied mathematics. In addition to this, he was the inventor of many marvellous contrivances for the demonstration and measurement of the more obscure physical forces.
Did you explain to Chancellor Khane the importance of this experiment?" "I tried to, Your Majesty, but he simply wouldn't listen." "But, Your Majesty!" Khane expostulated. "Professor Dandrik is head of the department, and one of the foremost physicists of the Empire, and this young man is only one of the junior assistant-professors.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking