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Happy Birthday, Atom
Shipud writes "200 years ago today (Oct. 21) John Dalton revolutionized chemistry by starting the process of turning it into an exact science. He presented the Table of Atomic Weights, at the Manchester literary and Philosophical Society.
Dalton's work proposed atoms exist: and not just as an explanatory or philosophical
tool. His theory laid the foundations for the periodic table of the elements (1869, Mendeleev), and indeed to all modern chemistry. The molecular weight of compounds is today measured in Daltons, the weight of a hydrogen atom. Read more about Mr. Dalton in today's Nature: a man of many
interests, whose atomic theory preceded experimental evidence by a century. Read also
about Daltonism -- and
why it is named after him."
Thanks for almost making me fail Chemistry cause my dumb-ass teacher made me memorize the first 80 elements for a test!
This comment was just a joke. If you are replying to say anything about how it'd be harder or memorizing 80 things are easy, save your fingers
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
And now we can make small nuclear reactors.
I remember when legal used to mean lawful, now it means some kind of loophole. - Leo Kessler
Dalton proposed the existence of the atom, but it took Rutherford to verify its structure and prove it existed as Dalton suggested.
Actually, isn't a dalton 1/12th the mass of a C12 atom? While very close to the mass of H1, they are not identical.
Ranier Wolfcastle: Up and at them!
like News for Turds. Stuff that Stinks?
That kind of waste?
I mean, what do you get for the guy who's everything? (rimshot)
You are not the customer.
I am soooooo screwed.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
You don't like it, block science stories. It's easy, and then you won't have to tax your widdle bwain.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Personally, I think Sean Connery ... oh wait, nevermind.
Yes, you certainly shouldn't give a rat's ass about chemistry, or the atom, or the fact that without the scientific and technological advances brought about over the years by building upon the work of people like Dalton, you'd still be living in a cave and wouldn't be able to post as an Anonymous Asshat on Slashdot.
No, nothing to care about at all.
A universe to put it in.
(rimshot)
200th anniversary? I think that's the Cesium year.
You horrible terrorist, you just explained the principle behind a Hydrogen Bomb. There are penalties for those who reveal the precious secrets of fusion.
:-)
You know those atomic models we played with at school.. the coloured balls that we attached together with plastic sticks.. making up molecules... Dalton must have had quite a lot of trouble with that if he was colour blind.. so even more kudos for being able to work all that stuff out.. I give him an A+
you'd still be living in a cave and wouldn't be able to post as an Anonymous Asshat on Slashdot.
I etch my Slashdot commets on the walls of my cave in Lascaux using bison blood and charcoal, you insensitive clod!
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Happy Birthday to you
Happy Birthday to you
Happy Birthday dear Atom
Happy Bi...
(knock at door)
Freeze!...This is the RIAA...
you are under arrest for massive copyright violation and you are going to jail for a long long long time...
whimper.
TDz.
"200 years ago today (Oct. 21) John Dalton revolutionized chemistry by starting the process of turning it into an exact science"
Can't argue with John Dalton having helped revolutionize chemistry, but he didn't start the process of turning it into an exact science. I think that the credit for that probably belongs to British chemist Joseph Black, who founded calorimetry and was one of the first scientists to emphasize quantitative experiments. (Interestingly, at Edinburgh his chemistry chair was unsalaried!)
John Dalton and John Lennon.
3 Daltons is roughly equivalent to one Lucky Luke.
That was clever!
If dalton didn't prove anything and only theorized, didn't Leucippus and Democritus beat him by a few thousand years?
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
He taught chemistry but had no experience of chemical research
Resembles some teachers I had in High School
"Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the life-long attempt to acquire it." -Albert Einstein
Good thing atoms were invented.
Before that, everything was made of plum pudding!
modern chemists don't measure molecular masses in daltons, they use gram/mole. Daltons aren't used until you get into larger molecules like proteins, as in "that protein is 70 kDa (kilodaltons) in size".
How interesting. Every day I go to study at the Department of Engineering and Technology in the JOHN DALTON building here in Manchester, yet I had NO idea who John Dalton was, or what he had to do with Manchester.
At least now I'll have something to bore my classmates with tomorrow...
200? I could have sworn atoms were around 13.7 billion years old, give or take.
-Carolyn
Like Daddy always said: if you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullshit.
When Dalton originally proposed his atomic theory there was much resistance. The idea of tiny, hard, indivisible units was unreasonable to many of the people around Dalton and it took a long time for people to accept his ideas. But guess what! The people who resisted were right. Today we have completely replaced the idea of an indivisible atom with a wavefunction in a Hilbert space. We might still call these things 'atoms' but they bear very little relationship with what Dalton was thinking of. In fact, at the time people used Dalton's theory as a metaphor as they couldn't take the ideas literally at all. And that's exactly what physicists do today.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I tek 2 ... no no no ... 4 ... no no no ... I want ALL. Cum rite hear an doo it!
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Even today many schoolrooms have recently-published science books that show a model of the atom that looks like a little solar system, electrons in orbits and all. No mention of quantum/wave dynamics, or the fact that they don't behave anything like orbiting bodies in a solar system.
No, I don't expect 5th graders to learn quantum theory. But just because spherical trigonometry is also too hard for them, I don't expect them to be taught that the earth is flat.
Side note: http://www.intuitor.com/physics_test/index.html is from the same people who brought you the Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics site. See whether you know more about physics than a random chimpanzee!
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Now if we could just quantify the rest of the psudo-sciences!! e.g. Psycology, Sociology, and the like.
Bad User. No biscuit!
Mr Dalton taught the world to say
that our matter's an atomic pile
and it changed our scientific style.
So let me introduce to you
Common, lets give a cheer!
particle physics and nuclear chemistry!
(RIAA note: satire makes for fair use, so there!)
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Not really. Perrin did work complementary to that of Thomson regarding the negative nature of part of the atom (ie, cathode rays). He also *proposed* a solar-system model for the atom in 1901, but wasn't able to substantiate this. Later, he did some work on Brownian motion, and that's what he got the prize for (as mentioned in your link, actually). But he didn't get any experimental evidence for the heavy nucleus surrounded by a very undense region. Rutherford did, in 1909, with his alpha-particle backscattering experiment. Without that experiment, which was certainly not redundant, it's hard to imagine how established atomic theory could possibly have been.
Really, atomic theory wasn't well established at least until Millikan did his oil-drop experiment, establishing the charge/mass ratio of the electron, and by deduction, the proton as well.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Just wait till Christmas rolls around and you have to buy presents for all its relatives.
The coolest voice ever.
Here I thought they meant Ray Palmer.
Or maybe Al Pratt.
Sorry...I just couldn't resist...
I had a Profy in our freshmen year by the name Dalton. He would always refer to "Quantum Numbers" as "Condom Numbers"
You may have misheard him say Condon, as in the Condon-Shortley phase convention for spherical harmonics.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Dunno about that. I was taught a model of probility clouds. They drew little probability cones (at 90% probibility I think) like you see in most university text books. They also taught us breifly some of the previous models like the Bohr model (I think that's the one you are talking about) and back to the Dalton model.
However the coolest demonstration was in university, with magnets. Playing with multiple magnets gave you a fields that layed out iron filings in the same shape as different electron orbits. Fun demonstration.
Daltonic = color blind
:) Please mod up this guy...
Creative and funny
http://www.atomandhispackage.com/
So, this puts the atom at abount 2400 years old.
espo
Just make sure you take it off before you wash your hands.
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
Happy 18th birthday to me. here's to gambling, strippers, and cigarettes
The expression is very close to an integer, because of a rather strange collection of facts. The imaginary quadratic field of discriminant -163 (elements are sums of rational numbers with rationals times sqrt(-163)) has class number 1 and Weber showed in the first half of the last century that the modular j function takes algebraic integers in class number 1 fields to rational integers. The function j(z) has fourier expansion 1/q + 744 + 196884q + O(q^2), with q=exp(2*pi*i*z), so feeding in (-1 + sqrt(-163))/2 for z gives exp(pi*sqrt(163)) as the first term. The second term is an integer, the third term is less than 10^(-12), and the rest of the terms get really small, so the first term is necessarily close to an integer.
You can also try same expression, but replacing 163 with discriminants of other class number one imaginary quadratic fields, such as 67, 43, 19, 11, 7, 3, 2, 1. The effect is not so great, since the third term gets substantially larger with smaller primes.
"Your notation sucks!" -- Serge Lang (1927-2005)
"You sure?"
"I'm positive!"
I studied Chemical Engineering for 3 1/2 years in college before switching majors and never heard the unit Dalton mentioned, ever. I highly doubt it's in common usage. It's not SI and it's not even listed in my copy of CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, 72nd edition. The atomic mass unit, on the other hand, is listed on page 1-1.
Since we're on the topic of chemistry history, don't forget that the 23rd of October (get it? 10-23? Ha!) is mole day
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The reason for many of the errors of modern natural science to lie in the completely incorrect standing that science had assigned to the simple sense impression. Our science transfers all sense qualities (sound, colour, warmth, etc.) into the subject and is of the opinion that "outside" the subject there is nothing corresponding to these qualities except processes of motion of matter. These processes of motion, which are supposedly all that exists within the "realm of nature," can of course no longer be perceived. They are inferred on the basis of subjective qualities.
But this inference must appear to consistent thinking as fragmentary. Motion is, to begin with, only a concept that we have borrowed from the sense world; i.e., it confronts us only in things with sense-perceptible qualities. We do not know of any motion other than that connected with sense objects. If one now transfers this attribute onto entities that are not sense-perceptible--such as the elements of discontinuous matter (atoms) are supposed to be--then one must after all be clear about the fact that through this transference, an attribute perceived by the senses is ascribed to a form of existence essentially different from what is conceived of as senseperceptible. One falls into the same contradiction when one wants to arrive at a real content for the initially completely empty concept of the atom. Sense qualities, in fact, even though ever so sublimated, must be added to this concept. One person ascribes impenetrability, exertion of force, to the atom; another ascribes extension in space, and so on; in short, each one ascribes certain characteristics or other that are borrowed from the sense world. If one does not do this, one remains in a complete void.
That is why the above inference is only fragmentary. One draws a line through the middle of what is sense-perceptible and declares the one part to be objective and the other to be subjective. The only consistent statement would be: If there are atoms, then these are simple parts of matter, with the characteristics of matter, and are not perceptible only because their small size makes them inaccessible to our senses.
But with this there disappears any possibility of seeking anything in the motion of atoms that could be held up as something objective in contrast to the subjective qualities of sound, colour, etc. And the possibility also ceases of seeking anything more, for example, in the connection between motion and the sensation "red" than a connection between two processes that both belong entirely to the sense world.
It was therefore clear to the editor that motion of ether, position of atoms, etc., belong in the same category as the sense impressions themselves. Declaring the latter to be subjective is only the result of unclear reflection. If one declares sense qualities to be subjective, then one must do exactly the same with the motion of ether. It is not for any principle reason that we do not perceive the latter, but only because our sense organs are not organized finely enough. But that is a purely coincidental state of affairs. It could be the case that someday mankind, by increasing refinement of our sense organs, would arrive at the point of also perceiving the motion of ether directly. If then a person of that distant future accepted our subjectivistic theory of sense impressions, then he would have to declare these motions of ether to be just as subjective as we declare colour, sound, etc., to be today.
It is clear that this theory of physics leads to a contradiction that cannot be resolved.
This subjectivistic view has a second support in physiological considerations.
Physiology shows that a sensation appears only as the final result of a mechanical process that first communicates itself, from that part of the corporeal world Iying outside the substance of our body, to the periphery of our nervous system, into our sense organs; from here, the process is transmitted to our highest centre, in order to be released there for the first time as sensation.
(Rudolf Steiner, Goethean Science XV, 1883)
Dalton (a chemist) proposed this atomic theory in 1803. 'Chemists' of the time were convinced, but the real scientists, physicists, weren't. In 1906 Boltzmann (a physicist) committed suicide because his theories, based on the atomic postulate, were not well-received. During a physics conference at the turn of the century, he was the only one to defend the atomic model. Other physicists of the time simply didn't buy it. in 1914 Rutheford (a physicist) finally verified experimentally the structure of the atom in a series of scattering experiments. One can't argue with experimental data. Physicists were finally convinced. (The folly of chemists can be demonstrated even today: ask them about their beloved Convervation of Mass 'law'). Dalton was a great guy, but more or less a footnote in scientific history. Did you know he obsessively collected weather data every day? Rutheford, Mendelev, or even Boltzmann would have been better choice as defender of the atomic model. But we woudln't expect slashdot editors to know the difference, would we? Physicists not only know everything, but they know everything better. Chemistry is just applied physics.
"Nothing exists but atoms and the void"
-Democritus, c.400 BC
I share my birthday with the atom... and it's also the day that the battle of Trafalgar took place :)
You've heard of social Darwinism, now in the US we have social Daltonism: classifying people based on their weight. You do know that Americium is an unstable, overweight atom...
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
before this date they had to make stuff out of other stuff, then they invented these new fangled atoms, and before you knew it everything was made out of them.
in my life God comes first.... but Linux is pretty high after that
Francis Smit
What has Reactant Injection Molding to do with this?
Are you trying to tell me that until 200 years ago Atoms did not exist??? I think you mean the birthday of the Discovery of Atoms.
DUKEY!
The Sun is a mass
of incandescent gasses;
A giant nuclear furnace
Where Hydrogen is built into Helium
At a temperature of millions of degrees.
TMGB--the best nerd-band ever!
Daltonism? Doesn't that have something to do with eating kittens?
UP AND AT THEM!!!