The Atomic Hypothesis

I like reading in the bathroom. It is one of those places where your mind can be at peace, where you'll always have a good reason to give to others and yourself about why you are reading something that may not be of utmost necessity or for that matter it is a good place to read something which you absolutely detest but have to read; because there is no escape from the pot! I think, I also remember reading some sort of a psychology report on the subject of how men tend to be more of the bathroom reader kinds rather than women...it is one place where the woman cannot nag the poor man and hence give him some moments for himself and his good book.

You might be wondering what the name of this post has anything to do with what I have said above. And no I am not about to give an atomic analysis of what lies in the commode. This morning I took this book called: The World Treasury of Physics Astronomy and Mathematics. It has articles written or delivered as lectures by famous scientists. I started reading the first chapter which was amount atoms and how atoms make up everything we know. Now this book has on it's later pages some very interesting articles on quantum mechanics, and I wanted to get to them as soon as I could; so given this situation I would not have spent much time on this very basic chapter about the atoms. But something about the very simple yet engrossing style in which the theory of atoms was being explained made me read more of the article. I was thoroughly enjoying myself, reading something as basic as the forces of attraction between molecules of water and forces of repulsion when you try and force two molecules toward each other; and was surprised and happy to have found such a well explained article on something so mundane.

And then I realized that I had somehow missed the cover page of this article, maybe just flipped it without realizing it. I went back to it and saw the source of the article: "Atoms in Motion: an excerpt from one of the introductory lectures given by Feynman to a class of freshmen and sophomores at the California Institute of Technology, 1961-62". I smiled to myself when the greatness of the man hit me. It is only people like him who will make the most mundane things the most interesting and the most difficult of concepts, intuitive and easy to grasp. It is people who understand the subject so well that they tend to explain it so beautifully that they leave you enlightened! Oh and by the way, the first page of the article had a quote by Richard Feynman:
"If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or the atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made of atoms - little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence, there is an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied."