Molecular Motion Quotes

Who then can calculate the path of the molecule? how do we know that the creations of worlds are not determined by the fall of grains of sand?

No lens is quick enough to track the movement of the human body. The molecules are always moving.

Hearing is the motion of molecules; sound is a wave in the atmosphere; solidity is the characteristic of spatial juxtaposition of atoms; smell is something given off by a body, rather than something belonging to a body.

Heat energy of uniform temperature [is] the ultimate fate of all energy. The power of sunlight and coal, electric power, water power, winds and tides do the work of the world, and in the end all unite to hasten the merry molecular dance.

If we conceive all the changes in the physical world as reducible to the motion of atoms, motions generated by means of the fixed nuclear forces of those atoms, the whole of the world could thus be known by means of the natural sciences.

According to the kinetic theory of gases, the mean kinetic energy of a molecule is a measure of absolute temperature.

So many of the properties of matter, especially when in the gaseous form, can be deduced from the hypothesis that their minute parts are in rapid motion, the velocity increasing with the temperature, that the precise nature of this motion becomes a subject of rational curiosity. Daniel Bernoulli, Herapath, Joule, Kronig, Clausius, &c., have shewn that the relations between pressure, temperature and density in a perfect gas can be explained by supposing the particles move with uniform velocity in straight lines, striking against the sides of the containing vessel and thus producing pressure.

From a certain temperature on, the molecules 'condense' without attractive forces; that is, they accumulate at zero velocity. The theory is pretty, but is there some truth in it.

When air is hot, the molecules move fast and they have high kinetic energy. The colder the molecules are, the smaller their velocities are and, subsequently, their energy. Temperature is simply a way to characterize the energy of a system.

Something can be real - actually existing, not merely illusory - and yet not be fundamental. Scientists used to think that heat, for example, was a fluidlike substance called 'caloric' that flowed from hot objects to colder ones.

It's frightening and unnerving to watch a stone melt.

One of the most beautiful hypotheses ever propounded in physics is ... the Dynamical Theory of Gases

One day we shall certainly 'reduce' thought experimentally to molecular and chemical motions in the brain; but does that exhaust the essence of thought?

Gay-Lussac was quick, lively, ingenious and profound, with great activity of mind and great facility of manipulation. I should place him at the head of all the living chemists in France.

Whenever we warm our hands by the fire, we allow the energy radiated by the fire to quicken up the movements of the atoms of which the hands are composed. When we cool any substance, we check those movements.

The elusive truth is that there is nothing stress-producing in the physical world. Things simply are. Molecules move. Light and sound appear.