Ben Franklin Stilled the Waves: An Informal History of Pouring Oil on Water with Reflections on the Ups and Downs of Scientific Life in General

by Charles Tanford

Overview

Benjamin Franklin was the first to report the phenomenon of oil's power to still troubled waters and to speculate on why it happened. A century later Lord Rayleigh performed an identical experiment. Irving Langmuir did it with minor variations in 1917, and won a Nobel Prize for it. Then Langmuir's work was followed by a Dutch pediatrician's in 1925. ^p Each experimenter saw a little more in the result than his predecessor had seen, and the sciences of physics, chemistry and biology have all been illuminated by the work. ^p Charles Tanford reflects on the evolving nature of science and of individual scientists. Recounting innovations in each trial, he follows the classic experiment from Franklin's drawing room to our present-day institutionalized scientific establishments and speculates on the ensuing changes in our approach to scientific inquiry.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780192804945
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	06/10/2004
Pages:	286
Product dimensions:	7.82(w) x 5.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Charles Tanford is Emeritus Professor at Duke University, Durham, NC, USA and a former Guggenheim Fellow. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) and lives in Easingwold, UK.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements1. Introduction2. Benjamin Franklin3. Friends and Influences4. The French Connection5. Pliny the Elder6. Eighteenth-Century Science7. Franklin's Experiment: The Observation8. How Small is a Molecule? The Calculation FranklinDid Not Make9. One Hundred Years Later: Science Comes of Age10. Lord Rayleigh11. Meticulous Miss Pockels12. Comrades in the Search: The Flavor of LateNineteenth-Century Physics13. Ben Franklin Wonders Why (Molecular Interpretation)

Editorial Reviews

Among the many phenomena which engaged the scientific imagination of Benjamin Franklin (1773) is the fact that a drop of oil, if placed on water, spreads out to form a film too thin even to produce "prismatic" colors but capable still of "smoothing the waves". The author, formerly a professor of physiology at Duke, has used his retirement to trace historically and physically the ramifications of that observations, and has evidently had a jolly good time. He writes with genial leisure about the development of our understanding of the physics and chemistry of molecular monolayers, and the lives of the persons (Maxwell, Lord Rayleigh, Agnes Pockels, Irving Langmuir, Evert Gorter, many others) who have in one way or another contributed to that development. A relaxed and relaxing labor of love, nicely printed, with photographs and a good bibliography. (NW) Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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