A new year, a new semester

I always enjoy the start of the second semester. There’s usually a great atmosphere around the college – after long weeks of quiet, it’s great to see the students back and all the restaurants, shops and canteens back open. The students themselves always seem to be in good form too. I suspect it’s the prospect of starting afresh with new modules, one of the benefits of semesterisation.

I’m particularly enjoying the start of term this year as I managed to finish a hefty piece of research before the teaching semester got under way. I’ve been working steadily on the project, a review of a key paper published by Einstein in 1917, since June 1st, so it’s nice to have it off my desk for a while. Of course, the paper will come back in due course with corrections and suggestions from the referees, but I usually enjoy that part of the process.

In the meantime, I’d forgotten how much I enjoy teaching, especially in the absence of a great cloud of research to be done in the evenings. One of the courses I’m teaching this semester is a history of the atomic hypothesis. It’s fascinating to study how the idea emerged from different roots: philosophical considerations in ancient Greece, considerations of chemical reactions in the 18^th and 19^th century , and considerations of statistical mechanics in the 19^th century. The big problem  was how to test the hypothesis: at least until a brilliant young patent clerk suggested that the motion of small particles suspended in water might betray the presence of millions of water molecules.  Einstein’s formula was put to the test by the French physicist Jean Perrin in 1908, and it is one of Einstein’s great triumphs that by 1910, most scientists no longer talked of the ‘atomic hypothesis’, but of ‘atoms’.

In 1905, a young Albert Einstein developed a formula describing the motion of particles  suspended in a liquid, based on the hypothesis that the liquid was made up of millions of molecules. In 1908, the French physicist Jean Perrin demonstrated that the motion of such particles matched Einstein’s formula, giving strong support for the atomic hypothesis.  

For more on Perrin’s exeriment see here