Exercises

I.Word-study.

Say what is meant by to experience deep spiritual crisis, dedication, reluctance, a profound synthesis, eternal certainty, corpuscular view, divine power, to lay the foundations of modern chemistry.

II. Comprehension check-up.

1) Choose the facts from the text that may help you characterize:

a) Boyle’s dedication to the service of God

b) early adult years of a scientist

c) his work The Skeptical Chemist

d) another writing entitled A Disquisition about the Final Causes of Natural Things

2) Give examples to support this point of view:

Boyle was drawn to the corpuscular view of the universe.

III. Review the text. Michael faraday (1791-1867)

Born to a poor blacksmith near London, Michael Faraday educated himself by reading the books he rebound as an apprentice in a book bindery. He attended a series of public lec­tures by Sir Humphry Davy, the most important chemist of the day, and afterwards sent his own carefully bound notes from the lecture to Davy. Davy subsequently took Faraday on as a laboratory assistant at the Royal Institution in 1813. Although Faraday and Davy made a scientific tour of Europe in 1813-15, their friendship cooled after Davy accused him of pla­giarizing research from Wollaston and after Davy attempted to block Faraday's election to the Royal Society.

Faraday was a member of the Protestant religious sect the Sandemanians; the strong work ethic, simplicity, and fierce attachment to the truth of this fundamentalist religion also char­acterized Faraday's experimental work in chemistry and physics. The influence of Faraday's religion on his scientific work cannot be underestimated, particularly the Sandemanian idea of the unity and harmony of nature: one of Faraday's primary research goals was to develop a unified theory of natural forces. John Tyndall wrote about Faraday that "his religious feel­ing and his philosophy could not be kept apart; there was an habitual overflow of the one into the other". Tyndall further believed that Faraday drew his week-day strength from his Sunday worship; Faraday's temporary exclusion from the Sandemanians in 1844 over a religious dispute may have contributed to the recurring mental instability, particu­larly severe in 1839, which plagued his later years.

The growth of Faraday's scientific thought can be traced in the laboratory notebooks he kept from 1820-62, published as Faraday's Diary by the Royal Institution. Faraday's original discoveries are numerous and far-ranging: he discovered benzene in 1825, succeeded in liq­uefying gases such as chlorine, and carried out research on steel alloys. He also instituted the popular Friday evening lecture series at the Royal Institution. In 1819, Hans Oersted had announced the discovery of the relationship between electricity and magnetism—electro-magnetism—when he demonstrated that an electric current deflected a magnetized needle. Andre-Marie Ampere, with his two-fluid theory of electromagnetism which reduced mag­netism to an effect of electricity, further demonstrated that an electric current was for all intents and purposes a magnet. Faraday and Davy rushed to replicate the experiments of Oersted, Ampere, and Arago; in 1821 Faraday succeeded in forcing a magnet to rotate around a wire carrying an electric current. This was a basic electric motor. In 1831, by thrust­ing a bar magnet into a metal cylinder, he produced electricity, creating the opposite of Oer­sted's effect. He also converted the mechanical energy of a rotating copper disk into electri­cal energy by spinning the copper disk between the north and south poles of a magnet. This was a simple dynamo or electrical generator, the machine used today to convert the mechan­ical energy of steam or falling water into electricity. Faraday also discovered that an electri­cal current changing over time in an insulated coil induced another current in a nearby coil, demonstrating the property of electrical induction, which is a central principle in electro­magnetic theory and the basis of electrical transformers. With these electrical experiments, Faraday directly laid the foundation of the electrical power industry of the twentieth centu­ry. Despite these achievements and true to the Sandemanian sect, he declined the presiden­cy of the Royal Society. Faraday seldom expressed his scientific thought in complicated mathematical terms, and it was James Clerk Maxwell's mathematical genius which devel­oped Faraday's experimental and theoretical work on electromagnetic fields into classical field theory.

Faraday collected his electrical researches into 3 volumes in Experimental Researches in Electricity (1839-55) and his Experimental Researches in Chemistry and Physics (1859). He also wrote two books, Chemical Manipulation, Being Instructions to Students in Chemistry (1827-29) and a series of lectures on the non-metallic elements (1853). Besides The Chemical History of a Candle William Crookes also edited another series of Faraday's lectures entitled A Course of Six Lectures on the Various Forces of Matter and Their Relation to Each Other (1860) for young people.

Faraday believed that there was no better way to enter into the study of natural philoso­phy than by considering the physical phenomena of a burning candle. Faraday wished to demonstrate to his audience the basic properties of gasses, the rules of chemical combina­tion, and the chemical processes underlying everyday events. Readers will recognize in Faraday's lectures on the candle many of the stock crowd pleasers still used today by intro­ductory chemistry instructors, such as the ignition of hydrogen formed by electrolysis or the crushing of a steam-filled can by rapid cooling.