Molecular Fields of Force: Retrospect and Suggestions

Abstract

IN the nineteenth-century development of the kinetic theory of gases, the molecules were at first usually treated as solid spheres like billiard balls, differing in size and mass. This molecular model, though it furnished a conveniently simple picture of many gas phenomena, nevertheless represented a retrogression from the model discussed long before by Boscovich¹, who regarded atoms as centres of force, varying with the distance r both in intensity and sign.