Middle World: The Restless Heart of Matter and Life
Macmillan Science: 2006. 256 pp. £16.99, $24.951403986037 | ISBN: 1-403-98603-7
The fascinating tale of brownian motion has been looking for a story-teller for a long time. The tangled threads knot together, rather than begin, in the nineteenth century with botanist Robert Brown's original observations of the random, ceaseless motion of particles in pollen grains of Clarkia pulchella. The threads lead back in time to medieval theories of matter that tangled physics with theology — a pattern that ran deep through the work of Galileo and Newton — and further back still to the Epicureans. Going forwards from Brown, they twist through the nineteenth century's ambivalence towards molecular theory and the thermodynamics of Sadi Carnot and Lord Kelvin. Weaving through the kinetic theory of James Clerk Maxwell and the statistical mechanics of Ludwig Boltzmann that finally grasped the physics of randomness, they lead to the complementary beauties of Einstein's theory of brownian motion and Jean Baptiste Perrin's experiments that led to modern soft-matter physics and a new understanding of the role of brownian dynamics in molecular biology. This is a remarkable story of science and scientists that leaves no major science untouched and summons onto the stage a colourful and eminent cast from centuries of endeavour.
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