Early Thoughts

But the idea of gas turbine itself can be traced back to a 1791 patent by Barber, who wrote of the basic concept of a heat engine for power generation. Air and gas were to be compressed and burned to produce combustion products these were to be used to drive a turbine producing a work output. The compressor could be driven independently (along the lines of Whittle s early thoughts) or by the turbine itself if it was producing enough work. 

MENDELEEV S EARLY THOUGHTS ABOUT RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN ELEMENTS... 

Mendeleev s early thoughts about relationships between elements "455... 

The Roy G. Neville Historical Chemical Library (California), catalog in preparation. I am grateful to Dr. Neville for making me aware of his views on Mendeleev s early thoughts on the relationships between elements manifested in his master s thesis. 

I think we become interested in the concept of infinity early in childhood. Perhaps our initial fascination starts when we hear about large numbers, or outer space, or death, or eternity, or God. When I was a boy, I often visited my father s library to examine his large collection of old books. The one that stimulated my early thoughts about infinity was not a mathematics book, nor a book on philosophy, nor one on religion. It was a history book published in 1921 titled The Story of Mankind. In the book, Hendrik Willem Van Loon starts with a little parable next to a sketch of a mountain ... 

For early thoughts on the use of Langmuir Blodgett (LB) films as filters for molecular separations, see Blodgett, KA. (1940) Film structure and method of preparation. US Patent 2,220,860. 

If one accepts the idea of the long chain macromolecule, the next obvious question relates to its conformation or shape in space. This is especially important since the spatial arrangement of the long chains was early thought to be important in determining the physical and mechanical properties of the material. Staudinger himself thought that most amorphous hi polymers, such as polystyrene, were rod-shaped, and when in solution, the rods lay parallel to each other. 

Cosmological thought recorded in diverse cultures during past millennia displays a continued fascination with a relatively small number of fundamental questions about the physical universe and our place within it. Many attempts to provide satisfying answers have been made, It is not appropriate to present here a comparative survey of the myriad world views that have been proposed, but there is value in understanding those issues raised by early thought that are still at the core of modern scientific cosmology. 

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