Luminaries

Stahl subsequently renamed the terra pingnis phlogiston, the motion of fire (or heat), the essential element of all combnstible materials. Thns the phlogiston theory was born to explain all combnstion and was widely accepted for most of the eighteenth centnry by, among others, such luminaries of chemistry as Joseph Priestley. 

One of the Department s luminaries, Ronald Ottewill, went off to Bristol University, where he became first professor of colloid science and then professor of physical chemistry, both in the Department of Physical Chemistry. The Bristol department has been one of the most distinguished exponents of colloid science in recent years, but Ottewill considers that it is best practised under the umbrella of physical chemistry. 

This is the Silver Anniversary for Advances in Chemical Engineering, founded by Thomas Drew and John Hoopes in 1956. The first volume contained review papers by legendary luminaries such as Westwater, Met-zner, Bird, Sage, Treybal, Schrage, and Henley. Let me quote from the first preface ... 

Saturn, who is called the greatest of the planets, is the least useful in our Magistery. Nevertheless, it is the chief Key of the whole Art, howbeit set in the lowest and meanest place. Although by its swift flight it has risen to the loftiest height, far above all other luminaries, its feathers must be clipped, and itself... 

Abraham Pais was a theoretical physicist and scientific historian, who died in 2000 at the age of 81. Pais worked with luminaries such as Einstein, Oppenheimer, Dirac, and Feynman. His best-known work was a biography of Einstein, Subtle Is the Lord The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein, which was published in 1982 and won the 1983 American Book Award. Now that Pais is gone, I have lost track of Einstein s pipe. 

I ve been interviewed countless times, but my favorite interviewer is David Jay Brown, who asked me questions for his book Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse The book includes some of the coolest thinkers of our time as they consider the future of the human race and the mystery of consciousness. David s interviewees included such luminaries as Noam Chomsky, Kary Mullis, Candace Pert, Robert Anton Wilson, Douglas Rushkofif, Paul Krassner, Bruce Sterling, Ray Kurzweil, Hans Moravec, John Mack, and Alex Grey. 

For a modern observer, there are some incredible aspects in the series of events described above. Publication times were of the order of 1-2 months, so apparently neither postal offices nor referees and editors had their present-day capability to slow down the publishing process. An author was allowed to submit the same material in parallel in two languages, a practice which certainly would infuriate editors and presumably raise grave questions about ethics today. Senior authors wrote papers based on experimental work carried out by themselves. On the other hand, a more than familiar feature is the eagerness and speed with which other chemists entered the exploration of the new phenomenon. Here was an important scientific problem upon which reputations could be built or crushed, and a large number of lesser or larger luminaries entered into the discussion. This story has been covered by McBride in his article The Hexaphenylethane Riddle and need not be repeated here. An earlier, detailed account of the development of free radical chemistry can be found in Walden s Chemie der freien Radikale. ... 

The heat of the sun has been approximately estimated by Pouillet, as between 2662° and 3202 Fahr, When the rays of this luminary are concentrated either by lenses or reflectors a great amount of caloric may bs brought to operate on bodies at a considerable distance. BuffoN ignited a board of tarred beech with forty reflectors, at a distance of sixty-six feet with the power of One hundred and twenty-eight mirrors he set on fire a torred pine plank, which was one hundred and fifty feet distant. Pieces of coin and other metallic matters were Teadily melted by this means.. 

God, after having created all things from the four elements fire, water, air and earth, causes the four qualities to depart from the ancient worlds heat, cold, moisture and dryness. The combinations of these elements have produced fire, which contains heat and dryness water, which contains cold and moistness air, which contains heat and moisture earth, which has cold and dryness. It is with the aid of these elements that God has created the superior and the inferior world. When he has established equilibrium between their natures, things persist in spite of time, without being consumed by the two luminaries, nor rusted... 

Davy, who experimented extensively upon himself with N2O, introduced it to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, James Watt (inventor of the steamboat), Peter Mark Roget (author of the famous Thesaurus), the potter Josiah Wedgwood (also later knighted) and other luminaries. Before long, patients were flocking to the Pneumatic Institution to be treated with... 

Another half-hour passed, and the servant, returning, found his master a corpse. Thus passed England s great chemical luminary, leaving part of his fortune to science, and his fame to be commemorated in the Cavendish Laboratory for Experimental Research at Cambridge, where today other oracles are travelling the path he helped illuminate. 

Free standing pole (light, flag, luminary) FSP 1... 

In fact, a century elapsed before Boyle s definition began to be taken seriously and put into practice. One of the great luminaries of science, the French chemist Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743 1794), sometimes called the father of modem chemistry, decided to put Boyle s arguments to the test. To determine which substances were elements,... 

LUMINARIES — The two grand luminaries of the Sages are the Gold and Silver of the Philosophers, that is to say, the matter of the Work arrived at the White Colour, which they term the Moon, and the Magisterium at the Red, which they name the Sun. 

MOTHER — The Spagyric Philosophers sometimes apply the name of Mother to the Vase which contains the Matter of the Great Work, but they more commonly say that the Sun is the Father of the Stone, and that the Moon is its Mother, because, in their opinion, the Matter of the Stone, as of every other substance, is engendered by the Four Elements, mingled and combined by the action of these two luminaries, and not, it should be noted, because ordinary Gold, which they also call Sun,... 

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