Microworlds

Kevlar The Wonder Material. Microworlds Exploring the Structure of Materials, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, http //www.lbl.gov/MicroWorlds/Kevlar/... 

Boltzmann s expression for S thereby reduces the description of the molecular microworld to a statistical counting exercise, abandoning the attempt to describe molecular behavior in strict mechanistic terms. This was most fortunate, for it enabled Boltzmann to avoid the untenable assumption that classical mechanics remains valid in the molecular domain. Instead, Boltzmann s theory successfully incorporates certain quantal-like notions of probability and indeterminacy (nearly a half-century before the correct quantum mechanical laws were discovered) that are necessary for proper molecular-level description of macroscopic thermodynamic phenomena. 

Phenomenological laws may describe many common irreversible processes with broken time symmetry. An irreversible phenomenological macroworld and a microworld determined by linear and reversible quantum laws should be related to each other. Prigogine and his colleagues attempted to unify the basic micro and macroscopic descriptions of matter. 

Tnpi/m) (1/m). Such a long lifetime should find reason in the existence of an (approximate) symmetry. From this viewpoint, cosmology is sensitive to the most fundamental properties of microworld, to the conservation laws reflecting strict or nearly strict symmetries of particle theory. 

Eq. (3.26) coincides in form with the phenomenological force law for a damped macroscopic particle. Thus for Eqs. (3.24) and (3.25) to be valid, an equation derived from macroscopic measurements must be sufficient to account for the microworld physics experienced by the particle. 

Section IV then tackles the most recent trend in analytical instrumentation, which is miniaturisation and the drive to create lab-on-a-chip devices. In this section, 1 discuss the development of chip-based technologies and the challenges associated with this such as pumping fluids on the microscale, fitting components onto a chip, detection strategies and how processes such as mixing are so different in the microworld when compared to the macroworld. 

Imagination in Science Point/Counterpoint 245 Chemists, Physicists, and the Microworld 255... 

This historical claim is elaborated and defended here passim, but most pointedly in the last chapter of this book. I use the word "microworld" to signify not that which is visible through microscopes, but rather atoms and molecules, which are orders of magnitude smaller than Robert Hooke s fleas or Antonie van Leeuwenhoek s animalcules. 

This book has three interconnected strands. First, 1 wish to show how nineteenth-century chemists created a version of "transdiction" or distant inference to the microworld, one that was more powerful than any hitherto deployed. A second objective is to explore some of the mental and material techniques that enabled them to do this. It is obvious that one cannot convincingly achieve either of these historical goals without putting a good deal of scientific flesh on the skeleton, following many of the details in the story of how these chains of inference were gradually constructed and tested. So the present work... 

How, indeed, should one interpret the symbols in a molecular formula Dalton thought that each of the symbols in his formulas must signify an actual "atom," in the sense of an absolutely unsplittable entity, much like an invisibly small but very real billiard ball— which is why he chose to represent his atoms by distinctive iconic circles, or spherical wooden models. Few chemists thereafter took such an unre-flectively realist position. At the other extreme, some regarded chemical formulas purely conventionally, as a mere aid to memory in representing the empirical facts of chemical analysis and having no real referent in the microworld at all. 

This complex case study of relatively simultaneous discovery has a substantive connection to the theme of images and imagination, for one purpose of this book is to investigate how so many people could concurrently have been following similar paths, exploring imaginative routes to the microworld in ways that could be justified by experiment. Indeed, matters of priority became contentious partly because the imagined molecular world necessarily had both speculative and private character. Moreover,... 

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