That Time of Year
Classes are about to start and that always makes me very philosophical. I usually get over that quickly enough, but here is one tangent/rant to get it out of my system. The wiki chemistry portal reminded me of somebody I haven't thought about in a while: Amedeo Avogadro, who rationally realized there was a difference between atoms and molecules. We take this concept for granted now, and yet it was a profound, radical, realization that atoms could associate into molecules. It wasn't fully accepted until after Avogadro's death.
So I poked around and ran into Johan Josef Loschmidt who it seems did so much and is remembered for so little. It appears that Loschmidt was the first to try to estimate the number of molecules in a mole and some wonder if we should call Avogadro's number Loschmidt's number instead! I had no idea.
Where is this going? I'm not sure, but it led me of all places to homeopathy and the silly (yes, it's silly) idea that a solution "remembers" a particle that was once in it. It's scary how long this mucked up idea has lasted. But one website (which I can't bear to link to) rattles off various tidbits like Loschmidt's determination of the average size of a small particle in the hopes that we'll think that if they can quote science history then they must be right about "memory water" too. There are a bunch of ways to debunk 'memory water', but the smoking gun is probably Brownian motion.
What's brownian motion? It's the drunk and the lamp-post of course. A drunk starts out at a lamp-post and has an equal probability of taking a left or a right step to go one way or the other down the sidewalk. How long does it take him to get home? Skipping to the punch-line: on average he never gets home! But hope is not lost - as he takes more and more steps he does have a probability of making some fairly large excursions from the lamp-post.