RICHARD FEYNMAN's TALK ON SCIENCE

Richard Feynman, is a true science character, he is deep , open minded and he has the scientific attitude one attitude every scientist needs to have.
 One of his works really did the magic for me and even inspired the creation of this blog and wish to share it here. 


There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom
An Invitation to Enter a New Field of Physics by Richard P. Feynman

This transcript of the classic talk that Richard Feynman gave on December 29th 1959 at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) was first published in the February 1960 issue of Caltech's Engineering and Science, which owns the copyright.

I imagine experimental physicists must often look with envy at men like Kamerlingh Onnes, who discovered a field like low temperature, which seems to be bottomless and in which one can go down and down. Such a man is then a leader and has some temporary monopoly in a scientific adventure. Percy Bridgman, in designing a way to obtain higher pressures, opened up another new field and was able to move into it and to lead us all along. The development of ever higher vacuum was a continuing development of the same kind. I would like to describe a field, in which little has been done, but in which an enormous amount can be done in principle.

IS SCIENCE AN AMALGAMATION?

So I now have two-third of the metal coil of the heater submerged into the water in a plastic jug, ready to prepare a cup of coffee. I need just a cup, not the whole volume of water in the jug. It’s getting complicated; I need the water faster to get me reading and sipping. When will the full jug of water get hot? Hmmm. Can science answer this?

I was silent for a while, thus I was not talking but building a set of thoughts and imagination about how to get my cup of hot water before the whole jug of water gets hot.

Water is deliberately made up of tiny independent and self existent units called molecules. Each water molecule carries within itself two ions of hydrogen bonded to an ion of oxygen. The convection currents according to the thermodynamics of a fluid explain: when heating fluids, molecules closer to the source of heat attain a higher energy which causes their acceleration and displacement from their original position of random vibrational motion, just as the reverse will do the opposite (thus a moving particle generates heat directly proportional to its momentum). When the water molecules attain a higher temperature, or perhaps absorb much heat energy, the molecules expand and bear a less density. The expansion should be as a result of weakness of the H-O-H bond, causing each hydrogen ion to radiate farther from the oxygen ion as compared to its state at room temperature.

A bit of chemistry here, but physics takes over again. The expanded molecules, having a lesser density can not remain at the same depth with the fairly cold molecules; rather they will have to float over the cold molecules (a body will float when its density is lesser than the density of the fluid in which it is placed—principle of floatation). So in time I should have the water just below the surface getting hot before the molecules at the bottom.

I expected my pondering to come up true but it was four minutes already, and the water only fairly warm.