Word: langmuir
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...been made to convey them by bus the twelve miles to Chapel Hill. In the line of special busses waiting at the Durham station was a regular bus whose route missed the university by half a mile. Some 25 scientists, including General Electric Co.'s Nobel Laureate Irving Langmuir, heedlessly climbed aboard this bus, were driven...
Films & Jellies. Dr. Langmuir held the chemists spellbound when he recounted his tricks with "monofilms''-layers of matter only one molecule thick. Certain oils, fats and proteins will spread out in monofilms on water whose surface has been scraped clean. The molecules have dissimilar ends, "heads" and "tails." Some years ago Dr. Langmuir found that in a monofilm on water, the heads all pointed up, the tails down. Such films resemble crystals in that their structure and dimensions can be learned from their behavior under X-rays and polarized light...
Last week Dr. Langmuir talked about stearic acid, a substance found in animal fat, which makes a monomolecular film one ten-millionth of an inch thick. This turned out to be an extremely sensitive detector for atoms of metal in water. If the metal atoms are jostled around by stirring the water, they will soon strike the underside of the film, adhere to it. The film is skimmed from the water, allowed to contract. If it contains no metal, when viewed by polarized light it will give a double refraction effect in handsome colors. But if there were only...
...applied to the leaf it promptly acquired the ability to reproduce itself-a characteristic of life. The virus is a giant molecule weighing 17,000,000 times as much as a hydrogen atom. Dr. Stanley found the molecule to be spherical, with a diameter of .0000002 cm. When Dr. Langmuir made a monofilm of the virus and then transferred the film to a glass plate where its thickness could be measured, he found that the molecule had flattened out like a pancake and that the film was 15 times thinner than the spherical diameter of one molecule. "This lends support...
...virus molecule's diameter is just under the visibility limit of the most powerful microscopes. Dr. Langmuir made a molecule that anyone could see with the naked eye by adding acetic acid to a dilute solution of sodium silicate. After a while the solution became viscous and turned into a jelly. The molecules had combined to form bigger ones, the process speeding along in geometrical ratio until one super-giant molecule filled the entire container...