Triple bonds generally bind atoms together more strongly than double bonds, and double bonds more strongly than single bonds, but that pattern doesn’t hold in all cases. Hence their asking Haber to try his hand at the job. However dandy this was-nitric acid is a vital industrial product, and Ostwald won the Nobel Prize for the work in 1909-manufacturers still needed a way to produce ammonia. Not long before Haber’s breakthrough in synthesizing ammonia, a German chemist named Wilhelm Ostwald developed a method to convert ammonia (NH 3) into nitric acid (HNO 3). Eventually the CO 2-rich water at the bottom of the lake starts to rise, and as it gathers momentum it whooshes out the top. This decreases the pressure at the top, allowing water from below to rise within the pipe. There’s a pump at the top that starts the water flowing upward. The pipe that vents CO 2 from the bottom of Lake Nyos works as follows. The incredible linguistic diversity of the region-roughly thirty different languages are spoken there-made finding translators for difficult, and it’s not clear whether everyone’s original testimony got recorded accurately. Interlude 1AĮyewitness testimony around Lake Nyos remained confused for other reasons as well, beyond possible hallucinations from carbon dioxide poisoning. The reincarnation of Spirit Lake at a higher elevation always reminds me of Alph, the “sacred river” in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan,” which forced itself upward after an earthquake nearly buried it and proceeded to devour Kubla’s pleasure dome. It’s no match for the 1,185-letter, carbon-based word that appears on page 33 there, but it’s pretty good. “p45”) from the discussion of the longest word in the English language. Readers of my first book, The Disappearing Spoon (a romp through the periodic table) might recognize this disease (a.k.a. Helens blew, students in colleges in eastern Washington dropped out by the thousands, fearing that if they stayed through finals they would catch something called pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, a lung disease that results from inhaling fine silicon particles. It does, on atomic scales.īefore you go telling people this at parties, though, remember that perpetual motion machines cannot exist, because you can’t harness this perpetual atomic motion to do work. So technically, it’s wrong to say that perpetual motion doesn’t exist. They vibrate in place or, if bonded to other atoms, hinge and twist and pivot back and forth. But even in solids at extremely low temperatures, hundreds of degree below zero, atoms never quite sit still. That’s far faster than the molecules in liquids or solids move. Chapter One Interlude 1A Chapter Two Interlude 2A Chapter Three Chapter Four Interlude 4A Chapter Five Interlude 5A Chapter Six Interlude 6A Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Interlude 8A Chapter NineĪs noted, an average molecule of air at 72☏ zips around at roughly a thousand miles per hour.
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