ADAMS, HENRY

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE RULE OF PHASE APPLIED TO HISTORY IN 1876-1878 Willard Gibbs, Professor of Mathematical Physics at Yale, published in the Transactions of the Connecticut Academy his famous memoir on the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances, containing the short chapter On Existent Phases of Matter, which, in the hands of the Dutch chemists, became, some ten years afterwards, a means of greatly extending the science of Static Chemistry. Although the name of Willard Gibbs is probably to-day the highest in scientific fame of all Americans since Benjamin Franklin, his Rule of Phases defies translation into literary language. The mathematical formulas in which he hid it were with difficulty intelligible to the chemists themselves, and are quite unintelligible to an unmathematical public, while the sense in which the word Phase was used, confused its meaning to a degree that alters its values, and reduces it to a chemical relation. Willard Gibbs helped to change the face of science, but his Phase was not the Phase of History. As he used it, the word meant Equilibrium, which is in fact the ordinary sense attached to it, but his equilibrium was limited to a few component parts. Ice, water, and water-vapor were three phases of a single substance, under different conditions of temperature and pressure; but if another element were added, ? if one took sea- water, for instance, ? the number of phases was increased according to the nature of the components. The chemical phase thus became a distinct physical section of a solution, and as many sections existed as there were independent components. The common idea of phase is that of the solution itself, as when salt is dissolved in water. It is the whole equilibrium or state of apparent rest. It means, perhaps, when used of movement, a varian...

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