Newton in a Nutshell

Sir Isaac Newton
Portrait: Godfrey Kneller (1689)

How much of the universe is empty space? Isaac Newton wondered:

Newton's belief in the particulate nature was supported by his optical experiments. His view was that light is a stream of corpuscles, and in order to explain the fact that some material is transparent he assumed that some of the corpuscles pass through matter without encountering the particles of which it is composed. Matter must therefore consist mainly of empty space, and he made estimates of the size of the particles. His conclusion was that the particles must be extremely small that if all the particles in the solar system came together the total volume would be that of a nut. Later Joseph Priestly (1733-1804), in his "Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit" (1777), first used the expression "matter in a nutshell" to describe Newton's ideas.* 

Newton's reasoning lacked a fuller understanding of how light interacts with matter. Light will resonate with matter if it encounters an energy match--but otherwise it passes on through or reflects away. Charged "corpuscles" like an alpha particle are another matter. Ernest Rutherford used them when he proposed atoms to be mostly space--cf. his famous "backscattering experiments." But electrons are not empty space--anyone who has seen electron densities as revealed in X-ray crystallography knows that atoms and molecules fill space quite densely.
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 *Keith J. Laidler, The World Of Physical Chemistry, Oxford University Press: New York, 1993.

There's more on the origin of the expression "in a nutshell" here from Ask Yahoo. Others trace it back to Shakespeare.

Thoughts on Love & Marriage

Shakespeare taught us:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments,

...but said nothing about the marriage of two bodies.


John Donne taught away from corporeal love as being true love:

Dull sublunary lovers' love
    —Whose soul is sense—cannot admit
Of absence, 'cause it doth remove
    The thing which elemented it.

Then there was the Bard of Hoboken:

Neither a Borrower Nor a Lender of Electrons Be

Neither a borrower nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

~Act I, Scene 3 of William Shakespeare's Hamlet

Polonius was speaking of money or gold, giving advice to his own son Laertes. But what sort of miserable person never borrows nor lends money?  A King? Nobility?

The noble gas helium neither borrows nor lends electrons. The price it pays is lonely chemical stability. Helium is the most noble of the noble gases, grudgingly condensing to liquid only at extremely low temperatures.

Hydrogen is the the most common element in the universe and it freely gives, takes, and shares electrons with others. It is the most promiscuous element, forming compounds with practically all other elements except the noble gases.

Those very first two elements display the full range of chemical reactivity and stability--another reason why they sit atop the Periodic Table at opposite ends, bracketing the whole thing as it were. And it's all done with the simplest spherical orbital -- the lowly 1s orbital. Every other heavier element has those same electrons at their very core too. But they aren't part of chemistry -- they're just there -- an inert core. And they're not mere abstractions either--they're part of me as well.