The mysterious universe / by Sir James Jeans.

  • James Hopwood Jeans
Date:
1937
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The mysterious universe / by Sir James Jeans. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    the ordinary processes of physics and chemistry. Although the problem is still far from solution, it is becoming increasingly likely that what specially distinguishes the matter of living bodies is the presence not of a “vital force,” but of the quite commonplace element carbon, always in conjunc¬ tion with other atoms with which it forms excep¬ tionally large molecules. If this is so, life exists in the universe only because the carbon atom possesses certain exceptional properties. Perhaps carbon is rather noteworthy chemically as forming a sort of transition between the metals and non-metals, but so far nothing in the physical constitution of the carbon atom is known to account for its very special capacity for binding other atoms together. The carbon atom consists of six electrons revolving around the appropriate central nucleus, like six planets revolv¬ ing around a central sun; it appears to differ from its two nearest neighbours in the table of chemical elements, the atoms of boron and nitrogen, only in having one electron more than the former and one electron fewer than the latter. Yet this slight difference must account in the last resort for all the difference between life and absence of life. No doubt the reason why the six electron atom possesses these remarkable properties resides somewhere in the ultimate laws of nature, but mathematical physics has not yet fathomed it.
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