Science Part 1

This is from a book called "The Boy Scientist".

 About Robert Boyle

Robert Boyle was born 15 years before Newton. He discovered a lot about Gases. He was born in 1627.  He learned to speak Latin and French almost as soon as he could speak English! When he was 8, went to Eton collage. When he was 11, he went on an extended tour of Europe with a French teacher. In the year 1641, when he was 14, he studied with Galileo, the year before Galileo died. When he came back to England, he studied science. He made many discoveries about gases and how they behave.

Gases

There are 3 forms which everything in the world assumes: Liquids, such as water, solids, such as wood, and gases, such as oxygen. All of these are made up of molecules. In a solid they are close together, in a liquid they are farther apart, and in a gas they are even farther apart. The molecules move very fast in a gas, slower in a liquid, and slower still in a solid. If you cool down steam (a gas), it changes into water, and if you cool down water, it changes into ice. If  you heat ice, it changes first to water and then to steam. Gas has a very interesting feature: If you put a pint of air into a gallon jar, it spreads our and fills the whole jar. It spreads our to fill the whole container it is in, to the boundaries. Any gas can be reduced to a liquid if under the proper pressure and temperature. It is so cold, 312 degrees below 0, that if you left your finger in it for 2 seconds, you could break that finger off like an icicle! A rubber ball dipped in it will shatter like glass if you tried to bounce it, and mercury dipped in it can be used as a hammer! Any liquid can be reduced to a gas, and any gas or liquid can be reduced to a solid, or the other way round.

Part 2 soon,
Bell