Things happen too swiftly for you to know much about them. The house you are in falls to dust instantly. You fall through the place where the floor has been; but you do not bump on the cement basement floor below, partly because there is no such thing as a hard floor or even hard ground anywhere, and partly because you disintegrate—fall to pieces—so completely that there is nothing left of you but a grayish film of fine dust and a haze of warm water.
With a deafening roar, rocks, skyscrapers, and even mountains tumble down, fall to pieces, and sink into an inconceivably fine dust. Nothing stands up in the world—not a tree, not an animal, not an island. With a wild rush the oceans flood in over the dust that has been nations and continents, and then this dust turns to a fine muddy ooze in the bottom of a worldwide sea.
But it is an ocean utterly different from what we have in the real world. There are no waves. Neither are there any reflections of clouds in its surface—first because the clouds would fly to pieces and turn to invisible vapor, and second, because the ocean has no surface—it simply melts away into the air and no one can tell where the water stops and where the air begins.
Then the earth grows larger and larger. The ocean turns to a heavy, dense, transparent steam. The fine mud that used to be rocks and mountains and living things turns to a heavy, dense gas.
Our once beautiful, solid, warm, living earth now whirls on through space, a swollen, gaseous globe, utterly dead.
And the only thing that prevents all this from actually happening right now is that there is a force called cohesion that holds things together. It is the pull which one particle of anything has on another particle of the same material. The paper in this book, the chair on which you are sitting, and you yourself are all made of a vast number of unthinkably small particles called molecules, each of which is pulling on its neighbor with such force that all stay in their places. Substances in which they pull the hardest, like steel, are very hard to break in two; that is, it is difficult to pull the molecules of these substances apart. In liquids, such as water, the molecules do not pull nearly so hard on each other. In a gas, such as air, they are so far apart that they have practically no pull on each other at all. That is why everything would turn to a gas if the force of cohesion stopped. Why things would turn cold will be explained in Chapter 4.
Cohesion, adhesion, and capillary attraction, all are the result of the pull of molecules on each other. The difference is that capillary attraction is the pulling of particles of liquids up into fine spaces, as when a lamp wick draws up oil; adhesion is the pull of the particles of one substance or thing on the particles of another when they are very close together, as when water clings to your hand or when dust sticks to the ceiling; while cohesion is the clinging together of the particles of the same substance, like the holding together of the particles of your chair or of this paper.
When you put your hand into water it gets wet because the adhesion of the water to your hand is stronger than the cohesion of the water itself. The particles of the water are drawn to your hand more powerfully than they are drawn to each other. But in the following experiment, you have an example of cases where cohesion is stronger than adhesion:
Experiment 16. Pour some mercury (quicksilver) into a small dish and dip your finger into it. As you raise your finger, see if the mercury follows it up as the water did in Experiment 14. When you pull your finger all the way out, has the mercury wet it at all? Put a lamp wick or a part of your handkerchief into the mercury. Does it draw the mercury up as it would draw up water?
Fig. 23. The mercury does not wet the finger, and as the finger is lifted the mercury does not follow it.
The reason for this peculiarity of mercury is that the pull between the particles of mercury themselves is stronger than the pull between them and your finger or handkerchief. In scientific language, the cohesion of the mercury is stronger than its adhesion to your finger or handkerchief. Although this seems unusual for a liquid, it is what we naturally expect of solid things; you would be amazed if part of the wood of your school seat stuck to you when you got up, for you expect the particles in solid things to cohere—to have cohesion—much more strongly than they adhere to something else. It is because solids have such strong cohesion that they are solids.
Application 13. Explain why mercury cannot wet your fingers; why rain falls in drops; why it is harder to drive a nail into wood than into soap; why steel is hard.
Inference Exercise
Explain the following:
51. Ink spilled on a plain board soaks in, but on a varnished desk it can be easily wiped off.
52. When a window is soiled you can write on it with your finger; then your finger becomes soiled.
53. A starched apron or shirt stays clean longer than an unstarched one.
54. When you hold a lump of sugar with one edge just touching the surface of a cup of coffee, the coffee runs up the lump.
55. A drop of water on a dry plate is not flat but rounded.
56. It is hard to write on cloth because the ink spreads out and blurs.
57. If you roughen your finger nails by cleaning them with a knife, they will get soiled much more quickly than if you keep them smooth by using an orange stick.
58. When you dip your pen in the ink and then move it across the paper, it makes ink marks on the paper.
59. If you suck the air out of a bottle, the bottle will stick to your tongue.
60. You cannot break a thick piece of iron with your hands.
Section 9. Friction.
What makes ice slippery?
How does a brake stop a car?
Why do things wear out?
It would not be such a calamity if we were to turn off friction from the world. Still, I doubt whether we should want to leave it off much longer than was necessary for us to see what would happen. Suppose we imagine the world with all friction removed:
A man on a bicycle can coast forever along level ground. Ships at sea can shut off steam and coast clear across the ocean. No machinery needs oiling. The clothes on your body feel smoother and softer than the finest silk. Perpetual motion is an established fact instead of an absolute impossibility; everything that is not going against gravity will keep right on moving forever or until it bumps into something else.
But, if there is no friction and you want to stop, you cannot. Suppose you are in an automobile when all friction stops. You speed along helplessly in the direction you are going. You cannot steer the machine—your hands would slip right around on the steering wheel, and even if you turn it by grasping the spoke, your machine still skids straight forward. If you start to go up a hill, you slow down, stop, and then before you can get out of the machine you start backward down the hill again and keep on going backward until you smash into something.
A person on foot does not fare much better. If he is walking at the time friction ceases, the ground is suddenly so slippery that he falls down and slides along on his back or stomach in the same direction he was walking, until he bumps into something big or starts to slip up a slope. If he reaches a slope, he, like the automobile, stops an instant a little way up, then starts sliding helplessly backward.
Another man is standing still when the friction is turned off. He cannot get anywhere. As soon as he