Simple Nature - Light and Matter

sun, moon, stars, and planets were fundamentally different fromearthly objects. But Newton realized that if science was to describeall of nature in a unified way, it was not enough to unite the humanscale with the scale of the universe: he would not be satisfied untilhe fit the microscopic universe into the picture as well.It should not surprise us that Newton failed. Although he was afirm believer in the existence of atoms, there was no more experimentalevidence for their existence than there had been when the ancientGreeks first posited them on purely philosophical grounds. Alchemylabored under a tradition of secrecy and mysticism. Newton hadalready almost single-handedly transformed the fuzzyheaded fieldof “natural philosophy” into something we would recognize as themodern science of physics, and it would be unjust to criticize himfor failing to change alchemy into modern chemistry as well. Thetime was not ripe. The microscope was a new invention, and it wascutting-edge science when Newton’s contemporary Hooke discoveredthat living things were made out of cells.8.1.1 The quest for the atomic forceNewton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the lastof the magicians.John Maynard KeynesNewton’s questNevertheless it will be instructive to pick up Newton’s train ofthought and see where it leads us with the benefit of modern hindsight.In uniting the human and cosmic scales of existence, he hadreimagined both as stages on which the actors were objects (treesand houses, planets and stars) that interacted through attractionsand repulsions. He was already convinced that the objects inhabitingthe microworld were atoms, so it remained only to determinewhat kinds of forces they exerted on each other.His next insight was no less brilliant for his inability to bring it tofruition. He realized that the many human-scale forces — friction,sticky forces, the normal forces that keep objects from occupyingthe same space, and so on — must all simply be expressions of amore fundamental force acting between atoms. Tape sticks to paperbecause the atoms in the tape attract the atoms in the paper. Myhouse doesn’t fall to the center of the earth because its atoms repelthe atoms of the dirt under it.Here he got stuck. It was tempting to think that the atomic forcewas a form of gravity, which he knew to be universal, fundamental,and mathematically simple. Gravity, however, is always attractive,so how could he use it to explain the existence of both attractiveand repulsive atomic forces? The gravitational force between objectsof ordinary size is also extremely small, which is why we nevernotice cars and houses attracting us gravitationally. It would behard to understand how gravity could be responsible for anything454 Chapter 8 Atoms and Electromagnetism