Bismarck daily tribune. [volume] (Bismarck, Dakota [N.D.]) 1881-1916, 1908-02-07
The SQUARE ROOT Or z.
No One Has Yet Succeeded In
Extracting 1t Accurately.
SOME IMPOSSIBLE PROBLEMS

There died in the year 1902 in st
Felix, a small village In the depart
ment of Haute Garonne, in France .
wealthy octogenarian horticulturist
who spent the last forty-five years of
his life and sum variously estimated
at from f12,OO0 to f15O0O in attempt
ing to produce by artificial cultivation
blue rose.
He failed, and for the best Of reasons
the task Is one impossible Of accom-
plishment AS De Candolle, great au-
thority on this subject, has pointed out
yellow and blue &e the fundamental
types Of color in flowers, and these col
ors are antagonistic, mutually exclud-
ing each other. Yellow by culture may
be changed into red or white, but new
er into blue. On the other hand. blue
will pass into red, but never into vel
low. We have a yellow rose; hence
there is no blue.
The pursuit OF the absolute zero pom,
is to chemists what the discovery of
the north pole is to geographers. Evei
since Fahrenheit in 1924 preached the
problem scientists innumerable have
striven to reach the goal in vain, al
though each, in turn, has succeeded In
understanding the other.
Thus Fahrenheit boosted that no one
could ever attain artificially to q
greater degree Of cold than he produced
with salt and ice seven degrees below
zeroalthough, of course, he did not
suppose that cold ended there. Yet,
within few years Of his death, over
100 degrees below had been obtained,
and Professor James Dewar, whose re-
searcheasin the field Of low ternpera-
lures have brought out SO many new
and startling facts, succeeded by cool
ing down the rare. gas helium by the
aid of Hquefed hydrogen In registering
the almost Uncomfortable temperature
Of 422 degrees below zero F. Bat this
is not absolute zero, and the problem
remains unselved.
Here and there, in odd corners OF the
earth, gray, bent men still pore over
crucibles seeking the philosophers
stone that mysterious and wonderful
substance which will, they believe,
when found change the baser metals
into gold. It never will be found, Of
course. for such substance, in the
nature Of things, can have no concrete
existence Nevertheless for hundreds
of years the best brains and keenest
intellects in Christendom sought It
early and late
Nor were their labors wholly wasted.
for it was while searching for this
mythical treasure that Bottcher STUN,
bled on the secret Of the manufacture
of porcelain; Roger Bacon on that of
the composition Of gunpowder; Geber
on the properties of acids; Van Hell
mont on the nature of gas, and DR..
Glauber on the ."salts" which bear his
name. After similar fashion, too,
the three century long hunt for the
elixir of life bequeathed to us whole
host of valuable remedial drugs and
was the means indirectly of saving or,
at all events, prolonging literally mil
lions of lives.
So also, as the result Of the vain
search after perpetual motion, there
was evolved the greatest of all the gen.
Civilizations Of modern physical sci
ence, the principle Of the conservation
Of energy, and even now more or less
important discoveries are being con-
stantly stumbled on by seekers after
the same perennial wili-o' -the-wisp
For let it be by no means imagined
that the perpetual motion cranks are
all dead and gone. On the contrary,
they are probably fully as numerous
and as sanguine today as they were in
the time Of Leibnitz or Newton.
OF course the thing is impossible and
has been proved so over and over
again, but that does not deter them.
Only the other day man turned up
at the Office Of a well known patent
agent with model of perpetual mo-
ton machine which depended for its
proper working upon the interception
Of grayitational attraction.
The principle of the invention, the
inventor was good enough to explain,
was simplicity itself. The only thing
that remained to be done, he ingenu-
ously remarked, was to find the proper
material for an interceptor. Is 1t pos
sible to conceive of human folly going
further than this?
Among mathema icians the two most
famous unsolvable problems are the
trisection Of the angle and the dupli-
cation of the cube. Men have toiled
at one or the other, sometimes at both,
Of these for fifteen, twenty, thirty
years, only to retire at last bafied and
beaten. Their calculations and meth
DDS of work have in many instances
been published to the world, but the
subject is too abstruse to attempt to
do more than merely touch upon 1t In
a popular article Of this kind.
It is somewhat startling, however,
to find that even figures, just plain,
ordinary arithmetical figures such as
are easily understandable by any mod
ern board school boy, have given rise
to problems quite as incapable of soIu-
ton as any of those springing out Of
the higher mathematics.
Il No one, for instance, has yet succeed
ed in extracting the square root OF 2,
= sg 4