The morning Astorian. [volume] (Astoria, Oregon) 1899-1930, 1908-06-02
THE SQUARE R0OT0F z
No One Has Yet Succeeded In
Extracting 1t Accurately.
SOME IMPOSSIBLE PROBLEMS

squaring Of the Circle.
There died In the year 1902 In st
Felix, a small village in the depart
ment Of IInutc Garonne. In France. u
wealthy oetogenarlan horticultural,
who spent the last forty-Gye years Of
his life and SUN yarlously estimated
at from E12,O00 TO $4,000 In attempt
Ing to produce by artificial cultivation
blue rose.
He failed. and for the best Of reasons
the task IL one impossible Of accom-
pIisbmcnt As De Candollc. great au.
thority on this subject, has pointed nut
yellow and blue are the fundamental
types Of color in flowers, and these col
ors are antagonlstic. mutsally 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 yellow rose; hence
there Is no blue
The pursuit OF the absolute zero poinl
Ia to chemists what the discovery Of
the north pole ls TO geographers. Ever
since Fahrenheit Ia 1724 broached the
problem scientists innumerable have
striven TO reach the goal In vain, al.
though each, In turn, has succeeded in
outdlstancing the other.
Thus Fahrenheit boosted that no one
could ever attain artlAcialIy to
greater degree Of cold than he produced
with salt and Ice seven degrees below
zero although, Of course, he did not
suppose that cold ended there. Yet.
within n few years of his death, over
100 degrees below had been obtained,
and Professor james Dewar, whose re-
searches In the field of low tempera-
lures have brought out SO many new
and startling facts, succeeded by cool
Ing down the rare gas helium by the
aid of lIquehed hydrogen In registering
the almost inconcelvable temperature
OF 422 degrees below zero II. But this
IL not absolute zero, and the problem
remains unsolyed.
Here and there, In odd corners Of the
earth, gray. bent men stlll pore over
crucibles seeking the philosophers
stone that mysterious and wonderful
substance which will, they believe,
when found change the baser metals
into gold. II never will be found, OF
course. for such n substance, in the
nature Of things, can have no concrete
existence. Nevertheless for hundreds
of years the best brains and keenest
inteilects In Chrlstendom sought 1t
early and late.
Nor were their labors wholly wasted.
for II 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 a similar fashion, too,
the three century long hunt for the
elixir Of life bequeathed to US a whole
host of valuable remedial drugs and
was the means indirectly OF saving or,
at all events, prolonglng 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
eralizatlons 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 will-o'-the-wisp.
For let 1t 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 Leibnltz or Newton.
: or 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 well known patent
agent with a model of perpetual mo-
tion machine which depended for its
proper working upon the interceptlon
Of gravitational 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 lnterceptor, Is it pos
sible to conceive Of human folly going
further than this?
Among mathematicians 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 batied and
beaten, Their calculations and meth
ods 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
q popular article Of this kind.
1t is somewhat startling, however,
to find that even figures, just plain,
ordinary arithmetical figures such as
oro ooai,,, undareto ndahln NV onv mod