Smyrna times., 1908-03-11
THE SQUARE ROOT OF 2
No One Has Yet Succeeded In
Extracting 1t Accurately.
SOME IMPOSSIBLE PROBLEMS

There died in the year 1902 in ST
Felix small village in the depart
ment of Haute GarOnne. in France. Il
wealthy octOgenarian horticulturisr.
who spent the last forty-five years of
his life and a sum variOusly estimated
at from $4,000 to $4,000 in attempt
ing to produce 10y artificial cultivation
a blue rose.
He failed. and for the best of reasons
the task is one impossible of accom-
plishment. As De CandOle, a great au-
thority on this subject. has pointed out
yellow and blue are 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 nev-
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 pen.
is to chemists what the discovery of
| the north pole is to geOgraphers Ever
since Fahrenheit in 1924 broached the
| problem scientists innumerable have
striven to reach the goal in vain. al
though each, in turn, has succeeded H.
understanding the other.
Thus Fahrenheit boasted that no one
could ever attain artifcially to u
rrp n for 6arfao Of cold than b, ,,,o1,,o1
with salt and ice-seven degrees below
zerO-althOugh, of course, he did not
| suppose that cold ended there Yet.
within Il few years of his death. over
| 100 degrees below had been obtained.
and Professor James Dewar. whose re
searches in the field of low tempcra-
| lures have brought out so many new
and startling facts, succeeded by cool
ing down the rare gas hclium by the
aid of liquctied hydrogen in regiSterin (.
the almost incOnceivablc temperature
of 422 degrees below zero f. But this
IL not absolute zero. and the problem
| remains uuSo.vcd
Here ana there. in odd corners of The
earth. gray. bent men still pore Ore:
CrucibleS seeking the philosophers :
| stOne-that mysterious and wonderful
substance which will, they believe,
when found change the baser metals
into gold. 1t never will he found. of
course. for such a substance. in the
nature of things, can have no concrete
| existence Nevertheless for hundreds
| of years the best brains and kecnest
! 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 He
mont on the nature of gas, and Or.
GlaubeT 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 AMI
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
/ nj - ~
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 Leibnitz or Newton.
or course the thing is impossible an1
has been proved so over and over
again, but that does not deter them.
Only the other day a man turned 10
at the office of a well known patent
agent with model of Il perpetual mo
tiOn machine which depended for its
proper working upon the interception
| 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 interceptOr. Is it DOS
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 baffled 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 it in
a popular article of this kind.
1t is somewhat startling. however,
to find that even figures, just plain,
ordinary arithmetical figures such as
are easily understandable by any mod