There is always the danger in scientific work that some word or phrase will be used by different authors to express so many ideas and surmises that, unless redefined, it loses all real significance.

I therefore take the liberty of proposing for this hypothetical new atom, which is not light but plays an essential part in every process of radiation, the name photon.

It was not easy for a person brought up in the ways of classical thermodynamics to come around to the idea that gain of entropy eventually is nothing more nor less than loss of information.

Since hydrogen is a constituent of most of our electrolytic solvents, the definition of an acid or base as a substance which gives up or takes up hydrogen ion would be more general than the one we used before, but it would not be universal.

We may say that a basic substance is one which has a lone pair of electrons which may be used to complete the stable group of another atom, and that an acid is one which can employ a lone pair from another molecule in completing the stable group of one of its own atoms.

There is always the danger in scientific work that some word or phrase will be used by different authors to express so many ideas and surmises that, unless redefined, it loses all real significance.

I take it that a monograph of this sort belongs to the ephemera literature of science. The studied care which is warranted in the treatment of the more slowly moving branches of science would be out of place here. Rather with the pen of a journalist we must attempt to record a momentary phase of current thought, which may at any instant change with kaleidoscopic abruptness.