Benjamin Franklin poured a single teaspoon of oil onto a pond on Clapham Common in 1774 and watched it flatten half an acre of rippled water, an afternoon’s party trick that a century later gave physicists their first honest estimate of the size of a molecule

A casual experiment with cooking oil revealed something profound about the invisible architecture of matter itself. The post Benjamin Franklin poured a single teaspoon of oil onto a pond on Clapham Common in 1774 and watched it flatten half an acre of rippled water, an afternoon’s party trick that a century later gave physicists their first honest estimate of the size of a molecule appeared first on Space Daily .