A Musical Tribute in the Better Late Than Never Dept.

So there is this Youtube gem that I stumbled upon a few months agot (viewer number two million and change, so I can’t really claim to have uncovered some occult treasure) — and ever since I’ve been looking for some shameless pretext to stick it up on the blog.

Well, the perfect excuse came with the birthday of the man with one of chemistry’s great names and numbers to his credit.

There is only one problem: travel, brain bubbles, advancing age, whatever, conspired to make me miss Amadeo Avogadro’s anniversary: he was born on August 9, 1776.

Avogadro, an aristocrat (with the astonishingly wonderful full name of Lorenzo Romano Amedeo Carlo Avogadro di Quaregna e di Cerreto), was one of the founders of the theory of gases. His greatest accomplishment was to formulate Avogadro’s law, which relates the mass of a volume of gas to its molecular mass. Among other garlands he received (posthumously in this instance) was the naming of his famous number, which states the number of molecules in one mole of gas. (The number was actually calculated by Johann Josef Loschmidt.)

Anyway, enough of this. As noted above, better late than never:

In honor (sort of) of Avogadro’s keen understanding of the importance of the relationship between pressure and volume, please enjoy, Mr. Freddy Mercury’s gloss on a similar theme:

Explore posts in the same categories: Brain bubbles, geek humor, History of Science, Music

Tags: Freddy Mercury, Gas, History of Science, physics, Pressure, Queen

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