The boy was sitting in his bedroom, swatting for his upcoming science essay.
Apart from the distant drone of his mother using the vacuum cleaner, the house was silent. He liked the silence when he was studying. He couldn’t help feeling that a cup of coffee would make it damn near perfect. He glanced at the glass of water his mother had insisted he take with him to his room. It was the latest thing. The latest health kick that everybody was supposed to be doing. The current advice was for people to consume two and a half to three litres a day. She’d even packed dad off to work with a flask of water. She had been so adamant about it, she had gone as far as to say it would help him with his homework. He took a sip and put the glass down on his bedroom desk. He sat staring at it.
It was all about invisibility.
He began to think about atoms. Atoms, and how they combine to form molecules. So many molecules. Hidden things. Molecules in water, each made of a group of three atoms, two hydrogen and one oxygen. Most of the time, they are crazy, tiny particles that constantly hare around, full of energy, endlessly bumping into one another. These little guys aren’t moving that fast, he thought, because they’re in water; not in anything that’s solid. Being in a liquid, they just have sufficient energy to flow passed one another. They flow, and as a result, water flows. That had to make sense.
These guys are just gliding around, but if you applied heat… that’s another matter, of course. They would all speed up. He thought about how the kinetic molecular theory says these tiny thingamajigs are always on the move.
It came to him that he now had the topic for his essay.
His mother was right!
