Famous People

H ermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894)

The extraordinary German scientist Herman Helmholtz made important contributions in all major fields of science. He expressed the relationship between mechanics, heat, light, electricity, and magnetism by treating them all as manifestations of a single force. His youth was marred with illness. At the age of nine he entered the Gymnasium in Potsdam where his father was a teacher. In spite of difficulty in distinguishing right from left, he progressed rapidly. He was interested in chemistry and physiology. He studied mathematics on his own, reading works by Laplace, Biot and Daniel Bernoulli. He had a keen interest in natural science and a desire to study physics. Helmholtz graduated from the Medical Institute in Berlin in 1843. He worked as a military surgeon for several years and spent all his spare time doing research. He concentrated on the principle of the conservation of energy and showed that muscle force was derived from chemical and physical principles. In 1847 he published his ideas in a very important paper On the Conservation of Force which provided one of the first, and certainly the clearest, statements of the principle of the conservation of energy. He demonstrated that in various situations where energy appears to be lost, it is in fact converted into heat energy. He met with, Micheal Faraday and William Thomas (Lord Kelvin), one of the foremost mathematical physicists of Europe. They were Helmholtz’s friends and colleagues for the remainder of his life.

Unit VIII. The Complex object

Read the following sentences. State the voice and the tense forms of the predicates. Translate the sentences into Russian, paying attention to the complex object.

1. The experiments proved the pressure of a gas at fixed temperature to depend on its

concentration.

2. They expected the acceleration to be different for different weights but this was not the case.

3. We consider substances to expand when heated.

4. We find this value to be accurate enough.

5. We know heat to have been of great importance for the development of industry.

6. Scientists assume the distance between these two planets to have increased.

7. Our research group believes the temperature inside the furnace to be changing.

8. We consider silver to be the best conducting material.

9. They expect these new data to be investigated soon.

10. We observe rays of light from the same point source to be nonparallel to each other.

11. We may suppose the alpha particles within the nucleus to be in motion.

12. He expects his colleagues to complete the experiment soon.

13. We suppose the velocity of the molecules to have changed.

14. Everybody knows them to have been working on the problem of heat loss over the last two months.

15. I don’t think these data to be of value in our work.

• Read the following text. Find the predicate in each sentence and state the tense and the voice form. Which of the sentences contain the complex object? Translate the text into Russian.