Literary Allusions
In his 1891 novel The Doings of Raffles Haw, Arthur Conan Doyle talks about turning elements into other elements of decreasing atomic number, until a gray matter is reached.
In his 1959 novel Life and Fate, Vassily Grossman's principal character, the physicist Viktor Shtrum, reflects on Prout's hypothesis about hydrogen being the origin of other elements (and the felicitous fact that Prout's incorrect data led to an essentially correct conclusion), as he worries about his inability to formulate his own thesis.
Read more about this topic: Prout's Hypothesis
Famous quotes containing the word literary:
“Simile and Metaphor differ only in degree of stylistic refinement. The Simile, in which a comparison is made directly between two objects, belongs to an earlier stage of literary expression; it is the deliberate elaboration of a correspondence, often pursued for its own sake. But a Metaphor is the swift illumination of an equivalence. Two images, or an idea and an image, stand equal and opposite; clash together and respond significantly, surprising the reader with a sudden light.”
—Sir Herbert Read (1893–1968)