David Hoger, age 12, of Sarasota, Florida, for his question:
Why is a joule called a joule?
The scientists of the 19th century were busy probing the mysterious behavior of invisible energy. Lord Kelvin and James Prescott Joule of England, Julius Mayer of Germany and several others were especially interested in the way one form of energy changes to another. The work of these physicists led to the discovery of the Law of Conservation of Energy. Joule went on to study the heat produced by an electrical conductor and became the man who proved once and for all that heat is a form of energy. This was in the 1840's. Later researchers needed a standard unit to measure the amount of energy work performed. This unit was named in honor of J.P. Joule who had pioneered in the field of energy.
The joule unit can be demonstrated in terms of electric current. One joule is the energy required to send one ampere through an electric circuit that has a resis¬tance of one ohm. In terms of lifting power, it is equal to the energy expended by 0.74 foot pounds. This is about 3/4 of the energy required to lift one pound one foot above the ground. In the United States, Congress legalized the standard joule unit in 1894, but James Prescott Joule was not alive to appreciate the honor.
A tradition is something done the way it has been done for ages. Some traditions lose their usefulness and time comes to swap them for new ones. But no sensible person wants to belittle man's traditional respect for thoughtful study. Our students show their respect for education when they don the dignified robes and accept the diplomas that have been traditional through the centuries.
The origin of the word "bachelor" is even older than the gown that goes with the college degree. In the far off Days of Chivalry, a bachelor was the youthful squire of a knight. In the Middle Ages, a young man who had learned his skills from a master craftsman was called a bachelor. He was not yet rich enough to support a family of his own, hence the word bachelor came to mean an unmarried man. The college bachelor degree still keeps the earlier meaning of bachelor a young man ready to face the world after a serious period of studying.