9Let love be without hypocrisy. Abhor that which is evil. Cling to that which is good. 10In love of the brothers be tenderly affectionate to one another; in honor preferring one another; 11not lagging in diligence; fervent in spirit; serving the Lord; 12rejoicing in hope; enduring in troubles; continuing steadfastly in prayer; 13contributing to the needs of the saints; given to hospitality. 14Bless those who persecute you; bless, and don’t curse. 15Rejoice with those who rejoice. Weep with those who weep. 16Be of the same mind one toward another. Don’t set your mind on high things, but associate with the humble. Don’t be wise in your own conceits. 17Repay no one evil for evil. Respect what is honorable in the sight of all men. 18If it is possible, as much as it is up to you, be at peace with all men.
This passage sketches what sincere love looks like when it leaves the realm of feeling and enters ordinary habits: how we work, how we hope, how we treat people who are difficult. Nothing here is flashy. It is a list of small, repeatable choices, such as honoring others, staying faithful in hard seasons, sharing what we have, and refusing to repay harm with harm. Today might be a good day to pick just one of them and practice it on purpose, especially with someone who makes it hard.
Suppose a father who is neither a physician nor knowledgeable about health and sickness orders his sick son to take something he believes will help, though it will be useless or even harmful. If the son, knowing this, does not do as he is told, is he disobedient? Not at all. Then refusing to do what one ought not to do deserves praise, not blame. The disobedient man is the one who refuses orders that are right, honorable, and beneficial, and so acts shamefully. But to decline a shameful command from a parent is just and blameless. The obedient man is the one who follows a parent's good counsel, and follows all of it.
Translated for Dalton Daily
Musonius Rufus was a Roman Stoic of the first century. Nero exiled him, and he taught Epictetus. He wrote nothing himself. His lectures were noted down by a student called Lucius, and they reached us mainly through excerpts in later Greek anthologies.
Musonius separates obedience from simply doing what we are told. He defines it as following good counsel, and that includes following all of it. This applies well beyond parents. It covers a boss, a doctor, a neighbor or an old habit. Respect for someone's authority does not mean agreeing to every request. It also does not let us dodge the good advice we find inconvenient.
PracticeToday, when someone you respect asks or advises something of you, stop and ask whether it is right, honorable and beneficial. If it is, do it fully and without grumbling. If it is not, decline politely and plainly, without contempt.
A tiny, stubborn gap in the weight of nitrogen led to the discovery of an element that had been in every breath for all of human history.
In 1892, the English physicist Lord Rayleigh was weighing gases with extreme care. He found that nitrogen taken from air, after the oxygen, water vapour and carbon dioxide had been removed, was slightly heavier than nitrogen made from chemical compounds such as ammonia. The gap was only about half a percent. Most people would have put it down to sloppy technique. Rayleigh repeated the measurements and got the same gap every time.
He did something unusual for the time: he published a letter in Nature asking whether any reader could explain it. In the end, two ideas competed. Rayleigh suspected that the chemical nitrogen contained a light impurity. The Scottish chemist William Ramsay, who heard Rayleigh lecture on the problem in April 1894, suspected that atmospheric nitrogen contained something heavier. Rayleigh also found an old clue. In 1785 Henry Cavendish had sparked air with extra oxygen to burn away the nitrogen, and he noticed that a small bubble always refused to react.
Ramsay used a different route. He passed air over red-hot magnesium, which absorbs nitrogen. What was left grew denser, and in May 1894 it weighed nearly fifteen times as much as hydrogen, up from about fourteen. By August, Ramsay had isolated a new gas that would not combine with anything he tried. They named it argon, from the Greek for lazy.
The discovery had a larger consequence. Argon makes up almost 1 percent of the atmosphere, which makes it the third most common gas in air, ahead of carbon dioxide. It also had no place in the periodic table, and finding room for it led Ramsay to hunt down helium, neon, krypton and xenon. In 1904, Rayleigh received the Nobel Prize in Physics and Ramsay the one in Chemistry, both for work that began with a discrepancy in the third decimal place.
RememberArgon was found because Rayleigh refused to dismiss a half-percent discrepancy in the weight of nitrogen.
Read nextWilliam Ramsay, The Gases of the Atmosphere: The History of Their Discovery (free on Project Gutenberg)