EWP Primer – Page 4 – Ether Wave Propaganda

Primer: The British Association

In 1830, Britain was on the cusp of one of its most famous eras of scientific activity. The year before Charles Darwin unassumingly set out aboard the Beagle, the first volume of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology came off the printing press to wide and immediate acclaim. The experimentation of Michael Faraday and James Joule in the 1830s would help spark the development of modern electromagnetic theory and thermodynamics in the ensuing decades. The Cambridge Mathematical Tripos was already beginning to churn out rigorously prepared physical theorists.

charles-babbage-1-sized — Charles Babbage (1791-1871)

However, the future, as always, was unclear, and there were a number of people who were gloomy about the state of affairs in British science. One was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, Charles Babbage, who was frustrated in his search for funding for a calculating engine he had designed (and for which he would be most remembered thanks to the folk history of computing). In 1830 he gave vent to his gloom and frustration through a book entitled Reflections on the Decline of Science in England, and on Some of its Causes, which was picked up by the Edinburgh experimentalist and scientific journal editor David Brewster (best known today as the name behind Brewster’s angle), who ran extracts in the Edinburgh Journal of Science, and published his own screed in the Quarterly Review.

Babbage and Brewster were concerned that British science, unsupported by the state (which had just dissolved the Admiralty’s floundering Board of Longitude in 1828), was well behind the Continent, particularly France, where post-Revolutionary governments generously supported science and

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Primer: Lawrence’s Cyclotron

In the early 1930s, the acceleration of electrons and protons was a popular project. While the spectacular theoretical developments in quantum mechanics had stolen the show in physics in the 1920s, the problem of understanding the atomic nucleus had also become a subject of renewed interest following on experiments performed by Ernest Rutherford and his coterie at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University. They had shown that bombarding nuclei with the natural radiation of radioactive materials could transmute the subject nuclei into different elements. However, natural radioactive materials were expensive, and their ability to provide incident particles was uncontrolled and inefficient. It was understood that providing some artificial source of high energy (high velocity) particles would make bombardment easier, and the exploration of atomic nuclei more systematic and reliable.

Edwin McMillan and Ernest Lawrence. Credit: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, courtesy AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives, Fermi Film Collection

The obvious means of creating a source was to send particles streaming across a high electrical potential difference (high voltage). Lightning accelerated electrons in an uncontrolled way between the sky and the ground—and had, in fact, been marshaled as a source of ephemeral high voltages. The electrical industry had been vigorously seeking ways of creating high voltages so as to transmit electricity over long

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Primer: Dufay and Nollet

Frontispiece of Nollet's Essai sur l'electricité des corps

Electricity and electrical phenomena presented a major conceptual problem for 18th-century experimental philosophers, who were tasked with understanding not only the nature of electricity and how it moved, but how (or, in some cases, whether) it related to light, fire, magnetism, lightning, sparks, shocks, phosphoresence, nervous phenomena, and the attractive and repulsive phenomena associated with electrically charged objects. It was unclear whether electricity and the forces it exerted (what we would think of as charged particles and their fields) were one and the same thing, or how electricity moved about, or how it moved through materials such as glass, air, or vacuum. The relationship between all of these phenomena and the differing electrical properties of different materials, not to mention electricity’s finicky response to changes in ambient humidity all made electricity an extremely complicated thing to study. On the surface, Coulomb’s ~~19th-century~~ late-18th-century law (the force of attraction or repulsion is proportional to the product of charges of bodies divided by the square of the distance between them) might seem like a logical extrapolation from Newton’s law of gravitation (the force of attraction is proportional to the product of the masses of bodies divided by the square of the distance between them). Taking into account the experimental difficulties, however, it might also seem miraculous.

Unlike astronomy, the study of electricity remained without any quantitative basis for a long time. Instead, natural philosophers attempted to develop qualitative schemes that were capable of explaining all of the various observations and

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Primer: Dmitrii Mendeleev

Today’s Hump-Day History post has been guest written by Michael Gordin of Princeton University, author of A Well-Ordered Thing: Dmitrii Mendeleev and the Shadow of the Periodic Table, and Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War. In presenting “The Multiple Biographies of D. I. Mendeleev”, Michael has taken the opportunity to explore whether or not we can biographically encapsulate an individual.

Is it possible to write a blog post on the biography of Dmitrii Ivanovich Mendeleev (1834-1907)? This is not just an issue of whether one can shrink the life of any human being, let alone someone with a long life and a string of significant achievements, to under 2,000 words. Even on a broader scale (say 100,000 words), could one really do it? This might seem like a non-serious point, since I have in fact published a book in 2004 on this very same Russian chemist, the man most often credited with the formulation of the periodic system of chemical. The point, however, is serious: can one simply write a biography? Can you break down a person into one single narrative, one which builds up a picture of a story with no axe to grind, no preconceptions, no grand story? Well, you might think you can, but that only means you aren’t paying attention. Let me illustrate this with four possible “biographies” of Mendeleev, each based on documented facts from his life, and each with rather different plotlines.

The first biography focuses on the periodic table. The story begins in September 1860, at a congress of chemists gathered in Karlsruhe to discuss the fundamental issues of chemistry. Before the speech of Italian chemist Stanislao Cannizzaro (1826-1910) at that Congress, there were several different systems for correlating atomic weights, with hydrogen typically set equal to 1. Depending on how you measured, and what you considered the chemically “relevant” part of an element in a chemical reaction, you could have

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Primer: Cambridge Tripos Coaches

In the 1700s, calculus quickly became the most powerful tool for those practicing “mixed mathematics”, a diverse field of analysis dealing with the motions created by known forces. Throughout that century, it was used by a relatively narrow class of elite mathematicians, primarily to predict celestial motions, but also to analyze problems in ordinary mechanics and hydrodynamics. Increasingly, its development was centered on France, but in the 1800s it was adopted by large new groups of British and German physicists, who used it to establish the new fields of thermodynamics and electromagnetism.

The expansion in the population of calculus-users was made possible by new methods of mathematical training. At Cambridge University, the center of new physics developments in England, the mathematical “tripos” examination, taken in the Cambridge Senate House at the end of students’ course of studies, shifted from an oral examination to a written one in the late 1700s, and began adopting Continental mathematics in the early 1800s. Exam results were listed in an “order of merit” with the “wranglers” at the top (the “senior wrangler” being the highest rank), down through senior and junior “optimes” to the unranked “hoi polloi”. The competitiveness of these exams, and the sophistication of response that could be recorded on paper, allowed the exams to become unprecedentedly difficult over the course of the 19th century, often including cutting edge results.

To cope with the difficulty of these exams, students preparing for the tripos had to undertake continual study, not only to absorb the mathematics, but to train their abilities to use it appropriately. College lectures proved sorely inadequate for the task. Students instead turned to private tutors, or “coaches”.

The term coach came from the speedy horse-drawn coaches that could, in the decade or so prior to the widespread use of the train, transport wealthy students between London and Cambridge (about 60 miles) in

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Primer: Darwin

Today we present a guest post by Michael Robinson of the University of Hartford, manager of the science-and-exploration blog Time to Eat the Dogs (where this is cross-posted), and author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture.

Charles Robert Darwin (1809-1882), expert in barnacle taxonomy, lived his life as an omnivorous reader, letter-writer, and pack-rat. He attended college and traveled abroad, married his cousin Emma, and settled at Down House. There he wrote books, doted on his many children, and suffered bouts of chronic dyspepsia.

We don’t remember Darwin much for these details, eclipsed as they are by the blinding attention given to his work on evolution. But they are worth noticing if only to make a simple point. Darwin did not live life in anticipation of becoming the father of modern evolutionary biology, a status that seems almost inevitable when we read about Darwin’s life. Despite the distance of time and culture which separates us from Darwin, he lived his life much as we do: working too much, getting sick and getting better, fretting about others’ opinions, and seeking solace among his friends and family.

In spite of the scrutiny paid to evolution, or perhaps because of it, we continue to see Darwin through a glass darkly, distorted by a body of literature that, despite sophisticated analysis and a Homeric attention to details, reduces his life to the prelude and post-script of the modern era’s most important scientific theory. This is not to beat up on the “Darwin Industry” which has produced a number of superbly researched, balanced portraits of Darwin. But the nuance of such works cannot overcome the weight of Darwin as a

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Primer: William Whewell and the “Method of Hypothesis”

William Whewell was born on 24 May 1794 and died on 6 March 1866. Harvey Becher in the essay “William Whewell’s Odyssey: From Mathematics to Moral Philosophy” gives a good sense of both the polymath quality of Whewell’s inquiries and the fundamental reality that his interdisciplinary stance reveals about Victorian science. Becher notes, in a somewhat “heroic” fashion, “During his fifty-four years at Trinity College in Cambridge University, in an age when knowledge reverberated throughout an intellectual world unencumbered by barriers erected by disciplines narrowly defined as means and ends of themselves, Whewell incessantly studied and promoted the science and pedagogy which engulfed him.” (See William Whewell: A Composite Portrait, p. 1.) Whewell wrote on subjects as diverse as geology, mineralogy, mechanics, mathematics, political economy, political theory, and architecture.

Whewell was both a founding member and one of the first presidents of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, a fellow of the Royal Society, a president of the Geological Society, and was the Master, with intermittent controversy, of Trinity College, Cambridge. He exchanged ideas and letters with such well-known men of Victorian science as John Herschel and Charles Lyell, and exerted considerable influence on Michael Faraday. Whewell’s Bridgewater Treatise, Astronomy and general physics considered with reference to Natural Theology, published in 1830, was an important text

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Primer: Georges Cuvier

Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) was born on 23 August 1769.After an education at Stuttgart, he accepted a position as a tutor with the family of the Comte d’Hericy.During his time as a tutor, he became friends with the well-regarded agriculturalist Tessier. Cuvier became the protégé of Tessier, and through his correspondence with Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, managed in 1795 to secure an appointment as an assistant professor of comparative anatomy at Museum d’Histoire Naturelle.In 1796, he began a series of lectures at the Ecole Centrale du Pantheon.In that same year, he read his first paper, entitled Memoires sur les especes d’elephants vivants et fossils, which was published in 1800.For Cuvier, 1789 was a pivotal year as it saw the completion of his first systematic work of natural history, entitled Tableau elementaire de l’histoire naturelle des animaux.The period after the publication of this work saw Cuvier devote himself to three broad lines of inquiry: the structure and classification of mollusks, the classification and natural history of fish, and finally, the natural history of fossil mammals and reptiles.

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Primer: Lyell’s Principles of Geology

For today’s post, I want to talk about one of the most influential books in the natural sciences, Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, published in three volumes from 1830 to 1833. Lyell (1797-1875) was an English gentleman, who turned to scientific study at university after originally intending to train to be a barrister. His entry to geology came at a time when the field was becoming increasingly professionalized; Principles was his attempt to bring some philosophical rigor to the subject, to lend it further respectability as a modern, 19th-century “science”, that is, the sense that the term now connotes.

By the time Lyell wrote the Principles, mainstream geological opinion (and also some religious opinion) accepted that Biblical chronologies could not be maintained in light of fossil evidence. Debates had thus turned to the various problems of “deep history”, such as: what had happened in the past, how the earth began and whether it was headed for an end, and whether geological history followed a clear progressive arc

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Primer: Einstein!

OK, I fess up, I’m pulling out my reserve tank of things I can write about if I haven’t given sufficient thought to the weekly Hump-Day History post. Having been a teaching assistant in a course called the “Einsteinian Revolution”, I think I can rattle off a quick 900-1,000 words on the guy!

Credit: AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives, W. F. Meggers Gallery of Nobel Laureates

There is, of course, a historiographical industry surrounding Einstein. Legions of science history enthusiasts are well-aware of his personal biography, his scientific work, his role as a scientific diplomat, his political advocacy. There’s nothing that I can write here that would be considered remotely new or exciting, so this one goes out to all those who haven’t yet joined the thousands of Einstein groupies out there, those who know him mostly as an icon. (Certified groupies may feel free to cluck their tongues at the insufficient characterizations offered here).

Let’s focus on the significance and genius of Albert Einstein. As he himself often pointed out, as a day-to-day physicist, he was comparable in talent to the best minds of the theoretical physics community of his day. Where Einstein needs to be considered the best mind of his era is in his ability to conceptualize the fundamental questions at the heart of physical inquiry. Conceptually, there were only a few other physicists in his time who could even really be considered in his league.

Einstein’s interest in the conceptual problems of physics extends from his snotty lack of regard for the graduate training in physics he received

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