Advancing science : being personal reminiscences of the British Association in the nineteenth century / by Sir Oliver Lodge.

  • Oliver Lodge
Date:
1931
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Advancing science : being personal reminiscences of the British Association in the nineteenth century / by Sir Oliver Lodge. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    140/200 (page 136)
    at what rate electrostatic potential travels, the answer is that it does not travel, but is generated in situ by the subsidence of a magnetic potential which travels with the velocity of light.” (Refer back to p. 99.) There the matter rested, but now at Leeds in 1890 Professor FitzGerald revives and closes the subject by a paper entitled “ An Episode in the Life of J.” And this I summarised in “ The Electrician ” for September 26th, 1890, vol. xxv, as follows : “ As already known, Maxwell's equations appear to leave the question of the propagation of electrostatic potential vague, as something depending on ethereal volume elasticity [or incompressibility] a quantity about which nothing definite is at present known. Maxwell seemed to suppose it infinite ; Thomson has recently suggested that it may be zero ; while Helmholtz provided opportunity for everything by calling it k, and making the propagation of electro¬ static potential explicitly depend upon it. “ FitzGerald and others have argued, however, that electrostatic potential is not propagated per se at all, but that it is the consequence and residue of a subsident electro-magnetic field ; and hence, if it can be said to be a travelling entity or to have any velocity of pro¬ pagation, it must be said to travel at the same rate as an electro-magnetic disturbance, viz. with the velocity of light ; but that the best mode of regarding the matter is not to attend explicitly to the electrostatic potential (Maxwell’s function T) until everything has settled down and become static. That electrostatic