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.

    25/200 (page 21)
    CHAP. I MAXWELL’S ADDRESS inquiry. They are words of power, which stir their souls like the memories of childhood.” I remember feeling enthusiastically that that was exactly my own case. Maxwell goes on [and it is remarkable as coming from a mathematician] : “ For the sake of persons of these different types, scientific truth should be presented in different forms, and should be regarded as equally scientific, whether it appears in the robust form and the vivid colouring of a physical illustration, or in the tenuity and paleness of a symbolical expression.” Maxwell refers to Dr. Johnstone Stoney’s earliest estimate of the size of atoms, in 1868, as well as to Sir William Thomson’s extension of the idea in 1870. The whole address is full of interest, but a paragraph seems specially appropriate now that the particle and the wave are being in a sense unified, and when old- fashioned dynamical considerations have rather fallen into the background : “ There are certain electrical phenomena [he says] which are connected together by relations of the same form as those which connect dynamical phenomena. To apply to these the phrases of dynamics ... is an example of a metaphor of a bold kind . . . but it is a legitimate metaphor if it conveys a true idea of the electrical relations to those who have been already trained in dynamics.”