The concepts and theories of modern physics / By J.B. Stallo.

  • John Stallo
Date:
1900
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The concepts and theories of modern physics / By J.B. Stallo. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    259/376 (page 209)
    Impulse to this new departure in the walks of mathe- matical theory was given by Riemann in a remarkable dissertation * read before the philosophical faculty of Goettingen, June 10, 1854 (published by Dedekind in 1866, after Ilieinann’s death), and by Helmholtz in an equally remarkable essay f published two years later. These publications have since been followed by numer- ous articles, pamphlets and books expository of the doctrines thus advanced, and, as was to be expected, there has been no lack of writings in which these doc- trines have met with criticism and denial. The articles of the new geometrical faith are cer- tainly startling. Among them are propositions such as these : that our ordinary “ Euclidean ” tridimensional and “ homaloidal ” (flat) space is but one of several pos- sible forms of space; that the preeminence of this Eu- clidean space among other forms of space can be main- tained upon empirical grounds alone, and, in the sense of the logical and psychological tenets of the sensation- alist school, depends solely upon the accidents of no- tional association, which may be (and, in the opinion of some enthusiastic advocates of the new” doctrines, have been) overthrowm by the discovery that the existence of additional dimensions is a necessarv inference from cer- V tain facts of experience which can not otherwise be ex- plained—just as the third dimension of space is said to be, not directly perceived, but simply inferred from familiar facts of visual or tactual experience for whose explanation the third dimension is an indispensable * Ueber die Hypothesen wclchc der Geometric zu Gnmde lichen (Ab- hnndlungen der Kgl. Gcsellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Goettingen, vol. xiii, p. 133 seq.). ■f Ueber die Thatsachen die der Gcometrie zn Gnmde liegen (Nach- riclden der Kgl. Gcsellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Goettingen, 1865, June 3).