Abstract
Theoretical physics did not come into existence as a subfield of physics until the 1860s. By 1870 physicists had accepted mathematics as the natural language of physics and put into place their own ways of training and using the diverse languages of mathematics. Physicists such as John Tyndall were anachronisms within the profession. While he performed quantitative experiments, he was not obsessed with accuracy, even though trained within the German academic system. He also did not deduce algebraic relationships from his results that were by that time expected of physicists.1 Tyndall’s statements about the structure and functioning of nature were qualitative and in the vernacular. And his audiences consisted of the general public, as well as his colleagues within the profession. His career harkened back to the era before the formalized, academic and professional structure of the discipline which he entered in the 1860s. Physicists had withdrawn into a profession of peers that largely addressed each other. The general public was not privy to the research process as they had been in the first half of the nineteenth century. The mathematics now necessary to penetrate the theories of physicists meant that only the most general of ideas and sketchiest of plans of their understanding of nature were available to the vast majority of the general public.
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References
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The most dramatic nineteenth century example of this lies in the introduction of vector analysis into the theory of electromagnetism. In another context Ana Millán Gasea has discussed how different mathematical approaches affected the biological sciences and the images of biological systems the mathematics brought with them in Gasea, “Mathematical Theories versus Biological Facts: A Debate in mathematical population Dynamics in the 1930s,” Hist. Stud. Phys. Sci. 26(1996): 347–403.
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Rachel Laudan, “Definitions of a Discipline: Histories of Geology and Geological History,” in Functions of Disciplinary Histories, Loren Graham, Wolf Lepenies and Peter Weingart, eds. (New York: Reidel, 1983) has followed the same pattern of the ap- propriation of history by geologists. See also Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature on the rewriting of the history of natural history in the eighteenth century that rendered the work of Renaissance naturalists invisible.
See Lewis Pyenson, “Relativity in Late Wilhelmian Germany: The Appeal to a Preestablished Harmony between Mathematics and Physics,” Arch. Hist. Exact Sci. 27 (1982): 137–155. The author thanks David Cassidy for pointing out this argument and its importance for twentieth century physicists.
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Garber, E. (1999). Physics About 1870 and the “Decline” of French Physics. In: The Language of Physics. Birkhäuser, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-1766-4_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-1766-4_9
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