Abstract
A Briton wants emotion in his science, something to raise enthusiasm, something with human interest.
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Notes
- 1.
This is covered extensively in [140, pp. 11–18]. References are contained in that volume.
- 2.
The experiment was actually performed by Vincenzo Viviani (1622–1703), who had also been an assistant to Galileo [281].
- 3.
Holton and Brush remark that this was the beginning of a futile 250 year search for an ethereal fluid [143, p. 272].
- 4.
Boyle had defined an element as “a substance that cannot be decomposed into any simpler substance.”
- 5.
Temperature was not yet understood in thermodynamic terms. We therefore use Laplace’s designation u.
- 6.
Benjamin Thompson (Reichsgraf von Rumford, or in English, Count Rumford) (1753–1814) conducted experiments on cannon barrels, while in the service of the Duke of Bavaria. At the arsenal in Munich in 1798, Thompson mounted a cannon barrel vertically in water and and arranged for the barrel to be bored by rotating a blunted boring tool concentric with the barrel. The water was brought to a boil in two and a half hours.
Thompson’s experiments were taken seriously in France, although ignored in England. The measurements did not produce satisfactory (scientific) data. The link between motion and heat, however, could not be easily denied [256, p. 215].
- 7.
Carnot used air in his example.
- 8.
French engineer Benoît Paul Émile Clapeyron (1799–1864).
- 9.
Herapath’s paper was initially rejected by the Royal Society for publication in its Philosophical Transactions. It was published in the Annals of Philosophy in 1821, which merged with the Philosophical Magazine in 1826.
- 10.
Waterston’s contributions to the kinetic theory suffered a similar fate to that of Herapath’s. He eventually presented his work to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1851.
- 11.
For a system out of equilibrium, the entropy change includes an internal change, which the second law requires always to be greater than zero [138, Sect. 11.2].
- 12.
Krönig served as editor of Die Fortschritte der Physik and had at least encountered the abstract of Waterston’s 1851 paper. Daub discusses the influence of Waterston on Krönig [65].
- 13.
The primes in the collision term distinguish properties after collision from those before, g is the relative velocity of the atoms before the collision, b is the impact parameter, and \(\varepsilon \) places the plane of collision in space. The subscript 1 indicates the colliding partner. The species of the colliding partners in (1.14) are the same. For multi-component gases there is a collision term for each component [22, p. 123].
- 14.
This was originally called the Stosszahlansatz or collision rate assumption. It was considered self-evident by both Maxwell and Boltzmann. The postulate of molecular chaos replaced the Stosszahlansatz. Modern studies in the kinetic theory of gases represent the phase space density as a hierarchy in the so-called BBGKY expansion (see, e.g., [199, pp. 42–49] and [235, p. 286]). The Boltzmann equation is the first order approximation to the BBGKY expansion.
- 15.
The translators Sharp and Matschinsky refer to this as “hedging his bets.”
- 16.
Heinrich Hertz was one of the few who supported Hittorf’s approach. Most scientists were skeptical of the role of gases in conductivity and indeed some thought the vacuum to be an ideal conductor, while gases served only as insulators [203, p. 232].
- 17.
Efforts with ionized gases (plasmas) in the twentieth century led to an understanding of electrical conductivities and energy transport in these systems. A missing component in the investigation of the ionized gas in the nineteenth century was the electron.
- 18.
Free School Lane is a historic street in Cambridge, England, where several important university buildings are located. Among them is the physics department’s Cavendish Laboratory. The name of the street comes from the “Free School” which was established in the seventeenth century by Dr Stephen Perse who left money in his will to educate 100 boys from Cambridge, Barnwell, Chesterton, and Trumpington.
- 19.
At the end of the nineteenth century there were two famous English physicists with the family name Thomson: J.J. Thomson and William Thomson (Lord Kelvin). We will include first names or initials only when there is a possibility of confusion.
- 20.
Thomson had actually calculated the ratio m/e for the lecture at the Royal Institution in April. The present experiment used different gases and was more accurate, although the differences in the results were only in the second decimal place.
- 21.
At its Cardiff meeting in 1920, the British Association for the Advancement of Science accepted Rutherford’s suggestion that the hydrogen nucleus be named the “proton,” following Prout’s word protyle.
- 22.
In this section we are discussing the work of J.J. Thomson, not William Thomson (Lord Kelvin).
- 23.
Today we acknowledge electric charge to be a property of a particle. This was not the case in 1904.
- 24.
The German university system does not easily translate into the American one. A Privatdozent is someone who has written a habilitation and is granted the right to teach and lecture. The Privatdozent may be thought of as someone with the qualifications of an associate professor, although often without a faculty appointment.
- 25.
Laue received the 1914 Nobel Prize “for his discovery of the diffraction of X-rays by crystals.”
- 26.
The Braggs received the 1915 Nobel Prize “for their services in the analysis of crystal structure by means of X-rays” [91].
- 27.
The book by Harald Ibach and Hans Lüth [150] contains a particularly nice explanation of the connection between the Laue and Bragg theories.
- 28.
Heilbron identifies a wrangler as someone who can survive, with first class honors, a stiff week-long examination in mathematics held in an unheated room in January [129].
- 29.
Marsden recalls the care with which he checked the possible sources of error and his meeting with Rutherford on the steps to Rutherford’s “private room”[238, pp. 48–49].
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Helrich, C.S. (2021). The Atomic Theory. In: The Quantum Theory—Origins and Ideas. History of Physics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79268-8_1
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