Knott and the indefatigable physicists of Tokyo University.
Strutt, made him known over Europe; and his powers rapidly matured until, at the death of Clerk Maxwell, he stood at the head of British physicists, Sir George Stokes and Lord Kelvin alone excepted.
The so-called musical arc of Duddell has been the subject of considerable investigation, and physicists are not entirely in accordance as to the true explanation of the mode of production of the oscillations.
The instrument was described in over fifty publications 6 in various countries, and was well known to physicists previous to Bell's introduction of the electric telephone as a competitor with the electric telegraph.
Starting from the physical standpoint of the Ionian physicists, he accepted their general idea of the unity of nature, but entirely denied their theory of being.
Still no explanation of this singular fact was forthcoming, and it was reserved for the young chemist from FrancheComte to solve a problem which had baffled the greatest chemists and physicists of the time.
This knowledge, joined to what he had gathered by historical reading of equally unusual extent, he carefully digested and gave to the world in his Biographisch-literarisches Handworterbuch zur Geschichte der exacten Wissenschaften, containing notices of the lives and labours of mathematicians, astronomers, physicists, and chemists, of all peoples and all ages.
During the same period a brilliant group of mathematical physicists, notably Lord Kelvin (W.
The same physicists have made some additional experiments upon the effect of tension on magnetic change of length.
We thus see that, while the great anatomists, physicists and chemists - men of the type of Willis, Borelli and Boyle - were laying foundations which were later on built up into the fabric of scientific medicine, little good was done by the premature application of their half-understood principles to practice.
Thus the primordial matter assumed by the early Greek physicists may be said to be the universal substance out of which particular things arise.
It was not less against this form of idealism than against the determinism of the early physicists that Socrates protested.
The effects of the iron and steel used in the construction of ships upon the compass occupied the attention of the ablest physicists of the i 9th century, with results which enable navigators to conduct their ships with perfect safety.
In this connexion a statement in terms of force is apt to be displaced by more direct and more comprehensive methods, and the attention of physicists is directed to the intervention of the ether.
The assertion preserved by Stobaeus that Thales recognized, together with the material element " water," " mind," which penetrates it and sets it in motion, is refuted by the precise testimony of Aristotle, who declares that the early physicists did not distinguish the moving cause from the material cause, and that before Hermotimus and Anaxagoras no one postulated a creative intelligence.
Not in name only, but also in fact, Thales, the first of the Ionian physicists, was the founder of the philosophy of Greece.
Up to about this time Lavoisier's work, mainly quantitative in character, had appealed most strongly to physicists, but it now began to win conviction from chemists also.
The earlier Ionian physicists, Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes, in their attempts to trace the Multiplicity of things to a single material element, had been troubled by no misgivings about the possibility of knowledge.
It is certain that Socrates's contemporaries regarded him as a sophist; and it was only reasonable that they should so regard him, because in opposition to the physicists of the past and the artists of the present he asserted the claims of higher education.
First, Socrates, whilst he conceived that the physicists had mistaken the field of inquiry, absolute truth being unattainable, maintained, as has been seen, that one opinion was better than another, and that consistency of opinion, resulting in consistency of action, was the end which the human intellect properly proposes to itself.
It will be seen, however, that neither Socrates nor Isocrates was philosopher in any strict sense of the word, the speculative aims of physicists and metaphysicians being foreign to the practical theories both of the one and of the other.
Various as were the phases through which sophistry passed between the middle of the 5th century and the middle of the 4th, the sophists - Socrates himself being no exception - had in their declared antagonism to philosophy a common characteristic; and, if in the interval, philosophical speculation being temporarily suspended, scepticism ceased for the time to be peculiar, at the outset, when Protagoras and Gorgias broke with the physicists, and in the sequel, when Plato raised the cry of " back to Parmenides," this common characteristic was distinctive.
No better testimony to the value of the quaternion method could be desired than the constant use made of its notation by mathematicians like Clifford (in his Kinematic) and by physicists like ClerkMaxwell (in his Electricity and Magnetism).
Thus the suggestion preserved by Stobaeus that he conceived water to be endowed with mind is discredited by the specific statement of Aristotle that the earlier physicists (physiologi) did not distinguish the material from the moving cause, and that before Anaxagoras no one postulated creative intelligence.
De la Rive and Faraday were ardent supporters of the chemical theory of the pile, and even at the present time opinions of physicists can hardly be said to be in entire accordance as to the source of the electromotive force in a voltaic couple or pile.2 Improvements in the form of the voltaic pile were almost immediately made by W.
The phenomena of light had compelled physicists to postulate a space-filling medium, to which the name ether had been given, and Henry and Faraday had long previously suggested the idea of an electromagnetic medium.
Discharge through Gases.-Many eminent physicists had an instinctive feeling that the study of the passage of electricity through gases would shed much light on the intrinsic nature of electricity.
German physicists such as E.
The subject was pursued by Thomson and the Cambridge physicists with great mathematical and experimental ability, and finally the conclusion was reached that in a high vacuum tube the electric charge is carried by particles which have a mass only a fraction, as above mentioned, of that of the hydrogen atom, but which carry a charge equal to the unit electric charge of the hydrogen ion as found by electrochemical researches.
The study of Rntgen rays was ardently pursued by the principal physicists in Europe during the years 1897 and 1898 and subsequently.
The form into which he threw his investigation seems to have deterred many able physicists from the inquiry into the ulterior cause of capillary phenomena, and induced them to rest content with deriving them from the fact of surface-tension.
He did not, however, enter into the explanation of particular phenomena, as this had been done already by Laplace, but he pointed out to physicists the advantages of the method of Segner and Gay Lussac, afterwards carried out by Quincke, of measuring the dimensions of large drops of mercury on a horizontal or slightly concave surface, and those of large bubbles of air in transparent liquids resting against the under side of a horizontal plate of a substance wetted by the liquid.
While agreeing with the Eleatics as to the eternal sameness of Being (nothing can arise out of nothing; nothing can be reduced to nothing), Democritus followed the physicists in denying its oneness and immobility.
According to Diogenes Laertius he was " in his prime " 504-500 B.C., and would thus seem to have been born about 539 Plato indeed (Parmenides, 127 B) makes Socrates see and hear Parmenides when the latter was about sixty-five years of age, in which case he cannot have been born before 519; but in the absence of evidence that any such meeting took place this may be regarded as one of Plato's anachronisms. However this may be, Parmenides was a contemporary, probably a younger contemporary, of Heraclitus, with whom the first succession of physicists ended, while Empedocles and Anaxagoras, with whom the second succession of physicists began, were very much his juniors.
In the truism " the Ent is, the Nonent is not," iv 'rrt, 51, ovK g o-TC, Parmenides breaks with his predecessors, the physicists of the Ionian succession.
In short, the single corporeal element of the Ionian physicists was, to borrow a phrase from Aristotle, a permanent aorta having 7r1cOrj which change; but they either neglected the iraOn or confounded them with the oboia.
This way of solving, or passing over, the ultimate problems of thought has had many followers in cultured circles imbued with the new physical science of the day, and with disgust for the dogmatic creeds of contemporary orthodoxy; and its outspoken and even aggressive vindication by physicists of the eminence of Huxley had a potent influence upon the attitude taken towards metaphysics, and upon the form which subsequent Christian apologetics adopted.
There is no trace of the emergence of the problem of freedom in any intelligible MIL distinct form in the minds of early Greek physicists or philosophers.
The discovery of radio-activity may, by explaining the interior heat of the great bodies of the universe, solve a difficulty which since the middle of the 19th century has been discussed by physicists and geologists - that of reconciling the long duration which geologists claim for the crust of the earth with the period during which physicists have deemed it possible that the sun should have radiated heat.
In fact the process from the view of nature which we call personalism to the crudest theories of the physicists was apparently begun in New Zealand before the arrival of Europeans.
In 1846, when only twenty-two years of age, he accepted the chair of natural philosophy in the university of Glasgow, which he filled for fifty-three years, attaining universal recognition as one of the greatest physicists of his time.
The Glasgow chair was a source of inspiration to scientific men for more than half a century, and many of the most advanced researches of other physicists grew out of the suggestions which Thomson scattered as sparks from his anvil.
The dispute has now lost its interest, for physicists have learned to distinguish accurately the two quantities which are vaguely included under the expression amount of force, and consequently have been able to show in what each party was correct and in what it was in error.
