Elizabeth Garber

Thermodynamics and meteorology (1850–1900)

Summary We trace the use of thermodynamics in meteorology from 1850 to 1900 and show the extent to which physicists initiated important lines of research in the use of thermodynamics in meterology. However, it was not until meteorologists adapted physical arguments to the unique requirements of their data that the full power of thermodynamics was achieved. In tracing these developments we remark upon the boundaries between the sciences in the 19th century and tentatively define the criteria for intellectual independence between one science and the science to which it is indebted for its basic principles.

Reading Mathematics, Constructing Physics: Fourier and His Readers, 1822–1850

Historians consider that early nineteenth-century French mathematical physics is one of the roots of modern theoretical physics. This is problematic: French mathematical physics is mathematics, not physics. What evolved from this mathematics was the first logically defensible form of the calculus.

The Beginnings of Piezoelectricity: A Study in Mundane Physics

Piezoelectricity is the production of an electric potential by mechanical strain, and its inverse. These effects are seen in asymmetrical crystals such as quartz or tourmaline, along their hemihedral axes. (Quartz, a hemihedral crystal, has only half the number of faces expected, given the maximum symmetry of the crystal group to which it belongs.) Closely connected to piezoelectricity are other phenomena, such as pyroelectricity. Soon after its ‘discovery’ in the 1880s, piezoelectricity was incorporated into measuring instruments used in the study of such related phenomena as pyroelectricity. This presaged the ultimate use of the devices developed from piezoelectric crystals. Devices using piezoelectric crystals or ceramics are now ubiquitous. They are essential to all electronic communications and ignition systems, transducers (including television remote controls), intrusion alarms, relays, and electronic filtering devices. Their ongoing economic, social, military, and political importance led to a worldwide research effort to devise ever more effective materials and developing them into improved technologies. Fundamental research in this area is often tied to their possible development into electronic devices. The histories of the growth of such an important cluster of industries are usually found in the initial chapters of technical volumes and papers addressed to people engaged in the development and use of these devices. Most of these accounts are inaccurate, the same errors reappear in later narratives. In addition to exploring the early experimental and theoretical developments in research into piezoelectricity, Katzir’s corrects the myths about the early development of research on piezoelectrics in the 1880s and 1890s, such as the often repeated story that piezoelectric theory developed from William Thomson’s early papers on the subject. Katzir considers both the development of experimental and theoretical research in the area, both usually done by the same physicist. The discovery and the development of research into piezoelectricity did not lead to any intellectual upheavals in the foundations of physics. Such research is not the focus of attention of most philosophers or historians of science. Katzir labels this kind of research, as ‘mundane’. Yet, this is the kind of research pursued by the majority of physicists. Such labours require the same commitment, creativity, ingenuity, and skills as the, retrospectively, more glamorous research efforts. They

Degrees Kelvin: A Tale of Genius, Invention, and Tragedy: Lindley, David: Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press 366 pp., Publication Date: April 2004

Mayhall points out, not new. Militants drew on early nineteenth-century radicalism for inspiration, they identified themselves with political radicals and their movement with the struggles of the powerless in the past and in other countries, and they argued that the enfranchisement of women was about justice rather than upheaval-“the restitution of their [women’s] ancient political rights” (43). There are times when Mayhall states the obvious: “sexed female, they [suffragettes] denianded incorporation into a body politic conceptualised as male. Suffragettes repeatedly encountered resistance to their claims on the basis of their sex” (83). There are other times when more discussion about an idea is needed: “popular graphic representations of suffragettes being forcibly fed presented these women as young and attractive” (84). How does this statement square with the contemporary impression of the suffragette as a dried up spinster? And why, in a book that argues that the suffrage movement celebrated a wide variety of women, is Mary Wollstonecraft, whom turn-of-the-century suffragettes resurrected, absent? And what about the impact of the “new woman?’ There is room for ninre discussion, nonetheless, women’s historians, cultural and social historians and political theorists will find much of interest in The Militant Sufferage Movement: Citizenship and Resistance in Britain, 1860I 930.

“Empirical Literalism”: Mathematical Versus Experimental Physics in France, 1790–1830

Well before 1790 Paris had become the social and intellectual center for scientific life in Europe. It remained at the center until after 1830. Because this era in the scientific life of France has been seen as the source of modern physics, we need to examine the workings of Parisian scientific institutions and the practices of mathematicians and experimental physicists. What, precisely, did this band of intensely competitive men change in their mathematical and physical heritage from the eighteenth century? After examining the social and political structures of scientific Paris and their workings, we will turn to a series of problems and prize-essay questions of the era. In France the solutions to these problems were the occasions for fierce contests over the practices and future of both physics and mathematics. The solutions also disclose what was accomplished in this era in terms of changing the relationships between mathematics and experimental physics. The mathematization of electrostatics by Poisson, and Fourier’s work on the conduction of heat through solids, will help us distinguish the technical mathematician of the early nineteenth century from the theoretical physicist of a later era. Similarly, the development of the wave theory of light and subsequent work in France on elasticity will separate mathematicians from experimentalists and reveal the changes in physics by 1830.

Eighteenth—Century Physics and Mathematics: A Reassessment

We now need to examine the plausibility of this demarcation of physics and mathematics in the eighteenth century. Methods indeed defined other disciplinary fields such that there were multiple disciplines of astronomy, celestial mechanics and observational astronomy, as well as mechanics. There was even an attempt to establish a mathematical chemistry. Eighteenth century practitioners narrowed their specialties by the particular phenomena that yielded results to well defined practices. In this way chemists began to differentiate their specialty from the broad field encompassed by observation and experiment. Methods became a means of investigation and an explanation of the phenomena those methods uncovered. Interpretation, especially as natural philosophy, was more speculation than an aspect of the investigation of the structure and functioning of nature. Regarding the disciplines through the lens of a methodological definition, some of the important unique social as well as cognitive characteristics of eighteenth century science begin to coalesce. Histories of the sciences written in the eighteenth century by practitioners in their fields of specialization confirm the divisions of the sciences by method, as does the social structure of major scientific societies and the content divisions of their journals.

Physics About 1870 and the “Decline” of French Physics

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.

On the Margins: Experimental Physics and Mathematics in the German States, 1790–1830

Paris was not the only site for the practice and development of mathematics and experimental philosophy around the turn of the nineteenth century.1 Throughout the eighteenth century, in Britain and the German States, experimental philosophers and mathematicians built their own traditions, interacting with, but not over-whelmed by, the research of the French. After 1800 the achievements of French experimentalists and mathematicians intruded into those traditions and began to change them. These intrusions reoriented research problems and the terms of their solution by both experimentalists and mathematicians. At the same time and on a broad scale, British and German societies went through metamorphoses. In the German states, the invasion and occupation of the Rhineland by the French accelerated these changes. Experiences in the Napoleonic wars added to the structural, economic translocations already affecting Britain.

From Natural Philosophy and ‘Mixed Mathematics’ to Theoretical and Experimental Physics: Britain, 1830–1870

Most accounts of physics in the mid-nineteenth century focus on the conceptual transformations of the field. The date when conservation of energy and field theory became embedded in the research life of the discipline determines periodization.1 These accounts are closely connected to the sense that the history of physics is written in the lives of the singular individuals that first clarified and stated these concepts.2 Historians recently have focussed on communities of fellow practitioners and their interactions with their fellows rather than a few individuals in their isolated grandeur as thinkers.3 The legacy of intellectual leaders is often seen as less clearcut and more given to diverse interpretation than in earlier depictions. Above all, they are seen more often than not as a product of their time and place. Physics has become a product of many hands.4

On the Margins: Experimental Philosophy and Mathematics in Britain, 1790–1830

Experimental philosophers in Britain developed their own forms of theoretical physics during the same period as the Germans. In broad outlines, the processes through which these transformations occurred were the same. Socially experimental philosophy became a profession rather than an avocation; passage into the research community narrowed from self-education to formal, certified educational levels within the universities of Britain. Access to entry into the research communities was consequently constrained by these formal, educational gateways. Training became the modern apprenticeship of graduated courses, problems sets, and textbooks along with laboratory courses. Access narrowed to the social institutions of science that had appeared as open and serving many cultural, economic, and social purposes in the late eighteenth century. Their memberships and purposes became limited to the professional, research oriented physicist. The institutions that had been intellectually universal and geographically local became narrowly specialized and geographically national.