Skulls in the Stars

Author: skullsinthestars

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Whittaker breaks the irony meter (1910/1953)

... the Hell? / History of science / Physics

I’m currently working my way through E.T. Whittaker‘s monumental A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity (1910), among other things.  Whittaker’s book is a very comprehensive study of electricity and aether that stretches back from the seventeenth century up to the beginning of the twentieth, and it really is excellent — I’ve already learned a lot, and am only 20 pages into it!  (I loved a fascinating tidbit about the first experimental measurement of magnetic field lines, demonstrating the poles of the magnet — I’ll come back to this in a future post.)

However, as I’ve blogged about previously, there is one glaring weakness in Whittaker’s treatment.  In his second volume of the ‘History, released in 1953,  he almost completely discounted Einstein’s contribution to the theory of special relativity!  While discussing the “relativity theory of Poincaré and Lorentz,” his primary statement regarding Einstein’s work is:

In the autumn of the same year, in the same volume of the Annalen der Physik as his paper on the Brownian motion, Einstein published a paper which set forth the relativity theory of Poincaré and Lorentz with some amplifications, and which attracted much attention.

Whittaker is much more generous towards Einstein’s general theory of relativity, and gives him the credit, but his dismissal of Einstein’s contribution to special relativity is puzzling.  I’ve speculated that Whittaker was perhaps a bit miffed that his life’s work on the aether was made obsolete in 1905 by Einstein before it was even published; it may also be that Whittaker genuinely didn’t completely grasp the philosophical implications of Einstein’s contribution.

So what is the irony in this?

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R.W. Wood’s lecture demonstrations (1897-1905)

History of science / Physics

With all the concerted efforts into popularizing science that goes on these days, it is quite easy to forget that some of the best scientists throughout history put a lot of effort into making their knowledge accessible both to students of  the arts and laypeople alike.  Physicists in particular are often viewed as “keepers of secret knowledge” who study phenomena outside the ken of mortals and who are unwilling or unable to make this knowledge accessible to others.

A perfect counterexample to this perception is the great physicist Michael Faraday (1791-1867) , who over the course of many years presented the Christmas Lectures at the Royal Institution,  targeted at nonspecialists and young people.  Two of these lectures, “The Forces of Matter” and “The Chemical History of a Candle”, have been reprinted and are still available today; I will be blogging about them in detail in the near future (hopefully). Faraday in fact put much effort and thought into his public presentations; long before he was a recognized scientist and had any opportunity to speak to an audience, he observed other lecturers and took elaborate notes on the “do’s” and “don’t’s” of lecturing.

Another example of a distinguished scientist working very hard on presentation is Robert Williams Wood (1868-1955).  Wood is best known today for his work in optics, particularly in the study of infrared and ultraviolet light.  As we have seen previously on this blog, however, Wood was also active in popularizing science: he co-authored two science fiction novels, The Man Who Rocked the Earth (1915) and The Moon Maker (1916).  He also was quite skilled at setting up simple demonstrations of optical effects; I’ve previously discussed his 1902 illustration of a simple form of invisibility.   Between the years 1897 and 1905, Wood in fact published a number of short articles suggesting simple lecture hall demonstrations of a variety of physical phenomena; in this post, we’ll take a short look at these demonstrations.

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