Science In The Making: Scientific Development As Chronicled Historic Papers In The Philosophical Magazine, with commentaries and illustrations PDF
Preview Science In The Making: Scientific Development As Chronicled Historic Papers In The Philosophical Magazine, with commentaries and illustrations
SCIENCE IN THE MAKING Volume 1:1798–1850 SCIENCE IN THE MAKING SCIENTIFIC DEVELOPMENT AS CHRONICLED BY HISTORIC PAPERS IN THE PHILOSOPHICAL MAGAZINE—WITH COMMENTARIES AND ILLUSTRATIONS Volume 1:1798–1850 EDITED BY E.A.DAVIS Dedicated to Olivia, James and William UK Taylor & Francis Ltd., 4 John St, London WC1N 2ET This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006. “ To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to http://www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk/.” USA Taylor & Francis Inc., 1900 Frost Road, Suite 101, Bristol, PA19007 Copyright © Taylor & Francis Ltd. 1995 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 0-203-48217-4 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-79041-3 (Adobe e-Reader Format) ISBN 0 7484 02195 (Print Edition) Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data are available Contents Foreword viii Sir Nevill Mott Foreword The Diffusion of Philosophical Knowledge: 1798–1850 x Sir John Meurig Thomas Philosophical Magazine An Abbreviated History xx Acknowledgements xxvii Introduction Science in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century xxix Note to the Reader xxxii Plate Section xxxiii 1 Part One Early Papers 33 Part Two Electricity Discovered: The Voltaic Pile to the Electric Motor 75 Part Three Sir Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday 115 Part Four Miscellany 162 Part Five On the Nature of Light and Matter 226 Part Six Electricity and Magnetism 275 Part Seven James Prescott Joule Foreword: Sir Nevill Mott The Philosophical Magazine is a unique journal, not only in its long history but also in the tradition of the publishers, Taylor & Francis, for including on its board of directors members of the scientific community which the company and its journals seek to serve. I was very glad to be one of these members, as well as the editor of the Philosophical Magazine for many years, and thus to be involved in the development of scientific publishing in the United Kingdom. When I started research in 1926, quantum mechanics was in its infancy and to understand it one had to read the original papers. These, by Heisenberg, Schrödinger and Born were for the most part in German and my first task was to spend a long vacation in learning that language. The Zeitschrift für Physik was the outstanding journal for my subject, but my command of the language was never such as to allow me to write in German, and most of my papers in the pre-war period were, as were those of the small number of theorists in the United Kingdom at that period, published in the Proceedings or the Transactions of the Royal Society. After the rise to power of Hitler and the wholesale emigration of German Jewish physicists, the prestige of the German publishing houses rapidly declined and after the war many of us, including the late Robert Maxwell, saw the opportunity to establish in the United Kingdom a major publishing centre for Europe. Of course our main rival was no longer Germany but the United States, where the immense success of American physics during and after the war established the Physical Review and particularly the Physical Review Letters as the journals with the greatest reputation world-wide. It is still the case that young physicists want to be read in America, and believe that they will not be unless they publish in American journals. I myself have never done this except in papers written with a collaborator, and then have experienced their very high standard of refereeing. After the war, of course, we still had in the United Kingdom the Proceedings and the Transactions of the Royal Society, with their long and honourable tradition for publishing research in physics. But, with the enormous increase in the number of researchers in physics and realization of the industrial and military importance of the subject, journals which specialized in physics or even in particular branches of physics were in demand. At this time physics was represented in the United Kingdom by the Physical Society and the Institute of Physics, both of which had their publications; after their amalgamation, physics was represented by separate journals for different branches of physics, but this was well after I was offered and accepted the editorship of the Philosophical Magazine. With its distinguished history, and publications by those such as Niels Bohr, I thought it could well have a future as important as its past. I did not deliberately plan that the journal should specialize in a particular branch of physics. But I did find that, as I was editor and later influential in editorial policy, we tended to get papers on the branches of the subject in which I was active. People told me that they sent papers to Philosophical Magazine because they hoped I would read them! More intentionally they might hope for favourable refereeing. During the period when I was working on electrical properties of non-crystalline solids, work for which I shared a Nobel prize in 1977, I sent most of my papers to the journal. Some of my ideas were controversial (and one of them wrong—namely, a minimum metallic conductivity) and I doubt if they would have got through the refereeing system of a journal in which I had no influence. In any case, the journal helped me set out a series of assumptions which helped to establish models through which these phænomena could be understood. What I have written here concerns recent times, but this book celebrates the past glories of the Philosophical Magazine. In this first of four planned volumes covering the journal’s 200-year history, the current editor has selected an interesting variety of papers for reproduction and introduces them with informative commentaries. Some are classic works—by Davy, Faraday and Joule, for example—but others have been chosen to convey the way science was conducted in the first half of the nineteenth century, or simply for their entertainment value. It makes for fascinating reading. N.F.MOTT Cavendish Laboratory Cambridge
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