How Two Productive Research Programs Were Consciously Thrown Out

The Replacement of Continental Physics in the 19th Century, Part 2

George Gabriel Stokes, William Thomson and James Clerk Maxwell

On March 3rd, I gave a talk to the Rising Tide Foundation entitled “The Replacement of Continental Physics in the 19th Century”. This post is the second of three corresponding to an edited version of the transcript of that talk. The first post was entitled Two Productive Research Programs in the Early 19th Century.

I concluded the first post as follows:

So you would think, okay, by the middle of the nineteenth century, there were these two highly successful but, at least on the surface, apparently opposed research programs, and both were highly successful. So how should one have gone forward?

Well, one possibility would be to go forward by seeing, perhaps if there is some form of unity, whereby what appears to be at one level, for example, action-at-a-distance, if we pulled out our “ether microscope” (we are doing a thought experiment, of course), we could explain many of these things through some lower stuff involving an ether. For example, Weber never rejected the idea of the ether; he postulated that it consisted of very fine charged particles.

Another possibility would be to see if the actions of the ether could themselves be understood as action-at-a-distance.

History is Rewritten

Is this what happened?  No, this is not what happened. Something else took place. History was rewritten. We have seen this before, in other disciplines. In fact, it happens in all disciplines.

So this is the way history is understood when one studies science in a typical high school or early university. So James Clerk Maxwell wrote in 1855 on Faraday’s lines of force. He took up the lines of force of Michael Faraday and wrote a paper about it. In 1862, Clerk Maxwell measured the speed of light, seven years after it was estimated by Weber. In 1873, Clerk Maxwell published the first edition of his Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism. In 1876, Heaviside wrote about the telegraph equation, almost twenty years after did Kirchhoff and Weber. With respect to the atom, the discovery of the electron was made by JJ Thomson in 1896, decades after it was predicted by Weber. In 1904, JJ Thomson proposed the plum-pudding model for the atom in 1904. Finally, in 1911, Rutherford conducted his gold-foil experiment, demonstrating the existence of a nucleus. Two years later, in 1913, was presented the Rutherford-Bohr model of the atom, a full sixty years after Wilhelm Eduard Weber’s initial model of the atom. And remember, Weber was predicting the discovery of the atom, while the Rutherford-Bohr model of the atom was developed after it had already been proven that the atom existed, along with a nucleus.

So we are going to do a switch now, but it is, I think, important to have an idea of where all this came from.  These British empiricists arose during the time in which fluid mechanics was starting to become a serious body of work. This work had been initiated in the 18th century, with the mathematics of Euler and Lagrange, but its development continued throughout the 19th century.

In the middle of the 19th century, something interesting took place, which is illustrated by the development of the Encyclopedia Britannica, which was the Internet or Google search engine of the day. If one compares the 8th Edition with the 9th Edition, there was a massive increase in the number of copies sold: 8'000 copies for the 8th, 55'000 official and 500'000 pirated copies for the 9th. If one considers the content of the scientific articles pertaining to fluids, the 8th edition, from the 1850s, focussed on actual fluids, while the 9th edition, from the 1870s, focussed on ideal or perfect fluids. Of course, real science ultimately deals with actual things, actual atoms, actual fluids, so the trend of moving to further abstraction, is in my opinion, tricky.

In the 9th edition, James Clerk Maxwell wrote about electricity and magnetism, while William Thomson, later Baron Kelvin, wrote about heat. Given the reach of the 9th edition, people like James Clerk Maxwell and William Thompson had access to a megaphone reaching an educated audience far greater than any scientific distribution network available to scientists such as Wilhelm Eduard Weber.

The Ideological Presuppositions

It is now time for me to move on to the British empiricists. I am not going to focus on the actual technical content of their ideas. Rather, what I want to focus on is their ideological presuppositions, which they made very clear in their own scientific articles, typically in the introductions, not always, but typically. It is astonishing how clearly they stated, “We are not doing things the old way; we have decided to do things the new way.”

So let us go back to the first successful research program, The Luminiferous Ether. The person who redefined it was George Stokes (1819-1903). Now what is interesting about Stokes, about William Thompson (1824-1907), and about James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879), is that they all studied at the University of Cambridge. They studied mathematics, they did not study physics, and furthermore, they all studied mathematics under the same tutor, a man named William Hopkins (1793-1866). So they all had a very similar background.

Now Stokes is known for writing the mathematics of fluid equations. For those who study meteorology, and discuss global warming, for example, they are always working with Navier-Stokes equations.

So let us take an article that Stokes wrote in 1846 about the ether. He was considering work by Fresnel. So let us read Stokes:

Fresnel supposes that the earth passes through the æther without disturbing it, the æther penetrating the earth quite freely. He supposes that a refracting medium moving with the earth carries with it a quantity of æther…. He supposes that light is propagated through this æther, of which part is moving with the earth, and part is at rest in space…. It may be observed however that the result would be the same if we supposed the whole of the æther within the earth to move together, the æther entering the earth in front, and being immediately condensed, and issuing from it behind, where it is immediately rarefied, undergoing likewise sudden condensation or rarefaction in passing from one refracting medium to another.

George Stokes, 1846¹

So what was he saying? Fresnel had an idea of the ether that was so fine that, as the Earth moved, the ether did not move and all of the ether particles just sort of transparently went through the Earth. Given that the particles were so fine, essentially it did not affect the earth. Now the Earth did have some effect on the ether, but broadly that is what he was saying. But Stokes replied, “No, no, no, no, no, let us suppose that the ether is like strawberry jam, that the ether moves along with the Earth.” He was saying it may be observed however that the result would be the same. Now I have not yet looked at the actual mathematics. It might be that the mathematics actually resemble each other. However, just reading this, my idea is they have nothing to do with each other, one is that the ether is like some sticky jelly or jam, and the other is that it is an incredibly fine ethereal entity.

But the quote of his next paper is even more amazing:

The phænomenon of aberration may be reconciled with the undulatory theory of light, as I have already shown… without making the violent supposition that the æther passes freely through the earth in its motion round the sun, but supposing, on the contrary, that the æther close to the surface of the earth is at rest relatively to the earth.

George Stokes, 1848²

Now I do not know how the words violent supposition  — and this is not a mistranslation, because George Gabriel Stokes was writing in English and he was a graduate of  the University of Cambridge, i.e, he was a highly educated native English speaker — I do not know how anyone can state that supposing that the ether passes freely through the Earth is a violent supposition. Yet, this is what he wrote. So this is truly an ideological presupposition on the part of Stokes.

Okay, so that that gives us an idea of how the first successful research program was dealt with. Let us move on to the second.

For that, we have to take a step backwards. So we go back to René Descartes (1596-1650). So Descartes’s greatest achievement was to propose analytical geometry. Anyone who has used graph paper has ultimately used the Cartesian system of coordinates. Now, he did not invent it. As far as I know, he was the first in the West to use it. Nevertheless, I have seen Chinese maps from around year 1000, where they were clearly using “Cartesian coordinates”, long before Descartes showed up, unless Descartes was able to travel back in time.

Descartes declared that there was no void, so his corpuscles completely filled space, so the only way that there could be any motion was if everything was spinning around, so he developed this theory of vortices. And the vortices keep reappearing, as I wrote in my post Descartes's Vortices Keep Resurfacing.

So what did Descartes say? He said that there are no real atoms the way we understand them, or as Lucretius, in his De rera naturum, had written about in the late republican Roman period.

We also easily understand that it is not possible for any atoms, or parts of matter which are by their own nature indivisible, to exist. The reason is that if there were any such things, they would necessarily have to be extended [extended means they occupy space], no matter how tiny they are imagined to be. We can, therefore, still conceive of each of them being divided into two or more smaller ones, and thus we know that they are divisible. [This is simply an outright declaration on his part. There is no basis whatsoever for it. That line does not follow from the previous one.] For it is impossible to clearly and distinctly conceive of dividing anything without knowing, from that very fact, that it is divisible; because if we were to judge that same thing to be indivisible, our judgment would be in disagreement with our knowledge [of it].

René Descartes, 1644³

Descartes is just talking complete nonsense here, but he was stating categorically, There are no atoms in the way we understand them.

So the next person of relevance is Ruđer Josip Bošković (1711-1787). In English, we often call him Roger Joseph Boskovic. He was a Jesuit scholar of the early 18th century. He was not talking about atoms, but, rather, about points that are simply centers of external forces, but they still have the property of inertia. So you have these mathematical entities which have the property of inertia. It’s just like, yeah, right. So what he was essentially trying to do, and he wrote this explicitly in his work, he was attempting to hold some sort of intermediate position between Newtonian bodies and Leibnizian monads. Okay, so here is Bošković:

that matter is unchangeable, and consists of points that are perfectly simple, indivisible, of no extent [in other words, infinitely small], & separated from one another; that each of these points has a property of inertia [Remember, they are mathematical points, but have the property of inertia!], & in addition a mutual active force depending on the distance in such a way that, if the distance is given, both the magnitude & the direction of this force are given; but if the distance is altered, so also is the force altered;

Ruđer Josip Bošković, 1763⁴

Now Bošković had a huge influence in the 19th century on Michael Faraday, on William Thompson, and even on the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.

So now we come back to the 19th century, with Michael Faraday (1791-1867), the great experimentalist, who discovered electromagnetic induction. He began his scientific work as a chemist, and discovered benzene. He invented the lines of force, he did not discover the lines of force, he invented them. He declared they exist.

So let us read Michael Faraday:

I am not ignorant that the mind is most powerfully drawn by the phenomena of crystallization, chemistry and physics generally, to the acknowledgement of centres of force. [Centers of force, that is the Bošković idea.] I feel myself constrained, for the present hypothetically, to admit them, and cannot do without them, but I feel great difficulty in the conception of atoms of matter [In other words, I do not like this idea of matter.] which in solids, fluids and vapours are supposed to be more or less apart from each other, with intervening space not occupied by atoms, and perceive great contradictions in the conclusions which flow from such a view.

Michael Faraday, 1844⁵

What was he saying here? He did not like action-at-a-distance, because if there is intervening space between those atoms, even if they happen to be very close together, they would still be interacting at a distance, without any intervening medium. He said he did not like the idea.

How about William Thompson, later Baron Kelvin? Well he was really interested in continental physics. One has to understand that continental physics, as understood by mathematicians in Britain in the middle of the 19th century, was essentially the revival of Cartesian physics, in other words, the revival of Descartes’s vortices. So he had vortices on the mind. He wrote a paper called “Vortex theory of motion”. He wrote several papers called “Vortex theory of atoms”. He referred explicitly to Bošković several times.

He also oversaw the construction of the first transatlantic telegraph cable, and that was one of the reasons for which he was knighted.

But he also made many spectacularly wrong predictions: “No balloon and no airplane will ever be practically successful.” But he had an astonishing influence, both positive and negative, on the world of science. For example, when he declared categorically in 1892 that there was no matter between the Sun and the Earth, that was used as an excuse to simply throw out all of the observations made by Kristian Birkeland, the Norwegian engineer and scientist, when he published his observations in Nordkapp in northern Norway of the aurora borealis, concluding that there were definitely electric currents between the Sun and the Earth. That conclusion was thrown out, simply because William Thompson, later Baron Kelvin, had stated that there is nothing between the Earth and the Sun.

What did William Thompson say?

After noticing Helmholtz’s [We will see who is Helmholtz in a bit.] admirable discovery of the law of vortex motion in a perfect liquid [There is that perfect liquid, that ideal liquid, that ideal fluid], that is, in a fluid perfectly destitute of viscosity (or fluid friction), the author said that this discovery inevitably suggests the idea that Helmholtz’s rings are the only true atoms. [Now this is in 1868 that he wrote that! Already in 1852, Wilhelm Eduard Weber had posited that there was an atom with negative charges going around positive charges. This is 16 years later!] For the only pretext seeming to justify the monstrous assumption of infinitely strong and infinitely rigid pieces of matter [It is like Stokes talking about the violent supposition of Fresnel], the existence of which is asserted as a probable hypothesis by some of the greatest modern chemists in their rashly-worded introductory statements, is that urged by Lucretius and adopted by Newton; that it seems necessary to account for the unalterable distinguishing qualities of different kinds of matter.

William Thomson, 1868⁶

So it is interesting that it is the British who threw Newton under the bus.

James Clerk Maxwell follows. He mathematized Faraday’s lines of force into the magnetic and electric fields. With Boltzmann, he wrote about the kinetic theory of gases. What did Clerk Maxwell write?

These [German] physical hypotheses, however, are entirely alien from the way of looking at things which I adopt [In other words, I am going to throw away everything that works, and I am just going to come up with my own explanations], and one object which I have in view is that some of those who wish to study electricity may, by reading this treatise [That is, his Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism], come to see that there is another way of treating the subject, which is no less fitted to explain the phenomena, and which, though in some parts it may appear less definite [In other words, there is some stuff which gives nowhere near the same accuracy of predictions as what was previously defined by Weber], corresponds, as I think, more faithfully with our actual knowledge, both in what it affirms and in what it leaves undecided.

James Clerk Maxwell, 1873⁷

Okay, so now we move to the allies in Germany. Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894). It is important to understand that he did not study as a physicist, but, rather, as a physician. He was a real Anglophile, in other words he loved the British, and he was a strong and vocal supporter of British empiricism. After his 1847 paper about the conservation of force, he was invited over to Britain for several weeks, he was fêted everywhere he went, he was treated regally for weeks. He translated into German the Treatise on Natural Philosophy written by Thomson and Tait. In response to a scathing critique by Zöllner of a translation that he had made of Thompson and Tait’s book, Hermann von Helmholtz published something in Nature, the British Journal.

Among the scientific investigators who have especially directed their efforts towards the purification of physical science from all metaphysical infection and from all arbitrary hypotheses, and, on the contrary, have striven to make it more and more a simple and faithful expression of the laws of the facts, Sir W. Thomson occupies one of the first places, and he has consciously made precisely this his aim from the beginning of his scientific career.

Hermann von Helmholtz, 1874⁸

I think I have already given you an idea that this so-called purification of physical science from all metaphysical infection was in reality infesting physical science with more metaphysics from a purely arbitrary perspective. That is, I think, the message that I am trying to state.

And below we can see that William Thompson and Herman von Helmholtz together were a pretty petty pair. In 1881, it was time to start choosing the international set of units for the various things that had been discovered. Now who actually came up with the idea of having such units? Two “little-known Germans” named Carl Gauss and Wilhelm Eduard Weber. The meeting took place in 1881. Who was the German representative? Hermann von Helmholtz. And who was the British representative? William Thompson. And, so here they were, at a plenary meeting to discuss these things. The secretary, Éleuthère Mascart, recounts:

As we still only had two units, the ohm and the volt, and it was necessary to complete the system, I asked the president, M. Cochery, if the commissions could at least meet. I had to bow to his negative response, and we stayed, with von Helmholtz, near Lord and Lady Kelvin who, having neglected to eat lunch, were having a chocolate in the Chiboust restaurant, located near the Congress hall. It was in this small committee, around a common white marble table, that the following three units were agreed: Ampère (instead of Weber), Coulomb, and Farad [in honour of Faraday].

Éleuthère Mascart, 1881⁹

Now the point was that both in Britain and in Germany, people were already using the term weber to describe the electric current. In other words, Thompson and Helmholtz conspired openly to get rid of any reference to Weber for the set of units.  Now later, once both Weber and Thompson had passed away, Weber was given a unit. It was given for the magnetic flux, but the magnetic flux presupposes the magnetic field, and never would Wilhelm Eduard Weber have ever referred to a magnetic field. The irony!

And then we move on to Ludwig Eduard Boltzmann (1844-1906), who with Clerk Maxwell, developed the kinetic theory of gases. We are told he defined entropy. So Boltzmann below is writing in 1899, some 18 years after the death of Weber, about the fact that Weber’s theory of electrodynamics has been replaced.

Let us read the language Boltzmann is using:

The first attack on the scientific system described was directed against its weakest side, Weber’s theory of electro-dynamics. This is so to speak the flower of the intellectual work of that gifted enquirer, who has earned the most immortal merit on behalf of electric theory by his many ideas and experimental results recorded in the system of electrodynamic units and elsewhere. [Let us stop at this. So he was saying that, look, Weber was an absolutely brilliant guy, and then we go on to the same kind of language used by Stokes and William Thomson.] However, for all its ingenuity and mathematical subtlety, it bears so much the stamp of artificiality [Whatever that means: All human endeavour is artificial, by definition, i.e., it is human invented], that there can surely never have been more than a few enthusiastic followers who believed unconditionally in its correctness. [In other words, all these people are crazy to have believed that Weber’s work, despite the fact that there was huge experimental evidence, as well as brilliant theoretical work, was simply to be thrown out.] It was Maxwell who attacked it, while giving fullest recognition to Weber’s achievements. [You see, Maxwell was fully honest! That is what he was saying. And so the fact that Maxwell came up with a different system, we should all believe Maxwell, just trust me, because Weber’s work was artificial.]

Ludwig Boltzmann, 1899¹⁰

The next quotation is from the same text:

Weber’s electro-dynamic theory fared similarly. It is based, as we have seen, on the assumption that the effect of electric masses depends on their relative motion, and just when its inadequacy was definitively proved, Rowland found by a direct experiment in Helmholtz’s laboratory that moving charges act differently from stationary ones. [Well, no, its inadequacy was not definitely proved, its adequacy was definitely proved by Roland’s experiment.] In earlier periods one might have felt inclined to regard this as a direct proof that Weber’s theory was correct. [Well that is correct, it is direct proof that Weber’s theory is correct, because it was predicted.] Today we know that it is not a crucial experiment but that it follows also from Maxwell’s theory. [Yeah, but Maxwell’s theory was tweaked to take into account this result.]

Ludwig Boltzmann, 1899

As I have outlined above, the replacement of the ideas of researchers like Fresnel, Ampère and Wilhelm Weber did not take place for technical reasons or because of the failure of their ideas to explain experimental evidence, but, rather, because of metaphysical principles held by the British empiricists that were contrary to those of the aforementioned individuals. It will, of course, require numerous talks and posts to focus on the specific technical details of both the old and the new theories.

---

If you wish to donate to support my work, please use the Buy Me a Coffee app.

1. G.G. Stokes M.A. XVII. On Fresnel’s theory of the aberration of light, Philosophical Magazine Series 3, 28(185):76-81, 1846.

2. G.G. Stokes M.A. XLVII. On the constitution of the luminiferous æther. Philosophical Magazine Series 3, 32(216):343-349, 1848.

3. René Descartes, Principles of Philosophy. Translated, with Explanatory Notes, by Valentine Rodger Miller and Reese P. Miller. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1982. Part II, Section 20, pp.48-49.

4. Roger Joseph Boscovich, A Theory Of Natural Philosophy. Latin-English Edition.  London: Open Court Publishing, 1922. Synopsis of the Whole Work, p.17.

5. Michael Faraday, Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume II. London: Richard and John Edward Taylor, 1844. A speculation touching Electric Conduction and the Nature of Matter. To Richard Taylor, Esq., pp.289-290.

6. Sir W. Thomson. VI.—On Vortex Motion. Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 25:217-260, 1868.

7. James Clerk Maxwell. A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism. Unabridged Third Edition. New York: Dover, 1954. Preface to the First Edition, p.x.

8. Crum Brown. Helmholtz on the Use and Abuse of the Deductive Method in Physical Science. Nature, Dec. 24, 1874, p.150.

9. Gérard Borvon, History of the electrical units. Lundi 10 septembre 2012. http://seaus.free.fr/spip.php?article964

10. Ludwig Boltzmann, Theoretical Physics and Philosophical Problems: Selected Writings. Edited by Brian McGuinness. With a Foreword by S.R. De Groot. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1974, pp.82-84.