My Talk on The Replacement of Continental Science in the Nineteenth Century

On March 3rd, 2024, I gave a talk entitled “The Replacement of Continental Science in the Nineteenth Century.” It was presented to the Rising Tide Foundation. The video of the presentation (1 hour of presentation plus 1 hour of discussion) can be found here:

Here is the abstract:

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, there were two productive research programs prevalent in the European continent, which were completely replaced by British scientists and their German allies during the period 1850-1870.

The first research program was the luminiferous aether, the physical basis for the wave theory of light, and whose most important adepts were Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695), Thomas Young (1773-1829) and Augustin-Jean Fresnel (1788-1827).

The second research program involved action-at-a-distance, with forces varying with the inverse square of the distance between particles. The most important adepts were Isaac Newton (1643-1727), Charles-Augustin de Coulomb (1736-1806), André-Marie Ampère (1775-1836) and Wilhelm Eduard Weber (1804-1891).

Among the key players in the replacement of these research programs were Michael Faraday (1791-1867), George Gabriel Stokes (1819-1903), William Thomson, aka Lord Kelvin (1824-1907) and James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879).

Among their German allies were Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894) and Ludwig Eduard Boltzmann (1844-1906).

It is to be noted that in France, not everyone was impressed, including Jules Henri Poincaré (1854-1912) and Pierre Maurice Marie Duhem (1861-1916).

In this talk, we will try to give an overview of these issues.

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