Vorlesungen über hydrodynamische Fernkräfte nach C A Bjerknes' Theorie

Abstract

THEORIES of matter—or should we not rather call them theories of force, since, in “explaining” the properties of matter, we are mainly concerned with those manifestations which we say are due to “force”—naturally fall into two distinct classes. The first class includes those hypotheses which regard continuous matter as being built up of discrete particles, and the direct action of finite portions of matter as being due to action at a distance of these particles. The second class includes those hypotheses which regard these particles as singularities in a continuous medium, and which attribute their action at a distance to the direct agency of the medium. In a certain sense, these two theories are reciprocal. In both, certain attributes are localised at points, and it is necessary to bridge over the distance between these points. According to the first hypothesis, a field of force pervades the intervening gaps; according to the second, they are filled with a distribution of mass. The belief that both hypotheses are possible, enables us to imagine that there may be no limit to the smallness of the scale on which Nature conducts her operations, the phenomena occurring in any region being made to depend in their turn on others occurring in the far more minute regions which are regarded as constituting its ultimate elements, and these elements being in turn capable of further subdivision, and so on indefinitely.

Vorlesungen über hydrodynamische Fernkräfte nach C A Bjerknes' Theorie.

Von V. Bjerknes. Band i. Pp. 338; with 40 figures. (Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1900.)