Mathematical and Physical Papers by the Rt Hon Sir William Thomson, Baron Kelvin, O.M., P.C., G.C.V.O., &c

Abstract

THE publication of volumes iv. and v. of Lord Kelvin's “Mathematical and Physical Papers,” bringing as it does the collection of these memoirs nearly to an end, is important both to the student of mathematical physics and to the scientific historian. It gives the former access to papers of great value scattered through the Transactions and Proceedings of learned societies, or imbedded in the more easily obtainable but also more unexpected pages of the journals of pure and technical science. The latter will seize the opportunity to compare the utterances of the master during the last decade or two of the nineteenth century and the first seven years of the twentieth, with the last developments of the related theories of electrical action and the ultimate constitution of matter. To those who have come to these developments from the point of view of the Maxwellian electromagnetic theory of light, and find in atomic facts and hypotheses a supplement and to some extent a basis for the undulatory propagation of electric and magnetic action in a nonconducting and uniform medium, some of these utterances will occasion much thought, if they are not, indeed, a source of a good deal of perplexity.

Mathematical and Physical Papers by the Rt. Hon. Sir William Thomson, Baron Kelvin, O.M., P.C., G.C.V.O., &c.

Arranged and revised with brief annotations by Sir Joseph Larmor. Vol. iv., Hydrodynamics and General Dynamics. Pp. xvi + 563. Vol. v., Thermodynamics, Cosmical and Geological Physics, Molecular and Crystalline Theory Electrodynamics. Pp. xv + 602. (Cambridge University Press, 1910“11.) Price 18s. each.