Der energetische Imperativ

Abstract

IT was at the Leeds meeting of the British Association in 1890 that three foreign chemists, van't Hoff, Arrhenius, and Ostwald, propounded and defended a new theory of solution which has since then been generally accepted. One of them, Wilhelm Ostwald, simultaneously imported another germ of thought, which for some years afterwards exercised the minds of Poynting, Lodge, Heaviside, and numerous other physicists. It was a development of the conception of the conservation of energy. It was the question as to whether energy, being indestructible, had an existence independent of matter, whether it retained its identity, and whether it could be followed up from point of point of space in its various transformations.

Der energetische Imperativ.

Erste Reihe. By Wilhelm Ostwald. Pp. iv + 544. (Leipzig: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft m.b.H., 1912.) Price 9.60 marks.