Abstract
THE Andrew Laing Lecture to the North-East Coast Institution of Engineers was given on November 1 at Newcastle-on-Tyne by Prof. W. M. Thornton. He chose as his subject the foundations of the electrical and mechanical transmission of energy. From the earliest times men have sought to find the ‘nature of things’, and of the great branches of science into which their investigations have been gathered that of physics is both the most general and the most profound. It is essentially an experimental science; but its greatest advances have been made by the use of mathematics. The applications of physics that form the scientific part of engineering have been the most effective when experiment and theory have moved together in rapid interchange, and in no part of the subject has this been more marked than in that which deals with the transformations of energy. It is only within this century that the identity of energy, for so long a subject of debate amongst scientific workers, has been firmly established. It is as real as matter itself.
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Electrical and Mechanical Transmission of Energy. Nature 146, 693–694 (1940). https://doi.org/10.1038/146693a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/146693a0