Abstract
WHEN I was asked to give this lecture I was also asked to give a short list of subjects from which your directors might select what they thought most fit. I named three. Regarded from the scientific point of view, one of them was to be considered as fully understood in principle, and requiring only additional experimental data to make it complete. This was the Conduction of Heat in Solids. Another was to a certain extent scientifically understood, but its theory was, and still is, in need of extended mathematical development. This was the popular scientific toy, the Radiometer. The third was, and remains, scarcely understood at all. Of course it was at once selected for to-night. I might have foreseen that it would be. You may well ask, then, why I am here. What can I say about a subject which I assert to be scarcely understood at all? A few years ago no qualified physicist would have ventured an opinion as to the nature of electricity. Magnetism had been (to a certain extent, at least) cleared up by an assumption that it depended on electric currents; and from Örsted and Ampere to Faraday and Thomson, a host of brilliant experimenters and mathematicians had grouped together in mutual interdependence the various branches of electrodynamics. But still the fundamental question remained unsolved, What is electricity? I remember Sir W. Thomson, eighteen years ago, saying to me, “Tell me what electricity is, and I'll tell you everything else.” Well, strange as it may appear to you, I may now call upon him to fulfil his promise. And for good reason, as you shall see.
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Thunderstorms 1 . Nature 22, 339–341 (1880). https://doi.org/10.1038/022339e0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/022339e0