Sir O Lodge and the Conservation of Energy

Abstract

THE utterances of many men of science as to the doctrine of the conservation of energy betray a tendency to exaggerate the importance of the position of this principle in the general scheme of physical science. It appears sometimes to be forgotten that the principle of energy, if applied to even the simplest dynamical system which is possessed of more than one degree of freedom, is, taken by itself, wholly insufficient for the determination of the motion of such system. Although the principle has been of inestimable value as regulative of the relations between the different forms of molar, molecular, and corpuscular energy which the state of our knowledge compels us to distinguish, it is nevertheless true that in an ultimate, dynamical formulation of physical phenomena, the principle of energy descends to the rank of being one integral only of the dynamical equations of a system, a knowledge of the other integrals being indispensable for the complete determination of the motions of the system.