An Elementary Exposition Of The Doctrine Of Energy

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Excerpt from An Elementary Exposition of the Doctrine of Energy This Treatise is little more than the substance of a set of Lectures given by me in the summer of 1872, at the request of the Head Master, to the 6th Form Boys of the Surrey County School. My aim was to lay before them - lads of from sixteen to eighteen, soon about to quit school for active life - not a popular account of recent discoveries or theories, such as abound in periodicals and books for the young, but such an exhibition of the principles and methods of modern science, and of some results obtained therefrom, as might show them the use of the mathematical groundwork in which they had been carefully instructed, and perhaps induce some of them to pursue their own scientific education after leaving. Finding afterwards that the subject was to be made part of the annual examination in 1873, I made up my notes, that the Examiner might see what the course had been. He thought they might be usefully worked up into a fuller treatise: I took advice from other competent judges; and on the whole thought the experiment worth trying. Since that time various works have appeared in English, going over much of the same ground. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

An examination of the sources Helmholtz drew upon for his formulation of the conservation of energy and the impact of his work on nineteenth-century physics. In 1847, Herman Helmholtz, arguably the most important German physicist of the nineteenth century, published his formulation of what became known as the conservation of energy--unarguably the most important single development in physics of that century, transforming what had been a conglomeration of separate topics into a coherent field unified by the concept of energy. In Helmholtz and the Conservation of Energy, Kenneth Caneva offers a detailed account of Helmholtz's work on the subject, the sources that he drew upon, the varying responses to his work from scientists of the era, and the impact on physics as a discipline. Caneva describes the set of abiding concerns that prompted Helmholtz's work, including his rejection of the idea of a work-performing vital force, and investigates Helmholtz's relationship to both an older generation of physicists and an emerging community of reformist physiologists. He analyzes Helmholtz's indebtedness to Johannes Müller and Justus Liebig and discusses Helmholtz's tense and ambivalent relationship to the work of Robert Mayer, who had earlier proposed the uncreatability, indestructibility, and transformability of "force." Caneva examines Helmholtz's continued engagement with the subject, his role in the acceptance of the conservation of energy as the central principle of physics, and the eventual incorporation of the principle in textbooks as established science.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1876.