Popular scientific lectures

BY THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING CO.

Pages 1-258 } } in 1894. Pages 338-374 } Pages 259-281 in 1896. Pages 282-308 in 1897. Pages 309-337 in 1898.

AUTHOR'S PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.

Popular lectures, owing to the knowledge they presuppose, and the time they occupy, can afford only a modicum of instruction. They must select for this purpose easy subjects, and restrict themselves to the exposition of the simplest and the most essential points. Nevertheless, by an appropriate choice of the matter, the charm and the poetry of research can be conveyed by them. It is only necessary to set forth the attractive and the alluring features of a problem, and to show what broad domains of fact can be illuminated by the light radiating from the solution of a single and ofttimes unobtrusive point.

Furthermore, such lectures can exercise a favorable influence by showing the substantial sameness of scientific and every-day thought. The public, in this way, loses its shyness towards scientific questions, and acquires an interest in scientific work which is a great help to the inquirer. The latter, in his turn, is brought to understand that his work is a small part only of the universal process of life, and that the results of his labors must redound to the benefit not only of himself and a few of his associates, but to that of the collective whole.

I sincerely hope that these lectures, in the present excellent translation, will be productive of good in the direction indicated.

E. MACH.

PRAGUE, December, 1894.

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE TO THE THIRD EDITION.

The present third edition of this work has been enlarged by the addition of a new lecture, "On Some Phenomena Attending the Flight of Projectiles." The additions to the second consisted of the following four lectures and articles: Professor Mach's Vienna Inaugural Lecture, "The Part Played by Accident in Invention and Discovery," the lecture on "Sensations of Orientation," recently delivered and summing up the results of an important psychological investigation, and two historical articles (see Appendix) on Acoustics and Sight.

The lectures extend over a long period, from 1864 to 1898, and differ greatly in style, contents, and purpose. They were first published in collected form in English; afterwards two German editions were called for.

As the dates of the first five lectures are not given in the footnotes they are here appended. The first lecture, "On the Forms of Liquids," was delivered in 1868 and published with that "On Symmetry" in 1872 (Prague). The second and third lectures, on acoustics, were first published in 1865 (Graz); the fourth and fifth, on optics, in 1867 (Graz). They belong to the earliest period of Professor Mach's scientific activity, and with the lectures on electrostatics and education will more than realise the hope expressed in the author's Preface.

The eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth lectures are of a more philosophical character and deal principally with the methods and nature of scientific inquiry. In the ideas summarised in them will be found one of the most important contributions to the theory of knowledge made in the last quarter of a century. Significant hints in psychological method, and exemplary specimen-researches in psychology and physics, are also presented; while in physics many ideas find their first discussion that afterwards, under other names and other authorship, became rallying-cries in this department of inquiry.

All the proofs of this translation have been read by Professor Mach himself.

T. J. MCCORMACK.

LA SALLE, ILL., May, 1898.

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

The Forms of Liquids 1 The Fibres of Corti 17 On the Causes of Harmony 32 The Velocity of Light 48 Why Has Man Two Eyes? 66 On Symmetry 89 On the Fundamental Concepts of Electrostatics 107 On the Principle of the Conservation of Energy 137 On the Economical Nature of Physical Inquiry 186 On Transformation and Adaptation in Scientific Thought 214 On the Principle of Comparison in Physics 236 On the Part Played by Accident in Invention and Discovery 259 On Sensations of Orientation 282 On Some Phenomena Attending the Flight of Projectiles 309 On Instruction in the Classics and the Mathematico-Physical Sciences 338 Appendixes. I. A Contribution to the History of Acoustics 375 II. Remarks on the Theory of Spatial Vision 386 Index 393

THE FORMS OF LIQUIDS.

What thinkest thou, dear Euthyphron, that the holy is, and the just, and the good? Is the holy holy because the gods love it, or are the gods holy because they love the holy? By such easy questions did the wise Socrates make the market-place of Athens unsafe and relieve presumptuous young statesmen of the burden of imaginary knowledge, by showing them how confused, unclear, and self-contradictory their ideas were.

You know the fate of the importunate questioner. So called good society avoided him on the promenade. Only the ignorant accompanied him. And finally he drank the cup of hemlock--a lot which we ofttimes wish would fall to modern critics of his stamp.

What we have learned from Socrates, however,--our inheritance from him,--is scientific criticism. Every one who busies himself with science recognises how unsettled and indefinite the notions are which he has brought with him from common life, and how, on a minute examination of things, old differences are effaced and new ones introduced. The history of science is full of examples of this constant change, development, and clarification of ideas.

But we will not linger by this general consideration of the fluctuating character of ideas, which becomes a source of real uncomfortableness, when we reflect that it applies to almost every notion of life. Rather shall we observe by the study of a physical example how much a thing changes when it is closely examined, and how it assumes, when thus considered, increasing definiteness of form.

The majority of you think, perhaps, you know quite well the distinction between a liquid and a solid. And precisely persons who have never busied themselves with physics will consider this question one of the easiest that can be put. But the physicist knows that it is one of the most difficult. I shall mention here only the experiments of Tresca, which show that solids subjected to high pressures behave exactly as liquids do; for example, may be made to flow out in the form of jets from orifices in the bottoms of vessels. The supposed difference of kind between liquids and solids is thus shown to be a mere difference of degree.

The common inference that because the earth is oblate in form, it was originally fluid, is an error, in the light of these facts. True, a rotating sphere, a few inches in diameter will assume an oblate form only if it is very soft, for example, is composed of freshly kneaded clay or some viscous stuff. But the earth, even if it consisted of the rigidest stone, could not help being crushed by its tremendous weight, and must perforce behave as a fluid. Even our mountains could not extend beyond a certain height without crumbling. The earth may once have been fluid, but this by no means follows from its oblateness.

The particles of a liquid are displaced on the application of the slightest pressure; a liquid conforms exactly to the shapes of the vessels in which it is contained; it possesses no form of its own, as you have all learned in the schools. Accommodating itself in the most trifling respects to the conditions of the vessel in which it is placed, and showing, even on its surface, where one would suppose it had the freest play, nothing but a polished, smiling, expressionless countenance, it is the courtier par excellence of the natural bodies.

Liquids have no form of their own! No, not for the superficial observer. But persons who have observed that a raindrop is round and never angular, will not be disposed to accept this dogma so unconditionally.

It is fair to suppose that every man, even the weakest, would possess a character, if it were not too difficult in this world to keep it. So, too, we must suppose that liquids would possess forms of their own, if the pressure of the circumstances permitted it,--if they were not crushed by their own weights.

An astronomer once calculated that human beings could not exist on the sun, apart from its great heat, because they would be crushed to pieces there by their own weight. The greater mass of this body would also make the weight of the human body there much greater. But on the moon, because here we should be much lighter, we could jump as high as the church-steeples without any difficulty, with the same muscular power which we now possess. Statues and "plaster" casts of syrup are undoubtedly things of fancy, even on the moon, but maple-syrup would flow so slowly there that we could easily build a maple-syrup man on the moon, for the fun of the thing, just as our children here build snow-men.

Accordingly, if liquids have no form of their own with us on earth, they have, perhaps, a form of their own on the moon, or on some smaller and lighter heavenly body. The problem, then, simply is to get rid of the effects of gravity; and, this done, we shall be able to find out what the peculiar forms of liquids are.

The problem was solved by Plateau of Ghent, whose method was to immerse the liquid in another of the same specific gravity.[1] He employed for his experiments oil and a mixture of alcohol and water. By Archimedes's well-known principle, the oil in this mixture loses its entire weight. It no longer sinks beneath its weight; its formative forces, be they ever so weak, are now in full play.

As a fact, we now see, to our surprise, that the oil, instead of spreading out into a layer, or lying in a formless mass, assumes the shape of a beautiful and perfect sphere, freely suspended in the mixture, as the moon is in space. We can construct in this way a sphere of oil several inches in diameter.

If, now, we affix a thin plate to a wire and insert the plate in the oil sphere, we can, by twisting the wire between our fingers, set the whole ball in rotation. Doing this, the ball assumes an oblate shape, and we can, if we are skilful enough, separate by such rotation a ring from the ball, like that which surrounds Saturn. This ring is finally rent asunder, and, breaking up into a number of smaller balls, exhibits to us a kind of model of the origin of the planetary system according to the hypothesis of Kant and Laplace.

Still more curious are the phenomena exhibited when the formative forces of the liquid are partly disturbed by putting in contact with the liquid's surface some rigid body. If we immerse, for example, the wire framework of a cube in our mass of oil, the oil will everywhere stick to the wire framework. If the quantity of oil is exactly sufficient we shall obtain an oil cube with perfectly smooth walls. If there is too much or too little oil, the walls of the cube will bulge out or cave in. In this manner we can produce all kinds of geometrical figures of oil, for example, a three-sided pyramid, a cylinder (by bringing the oil between two wire rings), and so on. Interesting is the change of form that occurs when we gradually suck out the oil by means of a glass tube from the cube or pyramid. The wire holds the oil fast. The figure grows smaller and smaller, until it is at last quite thin. Ultimately it consists simply of a number of thin, smooth plates of oil, which extend from the edges of the cube to the centre, where they meet in a small drop. The same is true of the pyramid.