Physics and Chemistry in the “Encyclopædia Britannica”

Abstract

PHYSICS. THE editors claim that the physics programme is one of the most comprehensive and authoritative of the different divisions of the “Encyclopaedia Britannica”. Anyone wishing to use the work in the study of this branch of knowledge, after reading the article “Science ", which surveys the whole world of scientific achievement, would be well advised to refer to "Physics, Articles on ", for the main subdivisions and separate headings. Sir Oliver Lodge, in the main article "Physics ", discusses the history and development of the science which, by its derivation, means a study of Nature so far as it can be reduced by calculation and experiment to a few simple, or at least fundamental, laws. It was hoped at one time that the mechanical laws of Galileo and Newton would be all-inclusive. Efforts to apply them not only to matter but also to the ether, and even to life and mind, and thus to find a basis for a materialistic philosophy, have proved unsuccessful. So long as we are dealing with massive bodies or with great groups of particles, the Newtonian laws of dynamics are sufficient, and they reigned supreme till very near the end of the nineteenth century. Modern physics may perhaps be said to date from 1895, the year Ox Rontgen's discovery of X-rays. This discovery not only provided the physicist with a new tool; it illustrated the idea put forward by Lorentz and Zeeman, and also by Larmor, that electric charges were the agents responsible for the generation of radiation.