Lord Kelvin on Optical and Molecular Dynamics

Abstract

IN the autumn of the year 1884 Lord Kelvin delivered at Johns Hopkins University a course of lectures “On Molecular Dynamics and the Wave Theory of Light,” mainly extempore, which, having very fortunately been reported stenographically by Mr. A. S. Hathaway—one of his band of auditors, the famous “twenty-one coefficients”—were issued to the world unrevised in a papyrograph volume at the end of the same year, and have since been known as the “Baltimore Lectures.” The report, being nearly verbatim, showed how comparatively slight were the immediate preparations that Lord Kelvin had made for some portions of his task, and thus had the great advantage of revealing the procedure and attitude of an investigator of transcendent genius in face of regions of his subject more or less new to him.

Baltimore Lectures on Molecular Dynamics and the Wave Theory of Light.

By Lord Kelvin Pp. xxii + 694. (Cambridge: University Press, 1904.) Price 15s. net.