ENGINEERING AND PURE SCIENCE — SWANN 209 



THE SEARCH FOR REALITY 



The advent of the electrical era, initiated primarily by Faraday, 

 Henry, Ampere, Oersted, etc., a little more than 100 years ago, found 

 its formal development in the work of Clark Maxwell. The man of 

 science of the day was mechanically minded and sought to understand 

 all things in terms of the thoughts appropriate to elastic waves in 

 solids and fluids. Maxwell's theory was an almost insurmountable 

 stumbling block, inviting, as it did, concepts which were ultra-abstract 

 in terms of the thinking of the day. The matter is illustrated by a 

 comment in Sir Arthur Schuster's Theory of Optics, written as late as 

 1904, and it must be remembered that Schuster was one of the world's 

 high priests of natural philosophy in that epoch. He writes : "The 

 study of physics must be based on a knowledge of mechanics, and the 

 problem of light will only be solved when we have discovered the 

 mechanical properties of the ether." Writing in another place on 

 Maxwell's equations, he remarks : "The fact that this evasive school of 

 philosophy has received some countenance from the writings of 

 Heinrich Hertz renders it all the more necessary that it should be 

 treated seriously and resisted strenuously." 



The search for reality in which to frame the new thoughts born 

 of electrodynamics so persistent at that time has changed consider- 

 ably in its aims as the years have rolled by. In my student and early 

 teaching days it was the custom, following the lead of Maxwell and 

 his school, to seek an explanation of electrodynamic phenomena on 

 purely dynamical bases. If we wanted to make somebody under- 

 stand a circuit with self-induction, capacity, and resistance, we would 

 refer to a ball vibrating in a viscous fluid at the end of a spring. 

 We would say: "Now the self-induction in this circuit is like that 

 mass on the end of the spring. This capacity itself is like that spring. 

 The electrical resistance of the wire is analogous to the viscosity of 

 the liquid, and so forth." By thinking of the spring and ball, which 

 we of the older generation felt we understood more or less, we en- 

 deavored to accommodate our thinking so as to understand the elec- 

 trical problem. Today all this appears to be changed. At an early 

 age youngsters start to play with radios and to acquire quite a little 

 knowledge concerned with the essentials of their operation. This 

 fact has reversed the whole situation as regards reality in the mind 

 of youth, and the youngster of today and the older youngsters who 

 are doing research in our laboratories seek to understand dynamics 

 by showing that it is like electrodynamics. And if the youngster 

 wishes to understand how a ball bobs up and down on the end of a 

 spring when immersed in oil, he is apt to say : "Now, this weight is 

 just like that inductance. The spring is like the capacity, the vis- 

 cosity of the fluid is like the resistance of the wire. Now, you know 



