Abstract
In 1845, John Waterston, a Scot working for the East India Company, sent a manuscript to the Royal Society in London, proposing that a gas is composed of innumerable tiny molecules, in constant motion and continuously bouncing into each other. The manuscript was rejected as nonsense, without even the courtesy of a reply. In 1891, long after Waterston had died, Lord Rayleigh, then President of the Royal Society, discovered the manuscript purely by chance and wrote “The omission to publish ... probably retarded the subject by ten or fifteen years”. By that time, Waterston’s ideas were long established, though his name is largely forgotten.
This is therefore a possible form of the final distribution of velocities; it is also the only form
Maxwell
Experience teaches that one will be led to new discoveries almost exclusively by means of special mechanical models
Boltzmann
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Notes
- 1.
The little that Waterston did manage to publish showed detailed calculations of macroscopic properties of gases such as temperature in terms of kinetic energy of the molecules, but they made no impact at all on the science of the day. A number of pioneers of thermodynamics are now almost completely unknown, as discussed by Truesdell [1].
- 2.
This approach is contrasted to that of Gibbs, who studied a system in \(6\,N\) dimensional space rather than N systems in 6-dimensional space.
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Tame, J.R.H. (2019). Maxwell and Boltzmann. In: Approaches to Entropy. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2315-7_3
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