About this Item
MAXWELL, James Clerk. And George Howard Darwin. "On a Possible Mode of Detecting a Motion of the Solar System through the Luminiferous Ether. In a Letter to Mr. D. P. Todd," in Proceedings of the Royal Society of London; London, Harrison & Sons, Vol. XXX, No. 200, December 1879 July, 1880; ix, 599pp, with the Maxwell on pp 108-110. Beautifully and newly rebound in calf-backed marbled boards. There is some very occasional foxing here and there, but only for a few pages at a time (see photo). [++] The paper by (the deceased) Maxwell is actually not quite a paper by Maxwell, but a report by George Stokes on a letter that Maxwell wrote to D(avid) P(eck) Todd, so of course the content belongs to Maxwell, the resulting impact of which was providing a basis for the Michelson-Morley experiment. " Then in his article Ether for the Encyclopedia Britannica he again reviewed the problem of motion through the ether. The only possible earth-based experiment was to measure variations in the velocity of light on a double journey between two mirrors. Maxwell concluded that the time differences in different directions would be too small to detect. He proposed another method from timing the eclipses of the moons of Jupiter, which he later described in more detail in a letter to the American astronomer D. P. Todd, published after his death in the Royal Society Proceedings [the paper offered here] and in Nature. His statements there about the difficulties of the earth-based experiment served as a challenge to the young Albert Michelson, who at once invented his famous interferometer to do it."--Complete DSB online (Maxwell) [++] Also in this volume is: G.H, Darwin, "On the Analytical Expressions which give the History of a Fluid Planet of Small Viscosity, attended by a Single Satellite" on pp 255-278 AND "On the Secular Changes in the Elements of a Satellite revolving about a Tidally Distorted Planet" pp 1-10, which is Darwin's "resonance theory" on the origin of the Moon being a product of fissioning from Earth the Earth theoretically at one time spinning so rapidly that centrifugal force spun out material into orbit which would then become the Moon. This is different from the "resonance theory" of Charles Darwin, on the similarity of cross-species interpretation of rhythm. ["Another group of papers, dated from 1879 to 1880, are concerned with the tides in viscous spheroids, and still show the influence of both Kelvin and Laplace, although their scope is more general. In his paper of this series, On the Precession of a Viscous Spheroid and on the Remote History of the Earth (1879), Darwin proposed the resonance theory of the originated from the fission of a parent earth as the result of an instability produced by resonant solar tides. His monumental paper On the Secular Changes in the Elements of the Orbit of a Satellite Revolving About a Tidally Distorted Planet was published in 1880 [the paper offered here]. [++] AND: William Crookes, "On a Fourth State of Matter" pp 469-472.
Seller Inventory # ABE-1736873003152
Contact seller
Report this item
