About this Item
TROLAND, Leonard Thompson. "The Present Status of Visual Science", being the full issue of "Bulletin of the National Research Council", National Academy of Sciences, Washington D.C., 1922. Vol 5, part 3, number 27. 118pp. Original wrappers, perfect bound. This paper contains the second appearance in print (several times at the bottom of page 42) of the newly-coined word, "photon", created by Troland himself in 1916. [++] "After G. N. Lewis (1875-1946) proposed the term photon in 1926, many physicists adopted it as a more apt name for Einstein s light quantum. However, Lewis photon was a concept of a very different kind, something few physicists knew or cared about. It turns out that Lewis name was not quite the neologism that it has usually been assumed to be. The same name was proposed or used earlier, apparently independently, by at least four scientists. Three of the four early proposals were related to physiology or visual perception, and only one to quantum physics. Priority belongs to the American physicist and psychologist L. T. Troland (1889-1932), who coined the word in 1916 [in a paper given at the tenth annual meeting of the Illuminating Engineering Society in Philadelphia 18-20 September 1916] and five years later it was independently introduced by the Irish physicist J. Joly (1857-1933). Then in 1925 a French physiologist, René Wurmser (1890-1993), wrote about the photon, and in July 1926 his compatriot, the physicist F. Wolfers (ca. 1890-1971), did the same in the context of optical physics. None of the four pre-Lewis versions of photon was well known and they were soon forgotten."--Helge Kragh, "Photon: New light on an old name", abstract. [++] "In almost all accounts it is stated that the name was originally coined by the American chemist and physicist G. N. Lewis in 1926, although in a sense that differs from the one associated with the light quantum. There is a good deal of truth in it, but it is far from the whole truth. It is hard to know when, exactly, the word photon was first used in a scientific context, but as far as I can tell it was in 1916, ten years before Lewis reintroduced it. This earlier history had little or no impact on the later development, so it is perhaps understandable that it has not been much noticed, if at all. Yet the early appearance of photon in the context of visual science and physiology is interesting in its own right and deserves to be known by historians of physics."--ibid, pg 2.
Seller Inventory # ABE-1681999882253
Contact seller
Report this item
