ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Emergence and Interpretation of the Principle of Energy Conservation in the Long 19th Century

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

In 1847, Hermann Helmholtz contributed a framework, based on an
assumption of central forces and the impossibility of perpetual motion,
for the elaboration of the principle of conservation of energy. Today,
the significance of the principle for understanding phenomena from
scales sub-atomic to cosmological is well known, and historians of
science and technology have long sought to deepen our understanding of
its origins and evolution. The four papers in this symposium continue
this tradition. Shaul Katzir and Kenneth L. Caneva both take up Thomas
Kuhn's seminal 1959 paper on "Energy Conservation as an Example of
Simultaneous Discovery". Katzir focuses on how the analytical tools of
conservation of vis viva, the "living force" formulated in the 18th
century, were applied to new problems encountered in the early 19th
century, thereby broadening its scope, and rendering it available to the
overarching scheme of energy conservation. Caneva's paper offers, in
order to explain the phenomenal rapidity of cognitive mastery of the
principle, an alternative set of "trigger factors", which highlights the
contributions of Faraday and Liebig in the 1840s. David E. Rowe and
Scott A. Walter take up the lot of the principle in mid-19th and early
20th century Göttingen, respectively. Rowe recalls how Riemann sought to
modify Weber's electrodynamical force law, which was incompatible with
conservation of both vis viva and energy. Riemann's reactions to
Helmholtz's writings provide insight into his deep engagement with the
crucial challenges besetting natural philosophy after mid-century. By
the end of the 19th century, electron theory had largely supplanted
Maxwell's theory of electrodynamics. Walter's paper shows how Max
Abraham's 1902 definitions of electromagnetic momentum and the mass of
the newly-discovered electron allowed Hermann Minkowski to propose, in
the wake of relativity theory, energy conservation as a purely formal
consequence of his equations of motion.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Isobel Falconer, University of St Andrews

Individual Presentations

• Kuhn Revisited: On the Emergence of Conservation of Energy - Kenneth Caneva

• The Emergence of Energy Conservation: the Contribution of Developments in Mechanics - Shaul Katzir, Tel Aviv University

• Riemann Reads Helmholtz: German Natural Philosophy after 1847 - David E. Rowe, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz

• Electromagnetic momentum and energy conservation in Göttingen electrodynamics, 1900-1909 - Scott A. Walter, Nantes University

Session Organizers

• Shaul Katzir, Tel Aviv University

• Scott A. Walter, Nantes University