Academic literature on the topic 'John Tyndall'

Just once in its long history has a Royal Medal been awarded but not presented. John Tyndall FRS (1820–93) was the chosen recipient in 1853 for his early work on diamagnetism but declined to accept it. The story of why Tyndall felt compelled to turn down this considerable honour sheds light on the scientific politics and personal relationships of the time, on the importance given to the study of magnetism, and on Tyndall's own character and career.

Both contemporaries and historians have focused on the high-profile 1874 Belfast Address in which John Tyndall was widely perceived as promulgating atheism. Although some historians have instead interpreted him as a pantheist or an agnostic, it is clear that any such labels do not accurately capture Tyndall's religious position throughout his life. By contrast, this paper seeks to chart Tyndall's religious journey from 1840 (when he was in his late teens) to the autumn of 1848 when he commenced his scientific studies at Marburg. Although he had been imbued with his father's stern conservative Irish Protestantism and opposition to Catholicism, as a youth he seems for a time to have been attracted to Methodism. Later, however, he questioned and rejected his father's religious views and was increasingly drawn to the more spiritual outlook of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Carlyle, along with a more radical attitude to politics.

This paper highlights the way in which Tyndall achieved his broad understanding of the molecular character of physical nature through an examination of the various molecular explanations he put forward in his papers and lectures, and argues that, in Tyndall's writings, one can find a most articulate version of nineteenth-century British molecular discourse. The exploration of those molecular conditions which underlay physical phenomena was central to his research throughout the years, and for this exploration he utilized his imagination, which he believed to be an innate faculty of the human mind. According to Tyndall, the imaginative dimension of science consisted of the creation of mental images of the unseen which enabled scientists to cross the boundary that separated the realm of phenomena from those of causal mechanisms. In his writings he expressed these mental images of the unseen in the distinctive molecular language of his age.

In 1856, an American woman, Eunice Foote, discovered the absorption of thermal radiation by carbon dioxide and water vapour. That was three years before John Tyndall, who is generally credited with this important discovery—a cornerstone of our current understanding of the greenhouse effect, climate change, weather and meteorology. Tyndall did not reference Foote's work. From a contemporary perspective, one might expect that Tyndall would have known of her findings. But it appears that he did not, raising deeper historical questions about the connections and relationships between American and European physicists in the mid nineteenth century. The discovery is seen as a significant moment in physics generally and in climate science in particular, and demands a proper analysis. This paper explores the argument about priority, and the issues that the episode highlights in terms of simultaneous discovery, the development of science in America, gender, amateur status, the reputation of American science in Europe and the networks and means of communication between researchers in America and Europe in the 1850s.

John Tyndall, the British physicist and scientist who died a hundred years ago (4 Dec. 1893) was a great admirer of Switzerland and of its high mountains. Throughout his life as a researcher he was fascinated by glaciers, by their shape and movement. This made him an enthusiastic pioneer of alpine mountaineering. Besides his important attempts to conquer the Matterhorn he made the first successful ascent of the Weisshorn. On the Belalp, opposite the Weisshorn, he built a home for his annual vacations. The residents of Naters made him an honorary citizen of their community. On the Belalp, his widow erected a monument to remember Tyndall’s affection for Switzerland and for the Alps.

AbstractThroughout his career the geographer, and first reader in the ‘new’ geography at the University of Oxford, Halford Mackinder (1861–1947) described his discipline as a branch of physics. This essay explores this feature of Mackinder's thought and presents the connections between him and the Royal Institution professor of natural philosophy John Tyndall (1820–1893). My reframing of Mackinder's geography demonstrates that the academic professionalization of geography owed as much to the methods and instruments of popular natural philosophy and physics as it did to theories of Darwinian natural selection. In tracing the parallels between Tyndall and Mackinder, and their shared emphasis upon the technology of the magic lantern and the imagination as tools of scientific investigation and education, the article elucidates their common pedagogical practices. Mackinder's disciplinary vision was expressed in practices of visualization, and in metaphors inspired by physics, to audiences of geographers and geography teachers in the early twentieth century. Together, these features of Mackinder's geography demonstrate his role as a popularizer of science and extend the temporal and spatial resonance of Tyndall's natural philosophy.

La figura del físico irlandés John Tyndall (1820-1893), postergada en la historia de la ciencia hasta fechas recientes, ha recobrado actualidad a la luz de los trabajos de estudiosos de la época victoriana como William H. Brock, Frank M. Turner, Ruth Barton, Bernard Lightman o Ursula DeYoung. Ante la inexistencia de estudios previos, sobre el impacto de su figura y obra en España, esta investigación doctoral se marcó como objetivo encontrar actores e instituciones que fuesen receptores activos del naturalismo científico tyndalliano en el último tercio del siglo XIX. La circulación de dicho programa científico se plasmó en la práctica pedagógica del institucionismo español, en los usos didácticos de los libros de texto de física y química más empleados en la enseñanza superior, y en las páginas de la Revista de la Sociedad de Profesores de Ciencias. Claras muestras de la contribución tyndalliana a ensanchar el ámbito de la educación científica en España, y al proceso de configuración disciplinar de la Física. Un privilegiado marco espacial de apropiación del programa tyndalliano fue el “Ateneo Científico, Literario y Artístico de Madrid”, foco introductor del positivismo en España. John Tyndall, como paradigmático divulgador científico decimonónico, fue el prototipo adoptado por los científicos “tyndallistas” estudiados: José Rodríguez Mourelo (1857-1932), Luis Simarro Lacabra (1851-1921), Enrique Serrano Fatigati (1845-1918) y José Rodríguez Carracido (1856-1928). Su común estrategia en favor de la educación popular se vehiculó por medio de conferencias, la edición de manuales divulgativos, colaboraciones en revistas especializadas, discursos académicos, viajes instructivos, y en la prensa periódica. Al estudiar la importancia de la literatura como espacio de divulgación científica en la esfera pública descubrimos las resonancias tyndallianas, presentes en las obras de divulgación científica o de carácter literario, de la novelista Emilia Pardo Bazán. Su primera novela, Pascual López. Autobiografía de un estudiante de medicina (1879), testimonia la influencia de figuras institucionistas como el químico José Rodríguez Mourelo, en la primigenia formación científica de la escritora. El protagonista científico de dicha novela coincide con el arquetipo novelado del propio John Tyndall. Ello muestra, en toda su amplitud, el intenso proceso de apropiación del programa intelectual tyndalliano en España. La repercusión pública del controvertido discurso pronunciado por Tyndall en Belfast en el año 1874, y su posterior refutación experimental de la generación espontánea, fueron factores claves para entender las lecturas de su programa, en el contexto de las problemáticas relaciones entre ciencia y religión. En un inicio, los sectores confesionales lo percibirán como un peligroso anatema materialista, aunque a partir del paradigma teológico neotomista, impulsado por León XIII, se advierten nuevas señales apropiadoras de la autoridad científica de su figura. En contrapartida, para el librepensamiento, el cientificismo y el regeneracionismo español, representó un utópico referente de progreso. Su figura fue apropiada por un heterogéneo sector socio-político, oscilando desde el anarquismo y republicanismo hasta sectores de mentalidad liberal pertenecientes a la élite política de la Restauración borbónica, como evidencia el inédito epistolario aportado. Nuestra investigación aborda la forma en que la figura de John Tyndall fue apropiada por los diversos actores involucrados, en función de sus propios intereses: intelectuales, profesionales, políticos y morales.
Left behind until recently by historians of science, the Irish physicist John Tyndall (1820-1893) has been recognized in the context of the Victorian scholarly works of William H. Brock, Frank M. Turner, Ruth Barton, Bernard Lightman or Ursula DeYoung. As a result of the lack of previous studies about the impact of his life and scientific work in Spain, this PhD Dissertation sets the target to find actors and institutions which were active receivers of Tyndall’s scientific naturalism in the last third of the nineteenth century. The circulation of his scientific program resulted in the pedagogical practice of the Spanish “institucionismo”, in the educational uses of textbooks of physics and chemistry for higher education, and in the pages of the Revista de la Sociedad de Profesores de Ciencias. This demonstrates Tyndall’s contribution to widen the field of science education in Spain, and the setup process of Physics as an academic discipline. A privileged appropriation space for Tyndall’s program was "El Ateneo Científico, Literario y Artístico de Madrid", a crucial site for the introduction of positivism in Spain. John Tyndall, as paradigmatic nineteenth-century populariser was adopted as a prototype by ”Tyndallian” scientists such as: José Rodríguez Mourelo (1857-1932), Luis Simarro Lacabra (1851-1921), Enrique Serrano Fatigati (1845-1918) and Jose Rodriguez Carracido (1856-1928). They shared a common strategy for popular education through public lectures, popular science books, journals articles, academic addresses, educational journeys, and the periodical press. In considering the importance of literature as a site of science in the public sphere, we discover Tyndall’s resonances - in science popularization and literary works - of the Spanish novelist Emilia Pardo Bazán. Her first novel entitled, “Pascual López. Autobiografía de un estudiante de medicina” (1879), testifies the influence of the “institucionismo” on her early scientific training through names such as the chemist José Rodríguez Mourelo. The novel’s scientific hero fits in the fictionalized archetype of John Tyndall. This is an overall good example of the intense process of appropriation of Tyndall’s intellectual program in Spain. The public impact of the controversial Tyndall’s Belfast address (1874) and his subsequent experimental refutation of spontaneous generation are key factors to understand the readings of his program, in the context of the problematic relationship between science and religion. At first, the religious sectors perceive him as a dangerous materialistic anathema, but from the neo-Thomist theological paradigm, driven by Leo XIII, new signs of appropriation of his scientific authority appeared. On the other side, for the Spanish free-thinking, scientism, and “regeneracionismo”, Tyndall represented the utopia of progress. He was appropriated by heterogeneous socio-political groups, ranging from anarchists and republicans to liberals belonging to the political establishment of the Bourbon restoration, as clearly reported by the unpublished correspondence. Our research analyses how the various actors involved appropriated John Tyndall according to their own, intellectual, professional, political and moral agendas.

My dissertation examines the representations of materialism -- a philosophy stereotypically associated with a reductive, anti-theological and mechanistic world-picture -- in the published prose and (typically) unpublished poetry of several figures central to scientific discourse in the latter half of the nineteenth century, most notably W. K. Clifford, a mathematician, and John Tyndall, a physicist and media-savvy ‘champion of science’. These engagements, and representations, were not merely on the level of ‘direct’ argumentation, however. A self-consciously allusive, even polyphonous tone was far from uncommon in the many literatures arising from mid-Victorian scientific encounter, and this openness of form permitted both popularisers and critics of materialism to choose the vocabularies in which to relate their observations –- the texts with which they would engage –- towards specific ends. As I argue, such was a task they performed with great care and an often astonishing felicity: an essay on cosmology, after all, acquires quite a different colouration when interleaved with the cadences of Milton, another again if illustrated with quotations from Whitman or an epigram from ‘Tintern Abbey’. My 1st chapter provides a broader context for those that follow, analysing both changing nineteenth-century ideas of materialism and also a range of potential reactions to -– and inter alia a variety of the contrasting vernaculars used in illustration of –- contemporary metaphysical or ‘methodological’ materialism. My 2nd chapter offers a reading of Tyndall’s August 1874 Belfast Address, the locus classicus for practically all later elaborations of materialistic belief. My 3rd chapter contrasts the theologically orthodox position of James Clerk Maxwell (buttressed by allusions to the theologically doctrinaire George Herbert) with the radically atheistic and materialistic philosophy of Clifford (underpinned by the similarly atheistic Algernon Charles Swinburne). My 4th and 5th chapters are paired studies in the ‘private’ nuances of Tyndall’s ideology, elaborating on my 2nd chapter’s scrutiny of its more public attributes. The former discusses his notions of cosmic connectedness, ironically derived from the non-materialistic works of Carlyle. The latter examines both the exultancy and the despair explicit in Tyndall’s poetry and implicit in his prose. As I note in conclusion, such contrary emotions, phrased with striking clarity in Tyndall, are common in mid-Victorian writings concerning materialism, directly or indirectly. They are rooted in the hopes afforded by materialism’s explanatory prowess, on the one hand, and the ‘atrophy of spirit’ born of its austere, even dehumanising, epistemology, on the other; that is to say, in a salutary awareness of both power and pitfalls.

John Tyndall, FRS (1820-1893), the eminent scientist and mountaineer, the discoverer of the greenhouse gases, has been frequently presented as chiefly a populariser of science rather than a researcher. Although he regarded this education as an important function to fulfil, his researches and discoveries reported in the publications of the Royal Society, the Royal Institution and the British Association for the Advancement of Science, constitute a testimony to his standing as a scientist, hitherto neglected by his commentators. This thesis studies his contributions to the physics of the atmosphere and their subsequent impact on meteorology, research that is relevant to today’s concerns about climate change. Tyndall, did however, also make discoveries in other branches of physics, chemistry and bacteriology. Like many aspiring British scientists of the nineteenth century, Tyndall went to Germany as a mature student. He chose the University of Marburg to study chemistry, physics and mathematics under the renowned chemist, Robert Bunsen, the physicist Gerling and the mathematician Stegmann respectively, graduating with a PhD in applied mathematics. [1] At this time Faraday’s extraordinary discovery of diamagnetism in 1846 were causing a sensation in Germany, France and Britain. Scientists eagerly studied Faraday’s research, replicating his experiments and interpreting his findings. Faraday’s work apparently confirmed concomitant researches by Plücker on the magnetic properties of crystals. Tyndall’s pioneering contributions to the study of diamagnetism [2] constituted his formative experiences as an experimentalist. He effectively challenged the opinions of the distinguished scientists, Faraday and Plücker. [3] The deportment of magnetism with respect to matter provided Tyndall with a comprehensive alternative to Faraday’s views on the interaction of point forces with matter. Tyndall’s analogous investigation of radiant heat and its transmission by the atmosphere enabled him to study matter in its gaseous phase, hitherto inaccessible to the experimental process, and to participate in the all-important shaping of meteorology as a scientific discipline. The analogous interactions of matter with the forces of light and heat prompted Tyndall’s speculations on the role of the molecular structure in the modification and transmission of forces. The Tyndall Centre for the Study of Climate Change, thus named in his honour in the year 2000 by the Director of the Royal Institution, Professor Peter Day, testifies to the importance of Tyndall’s contributions to the all pervading problems which today face mankind. This thesis also addresses his role as a leading publicist for scientific naturalism and campaigner for science education, throwing a new light on his motives. On the death of his mentor and friend, Faraday, Tyndall succeeded him as Resident Professor in charge of the Royal Institution. In this historic laboratory Tyndall devised and perfected experimental methodology for the study of matter in its gaseous phase, thought, until then to not be amenable to scientific investigation. The importance of this contribution to science, underestimated over the years, is highlighted in the thesis. The thesis also looks at his pioneering researches on gases through their interaction with radiant heat and light. It examines how he used the forces of nature as tools to probe the nature of matter. It presents one consequence of Tyndall’s work that led to the discovery of calorescence, from a new perspective. The author of over 100 scientific papers, Tyndall is revealed as an inspiring research scientist, honoured by the Royal Society and numerous foreign academies. He was however castigated for an inadequate knowledge of mathematics, because he concentrated on imaginative physical interpretations of theoretical notions. At times, therefore, he was seriously underestimated as a scientist, despite admiration by some for the excellence of his work. This theme is also analysed in the thesis. Emerging from this study is an image of Tyndall’s serious engagement with science, and his role as an eminent practitioner and spokesman, who viewed science as beneficial to mankind, and physics as a means of education. 1 Tyndall (1870). 2 Tyndall (1851) 2, (9), 165-188. 3 Plücker (1849), 5, 353-375; 376-382.

In this thesis I present new insights into aspects of Peter Guthrie Tait's life and work, derived principally from largely-unexplored primary source material: Tait's scrapbook, the Tait–Maxwell school-book and Tait's pocket notebook. By way of associated historical insights, I also come to discuss the innovative and far-reaching mathematics of the elusive Frenchman, C.-V. Mourey. P. G. Tait (1831–1901) F.R.S.E., Professor of Mathematics at the Queen's College, Belfast (1854–1860) and of Natural Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh (1860–1901), was one of the leading physicists and mathematicians in Europe in the nineteenth century. His expertise encompassed the breadth of physical science and mathematics. However, since the nineteenth century he has been unfortunately overlooked—overshadowed, perhaps, by the brilliance of his personal friends, James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879), Sir William Rowan Hamilton (1805–1865) and William Thomson (1824–1907), later Lord Kelvin. Here I present the results of extensive research into the Tait family history. I explore the spiritual aspect of Tait's life in connection with The Unseen Universe (1875) which Tait co-authored with Balfour Stewart (1828–1887). I also reveal Tait's surprising involvement in statistics and give an account of his introduction to complex numbers, as a schoolboy at the Edinburgh Academy. A highlight of the thesis is a re-evaluation of C.-V. Mourey's 1828 work, La Vraie Théorie des quantités négatives et des quantités prétendues imaginaires, which I consider from the perspective of algebraic reform. The thesis also contains: (i) a transcription of an unpublished paper by Hamilton on the fundamental theorem of algebra which was inspired by Mourey and (ii) new biographical information on Mourey.