We are running a live rountable session as part of the British Society for History of Science Global Digital Festival, 6-10 July 2020.

Our session is entitled ‘Connecting Beyond: Oliver Lodge As A Communicator Of Science’ and features Di Drummond, James Mussell, and Richard Noakes. Graeme Gooday will serve as chair.

The session will take place at 10am UK time (UTC+1). Anyone can join the audience and it’s free to tune in via the Festival site here. The session will also be recorded and available to watch from this link after the event.

Abstract

This session’s participants are drawn from contributors to the recently published book A Pioneer of Connection: Recovering the Life and Work of Oliver Lodge (University of Pittsburgh, 2020). The roundtable builds upon this volume and looks beyond to explore new perspectives on how far, from the 1880s to 1930s, Oliver Lodge was an effective communicator of science and a local, national and international authority figure. Each of the three contributors will give a short (7-10 minute) summary of their views (abstracts below) and then will have a discussion between them on this core theme. The last 15-20 minutes of the session will involve audience discussion around such themes as ‘what would Oliver Lodge have made of the digital era?’ and ‘what lessons for the digital era might be gleaned from Lodge’s connecting together of seemingly disparate groups and topics?’

Dr Di Drummond (Formerly Leeds Trinity University), ‘Connecting Beyond the University: Principal Oliver Lodge as a communicator of science in the West Midlands, 1900-1945’

My contribution to the book, ‘Lodge in Birmingham: Pure and Applied Science in the New University, 1900-1914’, very much focused on the role of Lodge in shaping new applied science disciplines, together with the relationship between the pure and applied sciences, in the University of Birmingham itself.  

Focusing on material from the University’s own Cadbury archives, my chapter often only provided glimpses of Lodge’s role in communicating science to various individuals and organisations of Birmingham and the West Midlands. Future research ‘Connecting beyond the University’, could elaborate on this by employing the Cadbury Archive more intensively, and by using the archive collections, and published materials, of other organisations in the region. With this a more thorough understanding of Lodge’s role in communicating science there, not just through his lectures and publications, but also by the personal and professional connections and networks he made, would be gained.

Appointed as the first principal of the new University because of his long established ‘public profile’ in communicating science to the wider world, through his popular publications, lectures etc, Lodge took science out to the people of Birmingham and its hinterland. He was concerned to communicate science to people of every social class and background. In 1903 for instance, he gave a pubic lecture in Birmingham Town Hall on Radium, repeating it for working men at a later date.

Lodge also brought the wider scientific community to Birmingham. For instance the British Association for the Advancement of Science held its  annual conference at the University 1913 when Lodge was the Association’s President. This included tours for British Association members to various industrial and commercial installations throughout the area, excursions being facilitated by many of the industrialists who constantly rubbed shoulders with Lodge at the University’s Court of Governors.

It would be very worth while closely investigating the networks and personal links that Lodge made through the governors of the University of Birmingham, and the influence that this had upon their thinking (partially traceable through Lodge’s correspondence in the University of Birmingham and University of Liverpool Archives).

Of course in tracing Lodge’s connections, and influence on scientific understanding, should go beyond the University of Birmingham. Research in the archives of other organisations in the region (e.g. The Birmingham Chamber of Commerce),  societies (The Lunar Society), and of individuals would add to this understanding. Lodge was a member of other local bodies, his spiritual beliefs, coupled with his political ones (member of the Fabian Society), brought him into contact with people of many different backgrounds and social classes. A review of how far, and in what way, Lodge shaped this local Midlands understanding of science could be made by monitoring the reactions to the lectures and talks he made in the region, and through their reportage and the correspondence in  local publications. While this would provide a vision of Lodge’s influence in communicating science immediately beyond the University of Birmingham it should be remembered that as the World’s first civic university ‘Birmingham’ received an international focus (discernible through investigation on contemporary World-Wide publications).  Some of this interest was undoubtedly the result of the fame of the University’s first Principal, Sir Oliver Lodge.

James Mussell (University of Leeds), ‘Oliver Lodge and celebrity: decoding the Mariemont visitor’s book’ 

My talk considers the visitors book kept by Oliver and Mary Lodge during their second part of his career, when they moved from Liverpool to Birmingham, and then through retirement near Salisbury.  This page, in particular, captures what I think is so interesting about the visitors book.  It’s from May to July 1915: about halfway down the page is the signature ‘Raymond Lodge’.  Raymond was the Lodge’s youngest son, then serving as a machine gun officer with the South Lancashires in Flanders.  He was home for just four days.  Six weeks later he was dead.

Dead, but perhaps not gone.  In 1916 Oliver Lodge published what is probably his best known book, Raymond: Or Life and Death.  The book records the contact Lodge may or may not have had with Raymond’s spirit, scrupulously weighing the evidence regardless of what was at stake.  This is the page of Raymond that records Raymond’s visit to Mariemont.  The simple ‘Note by O.J.L.’ stands as a counterpart to that bare signature in the visitors book, bringing the two books into dialogue.  In my talk I want to do something similar.  These two books attempt to embody the intangible by recording bodies in time and space.  Whereas Raymond attempts to establish the unity of a single life, even after death, the visitors book records many lives but, focusing on a single place, brings into view what they all have in common: a relationship with the Lodges.  Whereas Raymond, then, attempts to provide a body for Raymond’s discarnate spirit, the signatures in the book record the marks made by bodies as they visited.  For Lodge the ether was both a medium in which personality could survive death and a flexible metaphor for social relations.  The visitors book, I will argue, provides a materialised counterpoint to the ether, its signatures tangible marks of togetherness in space and time.

Richard Noakes (University of Exeter), ‘Oliver Lodge’s Ethereal Attachments’

In 1926 a humorous poem about Oliver Lodge appeared in the leading comic periodical Punch.  It declared that having found the ‘mundane’ world too ‘cramping for his style’, Lodge had strayed into the ‘psychic sphere’ which seemed to the average Fellow of the Royal Society ‘A Lodge in some vast wilderness’.  By this time Lodge agreed that his interests in psychical research had damaged his scientific reputation in some quarters – notably among fellow professional scientists. But in many other quarters Lodge was still hailed as one of the most admired British scientists of the period and had certainly not drifted into the scientific margins or “wilderness”.

Until recently historians seem to have uncritically accepted Punch’s view of Lodge’s marginality.  His beliefs in psychic phenomena and the ether of space have proven particularly important contributions to this fall from grace.  This is mainly because of assumptions that most psychic phenomena were proven fraudulent or imaginary (and so Lodge’s position was unscientific) and that most movers and shakers in physics had abandoned the ether of space in the wake of the theory of relativity.  Lodge’s apparently heterodox beliefs, as well as his voluminous output of popular scientific, philosophical and religious publications, make him a very different kind of scientist than those that historians tend to associate with the invention of modern physics – Bohr, the Curies, Einstein, Planck, Rutherford et al.

But again, when we look at individuals other than those who seemed to have made the key contributions to modern physics, Lodge appears in a very different light.  As Imogen Clark has argued, his popular books on the physics of the atom, electricity, ether and energy persuaded many twentieth century readers that he was the go-to person on ‘modern’ trends in the discipline; and Jaume Navarro has rightly emphasised that in the growing number of popular magazines for wireless professionals and amateurs, Lodge was hailed as a pioneer of the field (mainly because of his syntonic tuning invention) and actually admired for upholding the ether because this concept fitted so well within quotidian wireless practices.

Historians are now much more likely to question Lodge’s scientific marginality, not simply by appealing to his phenomenal success in communicating to many different scientific and non-scientific audiences, but by acknowledging the significant status that the ether and the study of psychic phenomena enjoyed among professional scientific workers well into the 1920s and ‘30s.  But even here there’s been a reluctance to investigate the interconnections between the many different aspects of Lodge’s work.  In my recent monograph Physics and Psychics I have tried to counter this tendency by suggesting that Lodge’s interests in psychic phenomena encouraged aspects of his more purely physical enquiries.

This is particularly clear in the cases of telepathy and telekinesis, terms coined in the 1880s when Lodge began pursuing psychical research.  Telepathy is the supposed capacity of one individual to directly receive images and other impressions in the mind of another and by the 1880s plenty of Victorians believed evidence for its existence had been established.  Telekinesis describes the movement of material bodies through spiritualist seances by some unknown force and by the 1880s many Victorians (including Lodge) believed there was enough evidence for it to justify at least further investigation.   For Lodge both telepathy and telekinesis were exciting puzzles that, as he said in 1891, the ‘orthodox scheme of physics’ couldn’t explain and which therefore represented a ‘line of possible advance’ for the ‘King of the Sciences’.  There’s no doubt that Lodge was an imperialist when it came to physics.  In 1889 he upheld the successful application of Maxwellian electromagnetic theory to optics as the ‘annexation’ of optics to the ‘imperial science’ of electricity: telepathy and telekinesis were, to one degree or another, just more exotic territories to be annexed.

One of the most puzzling features shared by telepathy and telekinesis was their mechanism.  How were images ‘transferred’ between minds?  What forces moved untouched bodies though darkened seances? Did telepathy and telekinesis represent new forms of energy?  And if so, were they mediated by the ether that Lodge and other nineteenth century physicists claimed as the ultimate seat of so many other forms of physical energy and interaction?  For Lodge and some of his followers, the possibility of an etherial theory of psychic phenomena made the ether’s nature a more urgent problem than it already was.  Experimental investigations into ether drag by Michelson and Morley in the 1880s and by Lodge in the 1890s seemed to suggest that the ether was unlike any known material substance and followed laws – electromagnetic – more fundamental than Newtonian mechanics.  For Lodge, the ether’s weirdness made it a more plausible candidate as a mechanism for psychic mediation. His ether drag experiments took place in the wake of his first exposure to telekinetic effects and his energetic pursuit of the ether’s nature clearly owed something to this psychic puzzle.

The case of Lodge would be less interesting if it was unique or relatively rare – and it would reinforce the marginal status that he once occupied in the historiography of physics.  However, in Physics and Psychics I suggested that the creative interplay between ‘physics’ and ‘psychics’ was much more widespread than we have assumed.  There’s evidence to suggest that William Crookes’s celebrated work of the 1870s on the repulsive force associated with radiation was nurtured by his contemporary study of a psychic force exuded by spiritualist mediums; that electrician Cromwell Varley’s contributions to the pre-history of the electron were driven by a spiritualist preoccupation with the apparently material properties of immaterial agents; and that British wireless engineers’ Quentin Craufurd and Cyril Frost’s 1926 design for a radio receiver was shaped by their interest in picking up signals from the afterlife.  Although these examples are from Britain in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many other instances of the ‘psychic’ roots of scientific and technical creativity will doubtless be found because so many scientists and engineers were interested in psychical investigation.  And this will certainly help rescue Lodge from the ‘wilderness’ to which he’s so often been relegated.

Our book, A Pioneer of Connection: Recovering the Life and Career of Oliver Lodge has just been published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Edited by James Mussell and Graeme Gooday, it features chapters specially commissioned from participants in the project.

Further details about the book can be found on the publisher’s website here. The table of contents is as follows:

Introduction

James Mussell and Graeme Gooday, ‘Oliver Lodge: Continuity and Communication’

Part One: Lodge’s Lives

Chapter 1
David Amigoni, ‘Communication, (Dis)Continuities, and Cultural Contestation in Sir Oliver Lodge’s Past Years‘

Chapter 2
Peter Rowlands, ‘Becoming Sir Oliver Lodge: The Liverpool Years, 1881–1900’

Chapter 3
Di Drummond, ‘Lodge in Birmingham: Pure and Applied Science in the New University, 1900–1914’

Part Two: Science and Communication

Chapter 4
Bruce J. Hunt, ‘The Alternative Path: Oliver Lodge’s Lightning Lectures and the Discovery of Electromagnetic Waves’

Chapter 5
Matthew Stanley, ‘Lodge and Mathematics: Counting Beans, the Meaning of Symbols, and Einstein’s Blindfold’

Chapter 6
Bernard Lightman, ‘The Retiring Popularizer: Lodge, Cosmic Evolution, and the New Physics’

Chapter 7
Imogen Clarke, ‘The Forgotten Celebrity of Modern Physics’

Part Three: Science, Spiritualism, and the Spaces In Between

Chapter 8
Richard Noakes, ‘Glorifying Mechanism: Oliver Lodge and the Problems of Ether, Mind, and Matter’

Chapter 9
Christine Ferguson, ‘The Case of Fletcher: Shell Shock, Spiritualism, and Oliver Lodge’s Raymond‘

Chapter 10
Georgina Byrne, ‘Beyond Raymond: The Theology of Spiritualism and the Changing Landscape of the Afterlife in the Church of England

Chapter 11
David Hendy, ‘Oliver Lodge’s Ether and the Birth of British Broadcasting’

Chapter 12
James Mussell, ‘“Body Separates: Spirit Unites”: Oliver Lodge and the Mediating Body’

As part of an event entitled ‘A Weekend of Commemoration and Hope for the Future: Stories of the First World War from Edgbaston and Ladywood’, there will be a day dedicated to Raymond Lodge at St George’s Church, Edgbaston on Saturday 19 September 2015. Details of the day are below. To download the programme for the whole weekend click here.

A Day of Commemoration of the Lodge Family and the First World War, Saturday 19th September, 2015

Our focus is on Raymond Lodge, who was killed at the age of 26 on the Somme in September 1915 and his family, including Sir Oliver Lodge, the scientist, academic and psychical investigator. The family lived opposite the church and a memorial to Raymond was placed by his parents in St George’s. There will be a seminar and exhibition of memorabilia focussing on Raymond, his family and Birmingham connections.

There will be presentations and exhibits from academic contributors and members of the Lodge family.

Programme:-

10.30: Registration, coffee and viewing of memorabilia.

11.00: Dr Jim Mussell, Associate Professor, The University of Leeds and Principal Investigator on ‘Making Waves: Oliver Lodge and the Cultures of Science, 1875-1940’ talks on “Sir Oliver Lodge in Birmingham”.

12.00: Julian Godlee, great-grandson of Oliver Lodge, sings from A E Houseman’s A Shropshire Lad set to music by Butterworth: ‘Loveliest of Trees’, ‘With Rue my Heart is Laden’, ‘The Lads in their Hundreds’, ‘In Summertime on Bredon’.

Lunch: eat out locally or bring a picnic and eat in the church or its grounds.

14.00: Nicholas Godlee, grandson of Oliver Lodge, talks on ” Raymond Lodge 1889 – 1915”.

14.30: Audio and film prepared by the Lodge family.

15.00: Julie Carter talks on “Sir Oliver Lodge; mediumship, séances and survival”

15.30: Rev Canon Dr Georgina Byrne, Worcester Cathedral talks on “Religion and Spiritualism during the First World War”. Canon Byrne is the author of Modern Spiritualism and the Church of England, 1850-1939 (2010).

Registration is free but necessary. Voluntary donations to the Church ‘Let the Stones Live’ restoration fund, with Gift Aid where appropriate, will be welcome on the day.

Please register with:- Dr S Jane Darnton, E: janedarnton@btinternet.com or T: 0121 440 7813. By Saturday 12th September, 2015.

On Sunday the 20 September, 10.30am, there will be a morning church service at which the congregation, including members of the Lodge family, will seek to commemorate and to commit themselves to the making of peace for the future and to all that makes for a strong community and society. During the memorial service we shall dedicate a Peace Garden planted by our children in the Church grounds.

On Wednesday 8 July we will be holding a seminar on Oliver Lodge at the Science Museum. The event is titled ‘Oliver Lodge: Science, Progress and the Public’ and the speakers are:

• Robert Bud (Science Museum), ‘”Mean streets and squalid districts”: Oliver Lodge and his contemporaries on science and progress’
• Michael Whitworth (Merton College, Oxford), ‘Transformations of Knowledge in Oliver Lodge’s popular science writing.’

The seminar will be chaired by Christine Ferguson (Glasgow). It will take place in the Dana Centre, Science Museum, South Kensington, London, SW7 2DD, 2-4pm. For further details about the location, click here.

Registration is free, but places are limited. To book a place, email oliverlodgenetwork@gmail.com

After the workshop on the 6 March, Professor Graeme Gooday (Leeds) will give a lecture that asks ‘Why Did Scientists Come to Write Autobiographies?’.

The celebrity scientist publishing a best-selling autobiography is really rather a recent thing. This lecture asks what prompted scientists increasingly to publish their own life stories in the interwar period and considers what effect this has had on who we think scientists are and should be.

The lecture is free and open to all. If you would like to attend, please email the project at oliverlodgenetwork@gmail.com.

For further details, see the event page. You can also download the poster here (pdf).

Registration has now closed for our final workshop.  However, we have some spaces available so if you would still like to attend, email the project (oliverlodgenetwork@gmail.com) asap.

This workshop features a range of papers from people interested in life writing, the history of science, and the digital humanities. Our keynote speaker is Professor Bernard Lightman (York University, Toronto), who is speaking on Lodge and the new physics, and the workshop concludes with a public lecture from Professor Graeme Gooday, who asks ‘Why Did Scientists Come to Write Autobiographies?’. Other speakers include David Amigoni, Berris Charnley, Jamie Elwick, Kris Grint, Rebekah Higgitt, James Mussell, and Cassie Newland.

Lodge has been a difficult person to situate in both the history of science and the period more broadly. His spiritualism and strident defence of the ether meant that his scientific reputation became tarnished as he was associated with the ‘losing’ side. His long life makes him difficult to situate in terms of period: born in 1851 and dying in 1940, Lodge became seen as a Victorian who had outlived his era. This workshop asks what a life like Lodge’s reveals about our historiography and our curatorial and archival practices, while also considering how digital technology might allow us to revisit scientific lives in new ways.

The workshop will be held in the Henry Moore Room at Leeds Art Gallery, 6 March 2015.

Further details available on the workshop page.

By Alessio Rocci

[Note: highlighted words link to the Glossary at the end of the post.]

Historically, the term Quantum Gravity (QG) has had many meanings. Today it is often associated with the idea that the gravitational field must be quantized, but we do not know how to construct this theory in a consistent way. From the birth of General Relativity (GR) in 1915 until today, many approaches have tried to face, in a broad sense, the problem of harmonizing the quantum principles that govern the microscopic world. GR is actually our best theory describing the gravitational field.

In 1916, Albert Einstein was the first to argue that quantum effects must modify his general theory.¹ In fact, he had in mind Bohr’s principle of stationary orbits, which had already modified the classical idea of the atomic collapse in the case of the energy loss due to electromagnetic wave emission, and that seemed to suggest that a similar solution was needed to avoid the energy loss caused by gravitational wave emission. Presumably he did not know, at that time, that this kind of atomic collapse is characterized by a time of the order of 10³⁷s, that is an enormous lack of time compared with the life of our Universe: recent results give approximately (4,354±0,012)x10¹⁷s.² The first attempt to quantize the gravitational field appeared in 1930, in two papers published by Léon Rosenfeld. For this reason, the years running from 1916 to 1930 are often referred to as the prehistory era of QG, a period that collects all attempts to harmonize the microscopic world with GR, or with others theories of gravity.

The prehistory era is divided in two half-periods by a wall: the birth of Quantum Mechanics (QM) in 1925-1926. We are interested in the ambien first half-period, when one of the big problems was the origin of Bohr’s stationary orbits and when the application of GR to the microscopic world was not broadly accepted. In fact, in the first four years after the birth of GR, the only experimental test of Einstein’s theory was the amazing calculation of Mercury’s perihelion time-precession. Things started to change in UK after Sir Frank Watson Dyson announced, in 1919, Sir Arthur Eddington’s results of the eclipse expedition: starlight was deflected in the sun’s gravitational field by the exact amount predicted by Einstein.³ At this point Sir Oliver Lodge enters our story. In fact, he was very active in the field of Relativity during those years.⁴ As the general interest of the scholars for GR suddenly rose exponentially, Lodge also started to consider the new theory of gravitation and its connection with the microscopic world. In fact, even if Lodge is famous for his hard defense of the aether concept, he always looked at the scientific world with a very open mind and tried to face all of the popular problems of his time. He started to consider various problems connected with GR. Here we arrive at the year 1921, a very special year for Lodge production. Maintaining his old-fashioned vocabulary, Lodge writes a Letter to Nature, strongly impressed by a George B. Jeffery’s paper, where GR is applied to the microscopic world, as all pioneers of QG tried to do.⁵ Referring to the electrical theory of matter and GR, Lodge uses Jeffery’s results in order to infer something new about the origin of the gravitational field of an electron and he speculates about its interior. For this reason, we included Sir Oliver Lodge in the prehistory of QG.

Peter Rowlands writes that ‘Lodge’s analyses of contemporary work were frequently accompanied by brilliant speculations’.⁶ Indeed, many brilliant speculations are raised in the letter to Nature and would become prevalent in the whole production of the year. In the brief communication, Lodge notes some inconsistencies connected with the electrical theory of matter, which in fact contradict Einstein’s equivalence principle, as it would be pointed out e. g. by Enrico Fermi two years later.⁷ In the letter, Lodge also discusses how GR tells us that the origin of the electron mass should not have an electromagnetic origin. Last, but not least, he rightly points out that the new Jeffery’s result ‘does not apply in the interior of an electron, if an electron has any interior’, putting the old idea of composite electron and the modern concept of elementary particle on equal footing. With these comments, Lodge ends his incursion into the history of QG, but we can continue to track the other ideas that he developed in this period. Lodge himself attracts attention in his papers, published in the Philosophical Magazine.⁸ In ‘On the supposed weight and ultimate fate of radiation’, Lodge introduces the idea of refractive index of light in a gravitational field that he uses to correctly describe what happens to the light-cone, approaching the Schwarzschild radius.⁹ He poses the following questions: ‘What happens to light when, in free modified ether, it is stopped relatively to a gravitational mass? Does it retain its energy…tie itself into electrons and add to the mass of the body?’¹⁰ Lodge’s idea is amazing: doesn’t it resemble the modern concept of Black Hole accretion? In ‘Ether, Light and Matter’, Lodge associates the idea of the quantum with closed curves of magnetic lines, and has in mind the electromagnetic nature of the mass as he writes: ‘I ventured on a speculation that matter is a sink as well as a source of radiation… Annulling of the electric component in a ether wave… may also liberate the magnetic component…’.¹¹ Lodge’s imagination goes further: ‘the problem is whether part of the magnetic circulation, left stranded, could not cease to be oscillatory and become continuous and permanent; and whether the synchronous electric pulses of myriads successive waves could not accumulate as a separated pair of opposite electric charges’.¹² Doesn’t it resemble the modern idea of pair creation? In his successive paper, Lodge tries to go deeper and deeper with this idea: ‘Referring to previous papers… if it is ever possible to separate … a positive and a negative electron bringing them into practical existence from absolute neutrality … the uniting force must … follow the law: [here Lodge inserts a mathematical formula for the force, that mixes the gravitational force with an elastic force] The opposite charges may be thought of as initially united by an elastic thread of zero length… till it snaps.’¹³ The idea, exposed by Lodge, resembles the quark anti-quark string model of the seventies!

To summarize, I would like to express my opinion on ativan Lodge’s idea about the distinction between pure and applied science, emerging from the papers that we discussed briefly. Lodge’s speculations are very abstract models and could be thought as an incursion into pure science. But every speculation he did was always followed by a precise calculation, as if to try to connect it with reality, as requested by applied science. As an example, I mention that Lodge calculated the temperature at which the pair creation should take place. Finding too big a number, he comments: ‘I confess I had hoped that this ebullition temperature would not have been so high, so that there might have a chance of reaching it, at least locally, in the sun or some of the stars’.¹⁵ It is my opinion that Lodge never tried to distinguish between pure and applied science and I think that Lodge’s philosophy is well described by the following sentence:

For undoubtedly general relativity, not as a philosophic theory but as a powerful and comprehensive method, is a remarkable achievement […] but, notwithstanding any temptation to idolatry, a physicist […] must remember that his real aim and object is absolute truth […] that his function is to discover rather than to create […[ and that beneath and above and around all appearances there exists a universe of full-bodied, concrete, absolute, Reality.¹⁶

On 31 of October 1921, Lodge was in Liverpool, lecturing on ‘Relativity’ to the Literary and Philosophical Society and, on the same day in 2014, we were in Liverpool to give honor to this great scholar, at the third workshop of ‘Making Waves’.

Glossary

quantized: the terms quantum, quantization, quantized always refer to the fact that atomic world follows new laws, discovered from the beginning of last 20th century, often referred as quantum laws, that are deeply different from the laws of the macroscopic world, usually referred as classic laws. Gravity governs the microscopic and the macroscopic world. This fact implies that, at least for this reason, we need some synthesis between gravity and quantum laws. [back]

Bohr’s principle of stationary orbits: Bohr’s model of atom is the most popular image of quantum world (see the logo of the sitcom The Big Bang Theory). In this model electrons move around a nucleus made of protons and neutrons, like Earth and other planets do around the sun. But due to classic laws, an electron should emit electromagnetic waves, like a mobile do while ringing, loose its energy and fall towards the nucleus. Bohr postulated the existence of stationary orbits, where the electron does not irradiate, in order to let the atom live!. [back]

gravitational wave: Einstein discovered that his famous equations, describing the dynamic of a gravitational field produced by a body, also describe the process of emission of waves, called gravitational waves. Phentermine weight loss by gravitational wave emission by the Pulsars has become another important test for GR. [back]

Mercury’s perihelion time-precession: lets something have a fixed direction into the sky, like polar star for the sailors. The perihelion of a planet is the point occupied by the planet when it is closest to the Sun. The position of a perihelion is not fixed with respect to direction you choose: it rotates with a time that, in the case of Mercury, is about 43 seconds of arc per century. The Mercury’s time-precession puzzled the physicists from the birth of Newton’s theory of gravity and was correctly explained for the first time by GR. [back]

Electrical theory of matter: due to this theory the origin of mass should emerge from Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory applied to a rigid sphere electron model. The idea started with a Thomson’s formula, that express electron mass using the electric charge, the sphere radius and some fundamental constants of Maxwell’s theory. [back]

Einstein’s equivalence principle: Einstein defined it as like the most beautiful idea he ever had. Let suppose you are falling freely with a heavy ball in your hands. If you open your arms, the ball will fall with you. Now let’s imagine that you and your heavy ball shut in an elevator. If you don’t know that you’re falling, what you see is the absence of gravity, exactly like astronauts of the International Space Station do. If you reverse this idea you get the equivalence principle: gravity is due to an acceleration field that in GR is created by a curved geometry, exactly like roller coaster’s rails, generated by a mass. [back]

refractive index of light: like every mass does, light follows the curved geometry created by a big mass (see the Einstein’s equivalence principle in this dictionary). This phenomenon is called light bending and it could be described throughout the analogy with the phenomenon of refraction, where the bending of light is due to the change of the medium’s density that the light is traveling through. [back]

Light-cone: In Relativity this is an imaginary doubled-cone, whose edges are made of light rays, where we live, and that separates, in a certain sense, the past-cone from the future-cone. [back]

Schwarzschild radius: when the nuclear reactions inside a star end, gravity wins among all exploding forces and the star begins to implode. In some cases the radius of the star can approach the Schwarzschild radius. In this case we could say that a Black Hole has been born, because at the Schwarzschild radius the gravitational force is so strong that even the light cannot escape any more. [back]

Notes

¹ Albert Einstein,‘Naerungsweise Integration der Feldgleichungen der Gravitation’, Preussische Akademien der Wissenschaften. Sitzungsberichte (1916), 688-696. [back]

² Planck Collaboration (Ade P. A. R. et al.),‘2013 Planck 2013 results. I. Overview of products and scientific results’, Preprint: astro-ph.CO/1303.5062. [back]

³ Peter Rowlands, Oliver Lodge and the Liverpool Physical Society (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1990). [back]

⁴ Oliver Lodge, ‘The Gravitational field of an Electron’, Nature, 107 (1921), 392-392. [back]

⁵ Ibid. [back]

⁶ Rowlands, p.259. [back]

⁷ Enrico Fermi, ‘Correzione di una contraddizione tra la teoria elettrodinamica e quella relativistica delle masse elettromagnetiche’, Nuovo Cimento, 25 (1923), 159. [back]

⁸ Oliver Lodge, ‘On the supposed weight and ultimate fate of radiation’, Philosophical Magazine, 6.41 (1921), 549; Oliver Lodge, ‘Ether, Light and Matter’, Philosophical Magazine, 6.41 (1921), 940; Oliver Lodge, ‘Light and Electron’, Philosophical Magazine, 6.42 (1921), 177. [back]

⁹ Lodge, ‘On the supposed weight and ultimate fate of radiation’. [back]

¹⁰ Ibid., 555. [back]

¹¹ Lodge, ‘Ether, Light and Matter’, 942. [back]

¹² Ibid., 943. [back]

¹³ Lodge, ‘Light and Electron’, 177. [back]

¹⁴ Ibid., 183. [back]

¹⁵ Oliver Lodge, ‘The Geometrisation of Physics, and Its Supposed Basis on the Michelson-Morley Experiment’, Nature, 106.2677 (1921). [back]

By Bruce J. Hunt

Early 1888, Oliver Lodge performed a series of experiments on electrical oscillations along wires that led him very close to Heinrich Hertz’s discovery, announced that same year, of electromagnetic waves in free space. Within a few years, Lodge and others began to use such waves for wireless telegraphy, laying the foundations for technologies that are now ubiquitous. On the surface this looks like a classic case of ‘applied science’, in which a laboratory discovery was turned to practical use, and in some ways it was. But on digging more deeply, we find that Lodge’s work was itself rooted in an intensely practical concern: the protection of buildings from lightning. The path from lightning protection to the discovery of electromagnetic waves, and then on to their use in telecommunications, was winding and indirect. Following this path will shed light on some important ways in which technology and science can interact.

Lodge’s work on lightning grew out of an invitation from the Society of Arts in London that he deliver two lectures on the subject as a memorial to Dr. Robert Mann, a former president of the Meteorological Society. Lodge read up on the subject, particularly the authoritative 1882 Report of the Lightning Rod Conference, and also performed experiments of his own tramadol, using tea trays to stand in for storm clouds and discharges from large Leyden jars to mimic bolts of lightning.¹ This choice of model was the key to almost all that followed, and it turned out to have some flaws—clouds, it seems, are not really much like tea trays. Simply as studies of Leyden jar discharges, however, Lodge’s experiments were valid and valuable; they shed light on several phenomena related to lightning protection, and more importantly, they led him to new discoveries about rapidly oscillating electric currents.

Many of Lodge’s experiments involved what he called ‘the alternative path’: he would arrange various conductors and insulators, connect them to his Leyden jars, charge them with an electrostatic generator, and see which path the resulting discharge followed. In the course of these experiments, he found many cases, particularly of what he called ‘impulsive rush’, that did not behave the way orthodox theories of lightning protection would have predicted. This led Lodge to criticize some of the conclusions of the Lightning Rod Conference and landed him in heated controversies with some of its defenders. Lodge also noticed some new and unexpected phenomena, particularly when he discharged the Leyden jars into pairs of long parallel wires. Not only did sparks sometimes jump between the wires, but the sparks were longest at their ends, as if the current was surging along the wires and producing a ‘recoil kick’ as it reflected off their ends. Lodge knew that Leyden jars discharges could produce oscillating currents and, partly prompted by his junior colleague A. P. Chattock, he now concluded that these were forming actual electromagnetic waves that were moving at the speed of light through the space surrounding the wires. Here, Lodge thought, was the long-sought confirmation of Maxwell’s theory of the electromagnetic field. He appended a section on these waves along wires to a paper on ‘Lightning Conductors’ that he sent off to the Philosophical Magazine in June 1888, and he set off on a hiking holiday in the Tyrolean Alps with fond hopes that his discovery would be the hit of the upcoming meeting of the British Association, set for September in Bath.² He soon found, however, that Hertz had performed even more striking experiments on electromagnetic waves in Germany, and Lodge presented his own work simply as a confirmation of Hertz’s.

Lodge continued to work on lightning protection, working with Alexander Muirhead to patent and market an arrester for use on telegraph and power lines, and in 1892 publishing a book on Lightning Conductors and Lightning Guards that brought together his previous writings on the subject.³ Eventually he and others recognized the deficiencies in his experimental model of lightning, in particular the fact that storm clouds (unlike tea trays) do not act as connected conductors, and their discharges, though very sudden, are not generally oscillatory. But while Lodge’s work on electrical discharges was rooted in the practical problem of lightning protection, its real value lay elsewhere, in the scientific evidence it provided for the existence of electromagnetic waves, and in the eventual use of those waves for wireless telegraphy. Lodge’s work on wireless telegraphy did not grow out of pure undirected scientific research, nor did it grow out of a deliberate effort to produce a wireless communications system. Instead its development followed an ‘alternative path’, starting in one technological context and ending in a quite different one, passing along the way through realms of scientific experiment and theory.

Bruce J. Hunt

¹Symons, George James, ed., Lightning Rod Conference (London: E. & FN Spon, 1882). [back]
²Oliver Lodge, ‘On the Theory of Lightning Conductors’, Philosophical Magazine, 26 (1888): 217-230. [back]
³Oliver Lodge, Lightning Conductors and Lightning Guards (London: Whittaker and Co, 1892). [back]

By Di Drummond

My paper at the third workshop explored the role that Oliver Lodge had in forming a balance between pure and applied science subjects, and between the Sciences and the Arts and Humanities, and, as a result, in laying the foundations of the University of Birmingham. Birmingham was a new form of higher education, the first civic university in England. This was characterised by the Applied Sciences, but there was a concern on the part of Birmingham’s founders for the pure sciences and, in time, the Arts and Humanities, to be included in the portfolio of subjects.

Birmingham is often seen as a product of the political networks and liberal ethos of the University’s founder, the politician and statesman Joseph Chamberlain. Certainly, his campaign was key in raising the finances the University required from amongst the local industrial and commercial elite. Chamberlain was also instrumental in developing the governing structure of the new institution. In contrast, Lodge’s role as the first Principal of the University from 1900, until his retirement in 1919, has been neglected. This paper attempts to restore Lodge’s importance. As a pure scientist who developed practical outcomes from his research while he was Professor of Physics at Liverpool, Lodge argued for the reliance of applied on pure science from the 1880s. This was key to the nature of the new university. So too was Lodge’s belief in a ‘liberal’/’liberal arts’ university education, this being seen as important in preventing scientists and those in the applied sciences from becoming too narrow and utilitarian in their attitudes. Lodge’s wider political values also proved important in the shaping of the new university. While the history of Chamberlainite municipal liberalism in the city of Birmingham was key in forming the relationship between the University and the Midland region, Lodge’s Fabianism, with its ‘municipal socialism’, had some influence in ensuring that local political and professional interests were represented in the governing system of the University of Birmingham.

Di Drummond

Registration for our fourth and final workshop is now open.  The workhop addresses some of the methodological difficulties in approaching a life such as Lodge’s, and considers how such a life might be told using the various digital tools and resources we have available today.  If features a lecture by David Amigoni; talks by Berris Charnley, Jamie Elwick, Kris Grint, Rebekah Higgitt, James Mussell, and Cassie Newland; and a keynote lecture by Bernard Lightman.  The day finishes with a public lecture, ‘Why did scientists come to write autobiographies?, by Graeme Gooday. Both workshop and public lecture will be held at Leeds Art Gallery. Further details about both the day and how to register are on the workshop page here.