German, in 1888, following on Maxwell's ideas, succeeded in producing electric vibrations by direct electrical methods. His experiments are the basis of our wireless telegraphy.
In more recent years even more fundamental discoveries have been made, and the science continues to grow in theoretic importance and in practical interest. This rapid sketch of its progress illustrates how, by the gradual introduction of the relevant theoretic ideas, suggested by experiment and themselves suggesting fresh experiments, a whole mass of isolated and even trivial phenomena are welded together into one coherent science, in which the results of abstract mathematical deductions, starting from a few simple assumed
laws, supply the explanation to the complex tangle of the course of events.
Finally, passing beyond the particular sciences of electromagnetism and light, we can generalize our point of view still further, and direct our attention to the growth of mathematical physics considered as one great chapter of scientific thought. In the first place, what in the barest outlines is the story of its growth?
It did not begin as one science, or as the product of one band of men. The Chaldean shepherds watched the skies, the agents of Government in Mesopotamia and Egypt measured the land, priests and philosophers brooded on the general nature of all things. The vast mass of the operations of nature appeared due to mysterious unfathomable forces. "The wind bloweth where it listeth" expresses accurately the blank ignorance then existing of any stable rules followed in detail by the succession of phenomena. In broad outline, then as now, a regularity of events was patent. But no minute tracing of their interconnection was possible, and there was no knowledge how even to set about to construct such a science.
Detached speculations, a few happy or unhappy shots at the nature of things, formed the utmost which could be produced.
Meanwhile land-surveys had produced geometry,
and the observations of the heavens disclosed the exact regularity of the solar system. Some of the later Greeks, such as Archimedes, had just views on the elementary
phenomena of hydrostatics and optics. Indeed, Archimedes, who combined a genius for mathematics with a physical insight, must rank with Newton, who lived nearly two
thousand years later, as one of the founders of mathematical physics. He lived at Syracuse, the great Greek city of Sicily. When the Romans besieged the town (in 212 to 210 ), he is said to have burned their ships by concentrating on them, by means of mirrors, the sun's rays. The story is highly improbable, but is good evidence of the reputation which he had gained among his contemporaries for his knowledge of optics. At the end of this siege he was killed. According to one account given by Plutarch, in his life of
Marcellus, he was found by a Roman soldier
absorbed in the study of a geometrical diagram which he had traced on the sandy floor of his room. He did not immediately obey the orders of his captor, and so was killed. For the credit of the Roman generals it must be said that the soldiers had orders to spare him. The internal evidence for the other famous story of him is very strong; for the discovery attributed to him is one eminently worthy of his genius for mathematical and physical research.