in a striking form. Imagine two charged conductors with the same velocity of translation; they are relatively at rest. However, each of them being equivalent to a current of convection, they ought to attract one another, and by measuring this attraction we could measure their absolute velocity.
"No!" replied the partisans of Lorentz. "What we could measure in that way is not their absolute velocity, but their relative velocity with respect to the ether, so that the principle of relativity is safe."
Whatever there may be in these latter objections, the edifice of electrodynamics, at least in its broad lines, seemed definitively constructed. Everything was presented under the most satisfactory aspect. The theories of Ampère and of Helmholtz, made for open currents which no longer existed, seemed to have no longer anything but a purely historic interest, and the inextricable complications to which these theories led were almost forgotten.
This quiescence has been recently disturbed by the experiments of M. Crémieu, which for a moment seemed to contradict the result previously obtained by Rowland.
But fresh researches have not confirmed them, and the theory of Lorentz has victoriously stood the test.
The history of these variations will be none the less instructive; it will teach us to what pitfalls the scientist is exposed, and how he may hope to escape them.
THE VALUE OF SCIENCE
TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION
- Does the Scientist create Science?—Professor Rados of Budapest in his report to the Hungarian Academy of Science on the award to Poincaré of the Bolyai prize of ten thousand crowns, speaking of him as unquestionably the most powerful investigator in the domain of mathematics and mathematical physics, characterized him as the intuitive genius drawing the inspiration for his wide-reaching researches from the exhaustless fountain of geometric and physical intuition, yet working this inspiration out