Page:IntroductionToMathematicsWhitehead.pdf/39

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

of electricity. Faraday also reorganized the whole theoretical conception of the science. His ideas, which had not been fully under stood by the scientific world, were extended and put into a directly mathematical form by Clerk Maxwell in 1873. As a result of his mathematical investigations, Maxwell recognized that, under certain conditions, electrical vibrations ought to be propagated. He at once suggested that the vibrations which form light are electrical. This suggestion has since been verified, so that now the whole theory of light is nothing but a branch of the great science of electricity. Also Herz, a 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 them selves 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 as-