Legacies and Reception in Early Modern Physics

In this last part of our series on recently digitized books from the Wenner Collection, we are focusing on works that showcase the reception and legacies of physicists and astrophysicists in the 20th century. See Part 1: Popularizing Natural Philosophy and Part 2: Introducing Laws of Physics for more books from the Wenner Collection that are now online in our digital repository .

Part 3: Einstein, Volta, and Chandrasekhar

The turn of the 20^th century brought with it the dawn of modern physics. New ideas such as Albert Einstein’s theory of general and special relativity, along with the birth of quantum mechanics in the 1920s, prompted discussion and reexamination of physics past and present. The following digitized texts explore how some of these new advances were conveyed to scientists and the public in the early 20th century, as well as how figures of the past, such as Alessandro Volta, gained new popularity.

Testing Relativity

Ross, Alexander D. A popular introduction to Einstein’s theory of relativity : with an account of the tests made by the Wallal Solar Eclipse Expedition (Perth, 1923)
Catalog Record | Digitized Book

When Albert Einstein introduced his theory of relativity in 1915, the race was on to prove it experimentally. In 1919, Arthur Eddington went on a solar eclipse expedition where he was able to observe gravitational lensing on stars visible during totality, confirming Einstein’s theory of space time. Over the next several years, numerous eclipse expeditions continued follow-up experiments to gather more data, to verify Eddington’s results, and to further test the limits of Einstein’s theory. The above text follows an expedition to observe the total solar eclipse on the 21^st of September, 1922 in Wallal, Western Australia, led by William Campbell of Lick Observatory. The company brought cameras and equipment specially designed to measure the apparent shift in positions of stars due to gravitational lensing, more sensitive than typical photographic plates, which are highlighted in the multiple photographs throughout the text. The American account of the expedition was published by William Campbell in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific . Australian physics professor and expedition member, Alexander Ross, published this volume to explain the results and their significance to the general public.

Ross’s book gives us an idea of how Einstein’s theory of relativity was being communicated to the public in Australia in the early 20th century. It also showcases the international reach of eclipse expeditions and the scale of scientific collaboration made possible by them. Indeed, the Wallal expedition helped give the scientific community a more definitive confirmation of Einstein’s theory, which Ross describes at the end of his book with the following quote:

Criticizing Einstein

Tommasina, Thomas. La physique de la gravitation et la dynamique del’ univers : basées sur la découverte du mécanism edes radiations démontrant leur fonction gravitationelle réciproque
(Paris, 1928)
Catalog Record | Digitized Book

Thomas Tommasina (1855-1935) was a Swiss physicist who studied gravitational dynamics in the early 20th century. His book on gravitational dynamics attempts to provide a handbook for understanding the mechanical and material nature of phenomena in the field of astronomy and physics with consideration of the fundamental nature of the new modern physics. Tommasina, a strong believer in the ether theory, which imagined that gravitational waves must pass through a medium in order to propagate, takes issue with Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity in a chapter entitled “A. Einstein, his two relativist theories and his erroneous interpretation of physical phenomena.” One of the strengths of the Wenner Collection is material that was produced in response to Einstein’s theory of relativity, both those that supported it (such as the Ross book above) and its detractors, like this work by Thomas Tommasina.

Fun fact: Tommasina was originally an artist and only became interested in physics later in life after being inspired by reading the works of Alessandro Volta. In addition to writing about gravitational theories, Tommasina took an interest in meteorology and invented an “Electro-radiophone” for weather forecasting, which used wireless telegraphy to transmit the electrical discharges in the atmosphere as sound.

Our copy is signed by the author himself and features his portrait on the frontispiece (see gallery). Tommasina also makes special note of the year 1927 on the dedication page, which commemorates the 200th anniversary of Isaac Newton’s death and the 100th year after Volta, Laplace and Fresnel’s passing.

Volta’s Legacy

Volta, Alessandro. L’opera di Alessandro Volta : scelta di scritti originali / raccolti ed illustrati dal prof. Francesco Massardi ; pubblicati a cura della Associazione elettrotecnica italiana nel 1. centenario della morte. (Como, 1927)
Catalog Record | Digitized Book

Italian physicist Alessandro Volta (1745-1829) was a pioneer in the study of electricity and is credited as the inventor of the electric battery and namesake for the SI unit of electric power: the volt. Volta also taught at the University of Pavia for nearly 40 years. In 1927, 100 years after Volta’s death, several celebrations of Volta’s works and discoveries were held. This volume, which contains Vota’s collected works in Italian, was published by L’Associazione Eletrotecnica Italiana (AEI). That same year the International Congress of Physicists (known as the Volta Conference) was held at Lake Como from 11^th –27^th of September 1927.

The preface of this work describes L’Associazione Elettrotecnica Italia’s role in the earlier celebration at Como for the centenary of the invention of the battery in 1899. It also highlights AEI’s work to commission this government-funded national edition of Volta’s works and most significant of writings. The compendium was compiled by Professor Fracesco Massardi, who had been an editor of the national edition of Volta’s complete works. This reader provides six of Volta’s monographs, complimented by Massardi’s commentary on the framework of Volta’s scientific activity, footnotes, and introductions, along with facsimile reproductions of important figures and drawings from their original editions. It was published 100 years to the day of Volta’s death.

Chandrasekhar’s Sammelband

Chandrasekhar, Subrahmanyan. [Collection of thirty early offprints of journal articles]. 1930-1935
Catalog Record | Digitized Book

The last book in the Wenner Collection that has been digitized is one that has been featured on the blog a few times before (see these posts from 2022 and 2020 ) and is perhaps one of the most unique items in the collection. It is a compilation of nearly 30 scientific papers, often in the form of offprints (extracts from journals reprinted to include just a single article), bound together as a single volume (the formal term for which is called a sammelband), all authored by renowned Indian-American astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. The papers are from the early part of Chandrasekhar’s career, mainly dating from 1930-1935, and include his papers establishing what is now known as Chandrasekhar’s Limit, which is the upper limit for the mass of white dwarf stars that later earned him the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics, along with other important works on stellar structure. At the front of the volume is an inscription in Chandrasekhar’s handwriting saying “For the Royal Society” dated September 1935—implying that this collection of papers was put together by Chandrasekhar himself, perhaps as a CV of sorts. One of the papers in this volume was discussed at the Royal Astronomical Society in London in January 1935 and prompted a heated debate with Arthur Eddington ; Chandrasehkar was later proven to be correct. The next year Chandrasekhar moved to the United States to work at the Yerkes Observatory of the University of Chicago. He was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society in 1944.

Also present in this digitization scan is the custom box that collector David Wenner commissioned for the book. Although the book has since been rehoused for preservation reasons, we have kept some of the book boxes to show the original presentation of the collection.