Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book in good condition. Pages in great condition. Some dust marking to edges. Some corner wear. Pages bright and clean. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> But he could not have known of a letter from Maxwell to D. P. Todd Esq.. Director of the Nautical Almanac Office in Washington asking whether anomalies had been observed in the eclipse times of Jupiter’s satellites. For he wrote ‘they afford the only method as far as I know of getting any estimate of the direction and magnitude of the velocity of the sun with respect to the luminiferous medium. In the terrestrial methods of determining the velocity of light the light comes back along the same path again so that the velocity of the earth with respect to the ether would alter the time of the double passage by a quantity depending on the square of the earth’s velocity to that of light and this is quite too small to be observed’. Maxwell’s letter found its way into Nature shortly after his death in November 1879 and caught the eye of a young instructor at the US Naval Academy Albert A. Michelson. The letter is headed Caven- dish Laboratory Cambridge 19 March 1879 and is reproduced at the end of the preface. Five days earlier on 14 March Albert Einstein was born in Ulm. Thus the twin streams that were to grow into quantum theory and relativity came into being at the same moment as the man who for a critical decade was to be their surest oarsman. (MP)