Physics: The Elements

Abstract

DR. CAMPBELL has attempted with great courage a very ambitious task—that of discussing critically the fundamental conceptions, propositions, and methods of the science of physics. A rough idea of the nature of his work may be g-iven by saying that he attempts to do ifor the foundations of physics what Peano, Whitehead, Russell, and others of the modern ocritical school have done for the central principles oof mathematics. The spirit, however, rather than the exact method of these mathematical philosophers is what he emulates, for, apparently, one of the factors which determined him to write this book was a lively dissatisfaction caused by the 'fact that hitherto all inquiry of this nature in physics has been carried out by mathematicians xather than by experimenters. Mach, of course, in spite of Dr. Campbell's implication, was an experimenter of note, as well as a mathematician and philosopher, but our author aspires to a somewhat more complete and general discussion than that carried out by Mach for certain branches of physics, and wishes to include recent developments. Again, he is more anxious to win the oconfidence of the man in the laboratory (who, as he says, is often “not merely uninterested in fundamental criticism, but positively hostile to it”), while at the same time desiring to meet the logicians on their own ground, if not with their own weapons. From a window in his study he looks down with sympathy upon the laboratory, and writes with one eye on the bust of Mr. Bertrand Russell, serene above the conflict, and with the other on the working physicist, who is cursing alternately his electrometer and the theory of errors.

Physics: The Elements.

By Dr. Norman R. Campbell. Pp. ix+565. (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1920.) 40s. net.