Mathematicians will do well to observe that a reasonable acquaintance with theoretical physics at its present stage of development, to mention only s… - Carl Barus

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Mathematicians will do well to observe that a reasonable acquaintance with theoretical physics at its present stage of development, to mention only such broad subjects as electricity, elastics, hydrodynamics, etc., is as much as most of us can keep permanently assimilated. It should also be remembered that the step from the formal elegance of theory to the brute arithmetic of the special case is always humiliating, and that this labor usually falls to the lot of the physicist.

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About Carl Barus

(February 19, 1856 – September 20, 1935) was an American physicist and the maternal great-uncle of the American novelist Kurt Vonnegut. He was dean of the Brown University Graduate Department from 1903 until his retirement in 1926. In 1905 he became a corresponding member of Britain, a member of the First International Congress of Radiology and Electricity at Brussels, and a member of the Physical Society. Beginning in 1906 he was on the advisory board of physics at the Carnegie Institution in Washington state. He died in Providence, Rhode Island, U.S.A.

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I develop a method for the direct and expeditious comparison of the thermo-couple with the air thermometer. A comparison of the data... gives me a criterion of the accuracy with which the data in the region of high temperature are known. This indirect method... is not apparently as rigorous as their direct evaluation by means of the air thermometer; but the indirect method requires much smaller quantities of substance and may be conveniently extended to much higher temperatures. Taking all liabilities to error into consideration, its inferior accuracy is only apparent.

The reviewer is aware... he has given an imperfect account of this remarkable book. That Klein's researches constitute a splendid advance in dynamics of the rotation of a rigid body there can be no question. One cannot but hope that the outline given in these Princeton lectures may soon be expanded and put in shape more easily assimilated by persons more moderately versed in the theory of elliptic functions.

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A man may be a thoroughgoing soldier enough on land; but put him in the foot ropes of the flying jibboom in a storm, and he is apt to cut a most ludicrous figure. Shift a physicist's foothold of Cartesian differential coordinates, suspend him over an abyss of non-Euclidean space, and he will kick sturdily. Poor policy this, for a missionary!

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