Abstract
IT is only at the end of the last century that the somewhat vague principle of the economy of action or effort in physical actions—which, like all other general principles in the scientific explanation of nature, is ultimately traceable to a kind of metaphysical origin—has culminated in the hands of Lagrange in his magnificent mathematical generalisation of the dynamical laws of material systems. Before the date of this concise and all-embracing formulation of the laws of dynamics there was not available any engine of sufficient power and generality to allow of a thorough and exact exploration of the properties of an ultimate medium, of which the mechanism and mode of action are almost wholly concealed from view. The precise force of Lagrange's method, in its physical application, consists in its allowing us to ignore or leave out of account altogether the details of the mechanism, whatever it is, that is in operation in the phenomena under discussion; it makes everything depend on a single analytical function representing the distribution of energy in the medium in terms of suitable co-ordinates of position and of their velocities; from the location of this energy, its subsequent play and the dynamical phenomena involved in it are all deducible by straightforward mathematical analysis.
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A Dynamical Theory of the Electric and Luminiferous Medium.1 I. Nature 49, 260–262 (1894). https://doi.org/10.1038/049260a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/049260a0