Abstract
I HAVE to thank Mr. Culverwell for his reply to my letter on the discussion at Oxford. To quote his own words (in answering Mr. Burbury, p. 105), Mr. Culverwell's letter was “exactly the kind of letter that I hoped to elicit,” as I had not been able to recall the exact purport of Prof. Fitzgerald's “onslaught.” Although Prof. Boltzmann made no attempt to answer Prof. Fitzgerald's objections in the short space of time available after the other speakers had concluded, he several times mentioned the question to me after the debate as one which had not been hitherto satisfactorily cleared up. In preparing my Report, the question of the spectra of gases came prominently before me, but I purposely refrained from expressing my own opinions on a subject about which so little had been written in a report which was intended to be chiefly a record ot work actually done. My frequent allusions to the question of the uniqueness of the Boltzmann-Maxwell Law were intended, however, to pave the way, if possible, for an explanation of the discrepancies alluded to by Prof. Fitzgerald, and I should like now to attempt to answer some of his objections.
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BRYAN, G. The Kinetic Theory of Gases. Nature 51, 152 (1894). https://doi.org/10.1038/051152a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/051152a0
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