Page:A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism - Volume 2.djvu/217

 Rh our dynamical ideas. We therefore avail ourselves of the labours of the mathematicians, and retranslate their results from the language of the calculus into the language of dynamics, so that our words may call up the mental image, not of some algebraical process, but of some property of moving bodies.

The language of dynamics has been considerably extended by those who have expounded in popular terms the doctrine of the Conservation of Energy, and it will be seen that much of the following statement is suggested by the investigation in Thomson and Tait's Natural Philosophy, especially the method of beginning with the theory of impulsive forces.

I have applied this method so as to avoid the explicit consideration of the motion of any part of the system except the coordinates or variables, on which the motion of the whole depends. It is doubtless important that the student should be able to trace the connexion of the motion of each part of the system with that of the variables, but it is by no means necessary to do this in the process of obtaining the final equations, which are independent of the particular form of these connexions.

The Variables.

555.] The number of degrees of freedom of a system is the number of data which must be given in order completely to determine its position. Different forms may be given to these data, but their number depends on the nature of the system itself, and cannot be altered.

To fix our ideas we may conceive the system connected by means of suitable mechanism with a number of moveable pieces, each capable of motion along a straight line, and of no other kind of motion. The imaginary mechanism which connects each of these pieces with the system must be conceived to be free from friction, destitute of inertia, and incapable of being strained by the action of the applied forces. The use of this mechanism is merely to assist the imagination in ascribing position, velocity, and momentum to what appear, in Lagrange's investigation, as pure algebraical quantities.

Let q denote the position of one of the moveable pieces as defined by its distance from a fixed point in its line of motion. We shall distinguish the values of q corresponding to the different pieces by the suffixes 1, 2, &c. When we are dealing with a set of quantities belonging to one piece only we may omit the suffix.