Page:Lectures on Ten British Physicists of the Nineteenth Century.djvu/39

 chair he delivered an address "On the use of mechanical hypothesis in science, especially in the theory of heat." The address shows a clear appreciation of the logical bearing of scientific hypothesis. He had been criticised for holding the hypothesis of molecular vortices. "In order to establish," he said, "that degree of probability which warrants the reception of a hypothesis into science, it is not sufficient that there should be a mere loose and general agreement between its results and those of experiment. Any ingenious and imaginative person can frame such hypotheses by the dozen. The agreement should be mathematically exact to that degree of precision which the uncertainty of experimental data renders possible, and should be tested in particular cases by numerical calculation. The highest degree of probability is attained when a hypothesis leads to the prediction of laws, phenomena and numerical results, which are afterwards verified by experiment, as when the wave-theory of light led to the prediction of the true velocity of light in refracting media, of the circular polarization of light by reflection, and of the previously unknown phenomena of conical and cylindrical refraction; and as when the hypothesis of atoms in chemistry led to the prediction of the exact proportions of the constituents of innumerable compounds I think I am justified in claiming for the hypothesis of molecular vortices, as a means of advancing the theory of the mechanical action of heat, the merit of having fulfilled the proper purposes of a mechanical hypothesis in physical science, which are to connect the laws of molecular phenomena by analogy with the laws of motion; and to suggest principles such as the second law of thermodynamics and the laws of the elasticity of perfect gases, whose conformity to fact may afterwards be tested by direct experiment. And I make that claim the more confidently that I conceive the hypothesis in question to be in a great measure the development and the reduction to a precise form of ideas concerning the molecular condition which constitutes heat, that have been entertained from a remote period by the leading minds in physical science I wish it, however, to be clearly understood, that although I