Life and Scientific Work of Peter Guthrie Tait - School of Mathematics ...

CHAPTER I
MEMOIR
PETER GUTHRIE TAIT
Of all human activities and developments none are more characteristic
of the Victorian Era than those clustering round the word Science. Scientific
theory and its application to the growing needs of mankind advance hand
in hand. On the one side are the developments of steam power, and the
practical creations of Electric Telegraphy, Telephony and Dynamo-electric
on the other the framing of new theories of Heat and Electricity.
machinery ;
Practical engineers and scientific men of all types and degrees of ability
and talent have had their share in this great development, which within
two generations has transformed the whole aspect of human life.
But of far greater import to the philosophical student than the dove-
tailed features of this development is the apprehension of the broad principle
of Energy which has unified the various branches of science. The biography
of any of the outstanding natural philosophers of the latter half of the
Nineteenth Century must, indeed, be to a large extent a history of
Energetics, to use Rankine's convenient nomenclature. These minds,
trained under masters of an older school who knew of no such guiding
principle, grew with the scientific environment which they were themselves
creating. It is not easy for us, who are the heirs of the rich legacy of
thought which our immediate predecessors bequeathed to us, fully to realise
the greatness of the transformation which they effected.
We may be able to note here and there the subtle manner in which,
not always consciously to themselves, they acted and reacted one upon the
other ; but we are perhaps too near the age of transition to see clearly the
interplay of all that made for progress. Each of us has had his own
peculiar training, his own personal contact with the mighty
immediate past ; and
ones of the
this forms as it were a telescopic tube determining
limits to our field of vision. No doubt we may range the whole horizon ;
but after all we look from our own point of vantage. What may appear
T.
I