Gabriel Lippmann (1845-1921) was a leading Parisian physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1908 for his physical method of colour photography based on standing waves. This thesis is an intellectual biography that characterises his approach to experimental and mathematical physics during the late-nineteenth century. Despite ranging widely, his research and pedagogy were based on a set of practices that embodied a coherent, stable conception of the roles of theory, experiment, and measurement. This conception prioritised general laws over causal molecular hypotheses, located experiment prior to theory, and insisted upon `direct¿ measurements of physical quantities. The thesis is structured around a series of episodes based on Lippmann¿s education and research. His research began with electrocapillarity, an experimental and theoretical study of the electromechanical behaviour of mercury electrodes in solution. This led him to pose the problem of the efficiency of electrical machines in terms analogous to Carnot¿s for heat engines. He interpreted his solution physically as the principle of the conservation of electricity. Involvement with the 1881 International Electrical Congress led to a determination of the ohm and articulation of a general conception of direct measurement. His research into colour photography developed from attempts to measure the mechanical equivalent of light. By considering the flow of knowledge and practices across cultural boundaries in the episodes discussed, the thesis presents an image of French physics as an experimental discipline based on autonomous practices. This restricted the forms that constructive exchange could take within the wider international context of physics. The thesis raises possibilities for building bridges between local and disciplinary historiographies and proposes a means of reconceptualising the problematic thesis of the nineteenth-century decline of French physics independently of perspectives on theoretical developments that took place during the early-twentieth century.
...MoreDescription Defense date not indicated; cited by UMI in 2010. Cited in ProQuest, UMI Dissertations Publishing. Proquest Document ID: 1033191969.
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