Heat: A Mode of Motion

This classic book covers much of the Physics of heat transfer that we teach in UK GCSE school curricula (including explaining why some of the demonstrations we use in class fail to show what our exam boards require us to teach!). The pages on Leslie's Cube are especially insightful. Having read these, I am now a lot more confident teaching this material, as I know where the strange results we see in school are the same as the strange results John Tyndall observed using almost identical apparatus. And what inspiration! To know that the experiments we do in school have such historical importance! Tyndall writes in a way that, sadly, is not found in modern texts. At times he waxes lyrical about the beauty of what can be observed through careful experiment, for example his comment about the beauty of the colours obtained by passing light through solutions of coloured salts, with and without a prism to split the beam into different wavelengths. The significance today of Tyndall's work on heat transfer, of course, has risen tremendously, with all the research into global climate change and the effect of atmospheric carbon dioxide on Earth's surface temperature; in this book, Tyndall lays a firm experimental foundation for modern computer simulations of weather and climate change. In one major respect, however, Tyndall's work is out of date, and that is in his assumption that electromagnetic waves travel through an aether, while now we know that light and infrared radiation can travel through a vacuum. Search the book for key words of interest (such as Leslie's Cube) and browse a few pages, or even read whole chapters. You will be inspired.