![]() | Robert Mayer and the Conservation of Energy The principle of the conservation of energy was among the most important developments of nineteenth-century physics, and Robert Mayer, a physician from a small city in Germany, was one of its codiscoverers. As ship's doctor on a voyage to the Dutch East Indies in 1840, Mayer noticed that the venous blood he let from a European seaman was lighter than he expected. This observation set off a train of reflections that led him first to conclude that there must be a quantitative relationship between heat and "motion" and then, over several years, to believe in the indestructibility and uncreatability of "force." Rejecting the commonly invoked influence of Naturphilosophie, Kenneth Caneva provides a rich historical context for the problems and issues that concerned Mayer and for the ways in which he gradually came to understand what became known as the conservation of energy. |
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