| Description | He hopes that Larmor will be able to visit during his stay in America next Spring. The lecture series at Columbia ought to allow Larmor free time between lectures. The other men of physics and mathematics at New Haven are anxious to see him and he thinks Larmor would like to visit Yale, which has good rail links to New York. His feelings about Clausius and Kelvin are the same as Larmor's. He was in awe when he saw Kelvin five of six years ago and he thought of thermodynamics and energy, not the Atlantic cable. Clausius would not have aroused the same emotions. The more systematic presentation would have appealed to Gibbs,who was not in tune with Kelvin. After what Bumstead heard from Larmor or Thomson about the award of the Copley Medal to Gibbs, he thinks that Kelvin did not care for him. From his talks he thinks that Gibbs had more affinity for Maxwell. Maxwell would often be referred to by Gibbs in his talks. Kelvin did not turn up quite so much. Bumstead was disappointed to find little unpublished material in Gibbs's papers and he is not responsible for the inclusion of his own biographical sketch in the book, which was published by Professor Gibbs's family. It is over-enthusiastic in tone, perhaps excusable in an old pupil. They were pleased to hear that the Nobel Prize had gone to Thomson, and hope that mathematical physics will get its turn. |