| Description | He read Larmor's Strasbourg conference with great interest. He experiences the same annoyance with respect to the inconsistency in the choice of units and it will be a long time before an international understanding is reached. He asks if Larmor could not find a young pupil to draw up a table of the notations of the main formulas and the units employed by the most important authors. He would love to find someone who already knew electromagnetic and relativistic theories very well and get him to catalogue, classify, and make bibliographic tables of the authors (and their pupils) who used one or the other of the five or six systems of units and concurrent notations. It might be published in small pamphlet form in the Cambridge tracts, for example, and would be bought by many physicists if the price was not too high. For each system, two or three formulae would immediately inform the choice adopted by the author and the meaning of his preferred notation. A young man having the time and the aptitude could better be found by Larmor than among his pupils in Paris and it would be a useful service to all. |