H. A. Lorentz

“ Maxwell relieved us of all these doubts and uncertainties. By his bold assumption that in a non-conducting body, in a dielectric as he called it, there can exist what is truly a motion of electricity, and that, if this motion, the dielectric displacement, is taken into account, electricity can always be said to move as an incompressible fluid, the open currents and the longitudinal vibrations that were closely allied to them were made to vanish from the scene. ”

“ In his image the friction wheels represent what we call electricity; in a conductor we must conceive them to be freely movable, whereas the centres of the larger wheels or balls have fixed positions. It is easily seen how a motion of translation imparted to the friction wheels can give rise to rotations of the larger balls; this is how a current produces a magnetic field. Other phenomena can be explained on the same lines; it is sufficient for this that Maxwell's equations can be deduced by means of the model. ”

“ If any part of the kinetic energy depends on the product of an ordinary velocity and the strength of a current, it will probably be most easily observed when the velocity and the current are in the same or in opposite directions. We therefore take a circular coil of a great many windings, and suspend it by a fine vertical wire, so that its windings are horizontal, and the coil is capable of rotating about a vertical axis, either in the same direction as the current in the coil, or in the opposite direction. ”

“ A greater and really serious danger is threatening from the side of the quantum theory, for the existence of amounts of energy that remain concentrated in small spaces during their propagation, to which several phenomena seem to point, is in absolute contradiction to Maxwell's equations. ”

“ In the theory of dynamical systems there are as many velocities as there are coordinates and the kinetic energy is a homogeneous quadratic function of these velocities, in which in general not only the squares but also the products of the velocities appear. When we have one or more circuits carrying electric currents, we can distinguish in the kinetic energy one part that depends on the material velocities only, and this is the kinetic energy of ordinary mechanics, and a second part containing only the velocities corresponding to the internal coordinates ”

“ Similar phenomena could be observed with a closed circular tube capable of rotating about its axis, and there must be a corresponding electromagnetic phenomenon if a metallic wire contains something like movable electricity, as we are now in a position to assert, because we have good reasons for believing that an electric current consists in a motion of negative electrons. ”

“ Some years later E. F. Nichols and Hull repeated the experiment with the utmost care and were able to measure the pressure and to prove that its intensity agrees with Maxwell's calculation.
We are now quite sure of this phenomenon which has come to play a great part in stellar physics. When we are concerned with very small particles near or in a star, the radiation pressure may very well become greater than the force of gravitation, and it is taken into account by many astronomers in their speculations about the state of heavenly bodies. ”

“ Maxwell showed how, in general, these forces can be deduced from the values of the electromagnetic energy corresponding to different positions of a system of bodies, or from a consideration of certain stresses which exist in the electromagnetic field and of which he taught us to determine the direction and the intensity. Every student, even of rather elementary physics, now knows that the mutual attraction of two conducting plates between which there is a difference of potential, e.g. ”

“ Further, the optical behaviour of non-conducting substances was shown to depend on two properties, each characterized by a physical constant, the dielectric constant, or Faraday's specific inductive capacity, and the magnetic permeability. ”