Atualmente o potencial vetor é geralmente tratado no eletromagnetismo clássico como um artifício para o cálculo dos campos elétricos e magnéticos sem um significado claro. No entanto, quando foi proposto na metade do século XIX, ele possuía um significado físico claro e desempenhava um papel central para Faraday, Maxwell e outros físicos britânicos. Um dos objetivos deste trabalho é entender como se deu esta mudança na interpretação do conceito de potencial vetor. Para isto foi realizado um estudo histórico analisando as diferentes interpretações para este conceito partindo dos trabalhos de Faraday sobre indução eletromagnética, onde propôs o conceito de estado eletrotônico. Analisamos as contribuições de William Thomson que fortemente inspiraram Maxwell a sugerir diferentes interpretações para o conceito em trabalhos publicados ao longo de cerca de duas décadas até a publicação do Treatise on Electricity and Magnestism em 1873. No final do século XIX a interpretação dada por Maxwell ao conceito de potencial vetor começou a ser questionada por vários físicos. Uma das questões envolvidas neste processo foi a realidade das grandezas físicas. Nomes como Heaviside, Hertz e outros defendiam que as grandezas dotadas de realidade física na teoria eletromagnética eram os campos elétrico e magnético e não o potencial vetor. Com essa nova visão desenvolveram uma nova teoria eletromagnética próxima da que conhecemos atualmente. No entanto, este processo não foi linear e aceito acriticamente. Ao longo do século XX foram publicados trabalhos propondo uma interpretação física para o potencial vetor, ainda no contexto clássico. O estudo histórico aqui desenvolvido priorizou a abordagem desenvolvida na Grã-Bretanha / Currently the vector potential generally is considered in the classical electromagnetic theory as an artifice for the calculation of the electric and magnetic fields and without a clear physical meaning. However, when it was proposed in the mid-nineteenth century, it used to have a clear physical meaning and played a central role for Faraday, Maxwell and other British physicists. One of the goals of this dissertation is to understand how the meanings attributed to the vector potential changed along years. In order to answer to this question, we developed a historical study analyzing the different interpretations for this concept starting with the works of Faraday on electromagnetic induction, where he introduced the concept of electrotonic state. We analyzed the contributions of William Thomson that inspired strongly Maxwell to suggest different interpretations for the concept in works published along the next two decades until the publication of the Treatise on Electricity and Magnestism in 1873. In the end of the nineteenth century Maxwells interpretations for the vector potential began to be questioned by several physicists. One of the issues involved in this questioning was the reality of the physical quantities. People as Heaviside, Hertz and others defended that electric and magnetic fields, not the vector potential, were quantities endowed with physical reality. With this new approach they developed a new electromagnetic theory closer to the currently accepted. Nevertheless, this process was not linear and uncritically accepted. Throughout the twentieth century papers and books were published defending a physical interpretation for the vector potential considering a classical context for the electromagnetic theory. The historical study developed here focused the developments in Great-Britain although some mentions to Continental physics are made

Atualmente o potencial vetor é geralmente tratado no eletromagnetismo clássico como um artifício para o cálculo dos campos elétricos e magnéticos sem um significado claro. No entanto, quando foi proposto na metade do século XIX, ele possuía um significado físico claro e desempenhava um papel central para Faraday, Maxwell e outros físicos britânicos. Um dos objetivos deste trabalho é entender como se deu esta mudança na interpretação do conceito de potencial vetor. Para isto foi realizado um estudo histórico analisando as diferentes interpretações para este conceito partindo dos trabalhos de Faraday sobre indução eletromagnética, onde propôs o conceito de estado eletrotônico. Analisamos as contribuições de William Thomson que fortemente inspiraram Maxwell a sugerir diferentes interpretações para o conceito em trabalhos publicados ao longo de cerca de duas décadas até a publicação do Treatise on Electricity and Magnestism em 1873. No final do século XIX a interpretação dada por Maxwell ao conceito de potencial vetor começou a ser questionada por vários físicos. Uma das questões envolvidas neste processo foi a realidade das grandezas físicas. Nomes como Heaviside, Hertz e outros defendiam que as grandezas dotadas de realidade física na teoria eletromagnética eram os campos elétrico e magnético e não o potencial vetor. Com essa nova visão desenvolveram uma nova teoria eletromagnética próxima da que conhecemos atualmente. No entanto, este processo não foi linear e aceito acriticamente. Ao longo do século XX foram publicados trabalhos propondo uma interpretação física para o potencial vetor, ainda no contexto clássico. O estudo histórico aqui desenvolvido priorizou a abordagem desenvolvida na Grã-Bretanha / Currently the vector potential generally is considered in the classical electromagnetic theory as an artifice for the calculation of the electric and magnetic fields and without a clear physical meaning. However, when it was proposed in the mid-nineteenth century, it used to have a clear physical meaning and played a central role for Faraday, Maxwell and other British physicists. One of the goals of this dissertation is to understand how the meanings attributed to the vector potential changed along years. In order to answer to this question, we developed a historical study analyzing the different interpretations for this concept starting with the works of Faraday on electromagnetic induction, where he introduced the concept of electrotonic state. We analyzed the contributions of William Thomson that inspired strongly Maxwell to suggest different interpretations for the concept in works published along the next two decades until the publication of the Treatise on Electricity and Magnestism in 1873. In the end of the nineteenth century Maxwells interpretations for the vector potential began to be questioned by several physicists. One of the issues involved in this questioning was the reality of the physical quantities. People as Heaviside, Hertz and others defended that electric and magnetic fields, not the vector potential, were quantities endowed with physical reality. With this new approach they developed a new electromagnetic theory closer to the currently accepted. Nevertheless, this process was not linear and uncritically accepted. Throughout the twentieth century papers and books were published defending a physical interpretation for the vector potential considering a classical context for the electromagnetic theory. The historical study developed here focused the developments in Great-Britain although some mentions to Continental physics are made

Though there has been a considerable amount of work investigating the early stages of low-mass star formation in recent years, the general theory is only broadly understood and several open questions remain. Specifically, the dominant physical mechanisms which connect large-scale molecular cloud structures, intermediate-scale filamentary gas flows, and small-scale collapsing prestellar envelopes in the interstellar medium are poorly constrained. Even for an individual forming protostar, the evolution of the mass accretion rate from the envelope onto the central object is debated with little observational evidence to help guide the theoretical framework. In addition, with the development of new technology such as the continuum imaging instrument in operation at the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT), the Submillimetre Common User Bolometer Array 2 (SCUBA-2), the best practices for data reduction and image calibration for ground-based, submillimetre wavelength observations are still being investigated. In this dissertation, I address facets of these open questions in five main projects with an overarching focus on the flow of material from the largest to the smallest scales in a molecular cloud. By performing synthetic observations of a numerical simulation of a turbulent molecular cloud, I investigate the nature of prestellar envelopes and find evidence of larger mass reservoirs that form filamentary structures and feed cluster formation. Then, after robustly investigating and suggesting improvements for ground-based, submillimetre data reduction techniques, I continue to probe the connection between larger and smaller scales by characterising structure fragmentation in the Southern Orion A Molecular Cloud from the perspective of 850 m continuum data. Finally, I follow star forming material to even smaller scales by exploring the evolution of the mass accretion rate onto individual protostars. This examination has required designing and implementing unprecedented spatial alignment and flux calibration techniques at 850 m. Using these newly calibrated images, I am able to identify several candidate sources that show evidence for submillimetre variability, suggesting changes in protostellar accretion rates over several year timescales. / Graduate

Recent observations at the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) and elsewhere have identified a class of very deeply embedded, possibly protostellar, sources which are not associated with any of the traditional indicators of star formation, such as HII regions and near-infrared emission, but which do lie close to otherwise isolated H2O masers. This thesis describes a search, based on catalogues of known water maser positions, for new deeply embedded cores similar to those found in S106 and M17. In addition to millimetre molecular line and submillimetre continuum observations, 22 GHz and 8 GHz radio observations have been made of a number of the sources in order to obtain more accurate maser positions and to search for any associated compact HII regions. Observing sources such as these in less active star forming regions provides a cleaner environment in which to examine the maser excitation and the ongoing process of star formation. A sample of 44 water maser sources was observed from which submillimetre continuum emission was detected from 40 (91 per cent). The most striking feature of the data is the close association of the masers with the submillimetre cores: the data are consistent with masers occurring within 6000 AU of the embedded core. The results can be summarised as follows: o High temperature gas has been detected, and most of the submillimetre cores have mean densities greater than 10^6 /cm^3. o The masers have low velocities with respect to the molecular cloud and are uniformly distributed within 6600 AU of the submillimetre core. o The isotropic maser luminosity is proportional to the far-infrared luminosity over more than 5 orders of magnitude. o There is no obvious correlation between the near-infrared spectral class and the maser emission. o Where a radio spectral index is known the majority of sources are optically thin HII regions. The bulk of the remainder are undetected and have a flux density less than 1 mJy. o Masers not associated directly with a submillimetre core show explicit evidence for shocks. Embedded cores \emph{have} been detected with this survey and the maser emission is consistent with collisionally excited pump models.

My dissertation examines the representations of materialism -- a philosophy stereotypically associated with a reductive, anti-theological and mechanistic world-picture -- in the published prose and (typically) unpublished poetry of several figures central to scientific discourse in the latter half of the nineteenth century, most notably W. K. Clifford, a mathematician, and John Tyndall, a physicist and media-savvy ‘champion of science’. These engagements, and representations, were not merely on the level of ‘direct’ argumentation, however. A self-consciously allusive, even polyphonous tone was far from uncommon in the many literatures arising from mid-Victorian scientific encounter, and this openness of form permitted both popularisers and critics of materialism to choose the vocabularies in which to relate their observations –- the texts with which they would engage –- towards specific ends. As I argue, such was a task they performed with great care and an often astonishing felicity: an essay on cosmology, after all, acquires quite a different colouration when interleaved with the cadences of Milton, another again if illustrated with quotations from Whitman or an epigram from ‘Tintern Abbey’. My 1st chapter provides a broader context for those that follow, analysing both changing nineteenth-century ideas of materialism and also a range of potential reactions to -– and inter alia a variety of the contrasting vernaculars used in illustration of –- contemporary metaphysical or ‘methodological’ materialism. My 2nd chapter offers a reading of Tyndall’s August 1874 Belfast Address, the locus classicus for practically all later elaborations of materialistic belief. My 3rd chapter contrasts the theologically orthodox position of James Clerk Maxwell (buttressed by allusions to the theologically doctrinaire George Herbert) with the radically atheistic and materialistic philosophy of Clifford (underpinned by the similarly atheistic Algernon Charles Swinburne). My 4th and 5th chapters are paired studies in the ‘private’ nuances of Tyndall’s ideology, elaborating on my 2nd chapter’s scrutiny of its more public attributes. The former discusses his notions of cosmic connectedness, ironically derived from the non-materialistic works of Carlyle. The latter examines both the exultancy and the despair explicit in Tyndall’s poetry and implicit in his prose. As I note in conclusion, such contrary emotions, phrased with striking clarity in Tyndall, are common in mid-Victorian writings concerning materialism, directly or indirectly. They are rooted in the hopes afforded by materialism’s explanatory prowess, on the one hand, and the ‘atrophy of spirit’ born of its austere, even dehumanising, epistemology, on the other; that is to say, in a salutary awareness of both power and pitfalls.

This thesis examines accounts of electricity in journalism, short stories, novels, poetry and instructional writings, composed between 1830 and 1880 by scientific investigators, popular practitioners and fiction authors. The writings are approached as diverse and often incongruous impressions of electricity, in which the use of figurative and narrative techniques brings into question distinctions between science and literature. It is proposed that the unusual combination of electricity’s historical characterisation as an elixir vitae, intense investigation by contemporary scientists, and close alliance with new technologies offered unique opportunities for imaginative speculation. The thesis contends that engaging with these conflicting characteristics created a synthesis of scientific, social and literary responses that defy epistemological and generic categorisation. Fictionality is approached in chapter two as a central feature of scientific conceptualisation, experiment and discovery, particularly in the work of Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell. In chapters three and four, the landscape of popular non-fiction books and periodicals is mapped, to show the ways in which the period’s publication contexts and forums, reading patterns, and use of literary practices contributed to wider engagement with ideas about electricity. Chapters five and six focus on fiction writings, identifying parallels and divergences between actual electrical science and its fictional portrayal. Short stories are shown to have emphasised associations between electricity, neurosis, deformity and the occult, complicating contemporary scientific optimism and presenting electricity as an alluring yet dangerous phenomenon, which disordered the natural world and man’s relationship with it. These characteristics are identified further in the metaphorical references of several canonical novelists, in the exploitation of electricity, elixirs and power depicted by William Harrison Ainsworth and Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and through a case study of the text and reception of a popular novel about electricity by Benjamin Lumley. The thesis contends that electricity’s anomalous and protean nature produced distinctively hybrid responses that enhance our understanding of contemporary popular writing, its contexts and how it was read.

Fourier transform spectroscopy (FTS) is one of the premier ways to collect source information through emitted radiation. It is so named because the principal measurement technique involves the analysis of spectra determined from the Fourier transform of a time-domain interference pattern. Given options in the field, many space- and ground-based instruments have selected Fourier transform spectrometers for their measurements. The Herschel Space Observatory, launched on May 14, 2009, has three on-board instruments. One, SPIRE, comprises a FTS paired with bolometer detector arrays. SCUBA-2 (Submillimetre Common User Bolometer Array) and FTS-2 have recently been commissioned and will be mounted within the collecting dish of the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope by Fall, 2010. The use of FTS in these two observatories will be examined. While work towards each project is independently useful, the thesis is bound by the commonality between the two, as each seeks similar answers from vastly different viewpoints. / xvii, 123 leaves : ill. (some col.) ; 29 cm

In this thesis I present new insights into aspects of Peter Guthrie Tait's life and work, derived principally from largely-unexplored primary source material: Tait's scrapbook, the Tait–Maxwell school-book and Tait's pocket notebook. By way of associated historical insights, I also come to discuss the innovative and far-reaching mathematics of the elusive Frenchman, C.-V. Mourey. P. G. Tait (1831–1901) F.R.S.E., Professor of Mathematics at the Queen's College, Belfast (1854–1860) and of Natural Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh (1860–1901), was one of the leading physicists and mathematicians in Europe in the nineteenth century. His expertise encompassed the breadth of physical science and mathematics. However, since the nineteenth century he has been unfortunately overlooked—overshadowed, perhaps, by the brilliance of his personal friends, James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879), Sir William Rowan Hamilton (1805–1865) and William Thomson (1824–1907), later Lord Kelvin. Here I present the results of extensive research into the Tait family history. I explore the spiritual aspect of Tait's life in connection with The Unseen Universe (1875) which Tait co-authored with Balfour Stewart (1828–1887). I also reveal Tait's surprising involvement in statistics and give an account of his introduction to complex numbers, as a schoolboy at the Edinburgh Academy. A highlight of the thesis is a re-evaluation of C.-V. Mourey's 1828 work, La Vraie Théorie des quantités négatives et des quantités prétendues imaginaires, which I consider from the perspective of algebraic reform. The thesis also contains: (i) a transcription of an unpublished paper by Hamilton on the fundamental theorem of algebra which was inspired by Mourey and (ii) new biographical information on Mourey.