ABSTRACT
In his preface, von Helmholtz pays a touching tribute to the genius of his favorite pupil, from whom he hoped most, and who had drunk most deeply of his master’s thoughts. The next thing to which Heinrich Rudolf Hertz devoted himself was a prize problem proposed, at von Helmholtz’s suggestion, by the Berlin Academy. In his own preface, Hertz says that he has culled many things from many minds; nothing particular in his work is new; what he presents as new is the arrangement and collocation of the whole, and the logical, or rather philosophical, aspect thereby attained. There are two assumptions that Hertz makes which he considers can only be proved by their success. One is that all the connections in nature can be represented by linear differential equations. The other assumption is that forces can be represented by force functions. This, again, may not be a complete representation of nature.
