Conservation and Innovation : Helmholtz's Struggle with Energy ...

different competing theories showed an agreement with some versions of PCE,
mainly with the impossibility of perpetuum mobile. That is, they admitted a
potential. Thus, strictly speaking, there was no longer any heuristic power in the
PCE (still a global one in Helmholtz’s view). Either a more specific version of
PCE or a more specific regulative principle was needed. The more specific
version of PCE was to be connected with the localisation of energy of Poynting,
but Helmholtz seems not to have understood its relevance, the more specific
principle was in Helmholtz’s view PLA. Moreover the PLA version had to be in
agreement with contiguous action: in fact a PLA related with Maxwell’s theory
was Helmholtz’s starting point in 1886. At this stage the two shifts had been
accomplished before Hertz’s experiments.
In 1894 Helmholtz publishes a small volume entitled "Introduction to
the Lectures on Theoretical Physics". The first two sections, Introduction and
Part I, are closely related to the themes discussed fourty years before in the
Erhaltung and with them we will be concerned here. The third section, Part II, is
very similar to the paper "An Epistemological Analysis of Counting and
Measurement".
Introduction and Part I are of great relevance to focus some aspects of
Helmholtz's methodological beliefs. Namely the conditions of possibility of
understanding nature, the relations betwen force and law, the role of regulative
principles in framing our scientific knowledge.
What had been achieved: a turn of the century viewpoint
Energy theory changed the shape of physics : after 1847 physical laws
no longer had only to face the challenge of experimental results, but also had to
be judged on more theoretical grounds, in their relation with the conservation
principle. But in turn the principle had, from the beginning, different
formulations.
The growth of these formulations was joined with the growth of
alternative research programs in the second half of the century. The energetist
movement took off, with its attempts to overthrow the mechanical worldview,