Abstract.
For more than twenty years, Macedonio Melloni (1798–1854) experimented with radiant heat rays. Until 1841 he thought of them as ontologically different from light, but in 1842 he converted to the opposite view according to which they are similar in kind, but only differ in wavelength. In this article I analyze the arguments which induced him to change his interpretation of radiant heat and I describe the instruments with which he arrived at these insights.
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Hentschel, K. Macedonio Melloni über strahlende Wärme. N.T.M. 13, 216–237 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00048-005-0221-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00048-005-0221-7