RankingsPrimerArbiterPhysicistMathematicianContrarianQESites logClaimsSourcesResearch notes

Google Search (Chrome) and smaller sites, 2026-10-08

Investigator run 1, Jeans-JH. Web time 9.6 min (timer start 1791519035, stop at 578 s). Chrome was connected and used for all Google searches; scripted fetches (curl) were used only to save pages and files for grepping.

Google queries and what each yielded

  1. Jeans "Atomicity and Quanta" 1925 Rouse Ball lecture advanced retarded potentials led to Chemical News 1927, Loring (see archive-org note). Positive.
  2. Jeans 1925 "advanced" potentials "Atomicity and Quanta" Wheeler Feynman OR Tetrode OR absorber: only citations in Springer's Fermi volume, Scribd and epdf. No historian linking Jeans 1925 to absorber theory. Negative for that link.
  3. "E. P. Adams" 1901 charged spheres rotating magnetic effect convection current Philosophical Magazine led to Phil. Mag. 1901 on IA; a Gutenberg (EB1911 "Electricity") snippet citing Pender (Phil. Mag. 1901, 2, p.179) and E. P. Adams (ib. 285); Nature index; E. P. Adams as translator of Einstein's Princeton lectures (1921/22). Positive.
  4. "Atomicity and Quanta" Jeans review Nature 1926 led to the Nature review (paywalled), Milne 1947 (JSTOR), Russell's Analysis of Matter, the AMS Bulletin review by E. P. Adams, Kragh-Carazza 1994, and the Fermi volume. Positive.
  5. site:ams.org "Atomicity and Quanta" Adams gave the issue page. Positive.
  6. "Jeans" 1925 convergent waves absorber "Lewis" 1926 "nature of light" advanced potentials history. Negative (generic textbooks).
  7. Jeans 1905 "partition of energy between matter and æther" OR "...aether" Philosophical Magazine led to the Montambaux collection, Taylor & Francis, Hudson 1989 (ScienceDirect), and fnorio.com (a Japanese translation and commentary of Jeans 1905). Positive.
  8. "Jeans" papers archive correspondence "James Hopwood Jeans" Royal Society archive catalogue led to the Royal Society JHJ fonds; a St Andrews Philosophical Transactions blog post on Jeans's 1902 letter to himself from Ringwood sanatorium (not opened); Chandrasekhar papers at UChicago (a typescript obituary of Jeans, Science 105, 1947, 224-226). Positive.
  9. history time-symmetric electrodynamics Tetrode 1922 Lewis 1926 Fokker "Jeans" 1925 half-advanced half-retarded precursor. Negative (image results only).
  10. "Jeans" "Atomicity and Quanta" "advanced potentials" OR "convergent waves" OR "source and sink": no exact matches. The loose results included Shuang-ren Zhao's "mutual energy flow" papers (retarded wave from source plus advanced wave from sink; Opast, HAL, arXiv:1606.08710). Related work (priority 3); see below.
  11. Bothe Geiger 1925 "Zeitschrift für Physik" 32 639 ... led to Wikipedia, Bonolis 2011 (arXiv:1106.1365), R. A. Campos 2004 "Still Shrouded in Mystery: The Photon in 1925" (arXiv), and Stuewer. Positive (dates).
  12. Google Books: "Jeans" "Rouse Ball" lecture 1925 convergent waves quanta led to Tolman's review in Physical Review 1926 p.1048. Positive.
  13. Kragh Carazza 1994 "From time atoms to space-time quantization" Jeans: the record was located; the paper is paywalled. Partial.
  14. "Jeans" 1903 OR 1904 vibrational energy transfer collision exponential adiabatic "Landau-Teller" history led to the Jeans-Landau-Teller literature (unimi), Nikitin 2008, Legnaro 2023, and Contopoulos and Voglis. Positive.
  15. "Boltzmann-Jeans conjecture" Galgani Benettin arXiv: several arXiv papers. Positive.
  16. "Owen Willans Richardson" papers Harry Ransom Center finding aid Jeans: only an AIP page on processing the O. W. Richardson Papers; the HRC finding aid was not reached. Partial.
  17. Wien 1924 "Abklingung" OR "Leuchtdauer" Kanalstrahlen Wasserstoff Hα Annalen der Physik decay time: no results shown. Negative.
  18. Shuang-ren Zhao mutual energy flow retarded advanced waves photon source sink. Positive (related work).
  19. Milne 1947 "James Hopwood Jeans" "Obituary Notices of Fellows" rsbm led to the free Royal Society Publishing page. Partial (not read).
  20. "Jeans" 1925 "advanced waves" OR "advanced potentials" "non-radiating" atom history Ritz Einstein 1909 led to the Ritz-Einstein 1909 "agreement to disagree" (reprints.gravitywaves.com; the download timed out), Einstein 1909 Phys. Z. 10, 817 (English translation, Montambaux; saved), MathPages on Ritz, shadetreephysics.com on Ritz, and Kennefick 1997 (arXiv gr-qc/9704002). Snippet from shadetreephysics: Ritz held that advanced potentials "don't exist (and their erroneous use led to the Rayleigh-Jeans ultraviolet catastrophe)". Positive lead; the key PDF was not obtained.

Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org, raw page text by curl)

  • "Bothe-Geiger coincidence experiment": "In April 1925, Bothe and Geiger reported that the photon and electron counters responded simultaneously", with Z. Phys. 32, 639-663 (1925). Compton and Simon, "Directed Quanta of Scattered X-Rays", Phys. Rev. 26, 289-299, dated 1925-09-01. [web: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bothe%E2%80%93Geiger_coincidence_experiment]
  • Bearing: Bothe-Geiger was reported about a month before the 11 May 1925 lecture; Compton-Simon was published about four months after it. Tolman (1926) called the timing "almost simultaneously". Whether Jeans knew the April report is unknown.
  • "Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory": the history section names Schwarzschild (1903), Tetrode (Z. Phys. 10, 317-328, December 1922), Fokker (1929) and the Ritz-Einstein 1909 dispute, and says Einstein told Wheeler and Feynman of Tetrode and Ritz. Jeans's 1925 lecture is not mentioned. [web: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheeler%E2%80%93Feynman_absorber_theory]
  • Bearing on claim 6: the standard history of time-symmetric electrodynamics, as summarised there, omits Jeans 1925. That is a silence, not a contradiction. The lecture is a 1925 instance of the same idea (half-advanced plus half-retarded potentials; emitter-absorber pair) that this lineage does not record.

arXiv

  • Kennefick 1997, "Controversies in the History of the Radiation Reaction Problem in General Relativity" (gr-qc/9704002): grep found 0 mentions of "Jeans". Negative for Jeans; it refers to Ritz and Tetrode "in former years".
  • The arXiv API query for Zhao 1606.08710 returned nothing within the timeout; not reached.

Europe PMC / PMC

  • G. N. Lewis, "The Nature of Light", PNAS 12 (1926) 22, PMCID PMC1084392 [web]. It is a scanned article; no text was returned by the Europe PMC API and the PMC PDF link returned HTML. Partial; not read. Lead: Lewis (1926) proposed that emission requires an absorber and coined "photon". Whether he cites Jeans's 1925 lecture is open.

HathiTrust

  • A full-text search URL was tried in Chrome; the page showed "Please enter a search" behind a cookie-consent banner. Per the rules the banner was not accepted. Blocked (cookie banner; the search did not run).

reprints.gravitywaves.com

  • Ritz-1909-Einstein "Agree to Disagree" PDF: curl timed out twice (60 s and 20 s). Blocked (timeout).
  • Shuang-ren Zhao and co-authors, "mutual energy" and "mutual energy flow" (arXiv:1606.08710, 2016; Opast and HAL papers; a 2024 Amazon book): photons are described as mutual energy flows of a retarded wave from the source and an advanced wave from the sink. This is the same source-and-sink structure as Jeans's 1925 two-atom solution. Mainstream status: outside mainstream journals (self-published and minor-publisher venues); that is a description of venue, not a reason to exclude. Zhao does not appear to cite Jeans (not checked).
  • Einstein 1909 (Phys. Z. 10, 817), "On the development of our understanding of the nature and composition of radiation" (saved: files/einstein-1909-wave-particles-PhysZ.pdf). It is the classic early statement that radiation shows both wave and quantum fluctuation terms. It is the position Jeans 1924-25 argues against for free radiation.