Samuel Tolver Preston

Samuel Preston Tolver (* July 8, 1844, † 1917) was an English engineer and physicist.

His parents were Daniel Bloom Preston (* 1807) and Mary Susannah Tolver from Norwich. Preston was trained as a telegraph engineer. He went to Munich, where he in 1894 his Ph.D. acquired at the Ludwig Boltzmann. He then worked as a private tutor.

He was known primarily for his work (1875-1894) for the kinetic theory of gases and his attempts to connect them with the Le Sage gravitation. 1875 in Physics of the Ether Preston claimed that normal matter in ether particles (which are also responsible for gravitation ) could disintegrate. They would reach the speed of light and thus have an enormous kinetic energy. A Gran matter in this way would have an energy of about one billion foot- tons (with a foot- ton = 2240 foot-pounds ) release. So matter represented by a vast reservoir of energy Preston. However, Prestons were based on considerations of classical physics and can not be compared with the developed by Albert Einstein equivalence of mass and energy.

Preston (1885 ) may have been the first to criticize the redundancy in Michael Faraday's explanation of electromagnetic induction. Einstein has shown a similar problem at the beginning of his work On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies (1905, the Special Theory of Relativity ).

In 1876 he corresponded with James Clerk Maxwell and attention was drawn to the work of John James Waterston. In 1880 he corresponded with Charles Robert Darwin.