The Ether of Space Part 9

I shall now attempt to ill.u.s.trate some relations between ether and matter.

The question is often asked, is ether material? This is largely a question of words and convenience. Undoubtedly, the ether belongs to the material or physical universe, but it is not ordinary matter. I should prefer to say it is not "matter" at all. It may be the substance or substratum or material of which matter is composed, but it would be confusing and inconvenient not to be able to discriminate between matter on the one hand, and ether on the other. If you tie a knot on a bit of string, the knot is composed of string, but the string is not composed of knots. If you have a smoke or vortex-ring in the air, the vortex-ring is made of air, but the atmosphere is not a vortex-ring; and it would be only confusing to say that it was.

The essential distinction between matter and ether is that matter _moves_, in the sense that it has the property of locomotion and can effect impact and bombardment; while ether is _strained_, and has the property of exerting stress and recoil. All potential energy exists in the ether. It may vibrate, and it may rotate, but as regards locomotion it is stationary--the most stationary body we know: absolutely stationary, so to speak; our standard of rest.

All that we ourselves can effect, in the material universe, is to alter the motion and configuration of ma.s.ses of matter; we can move matter, by our muscles, and that is all we can do directly: everything else is indirect.

But now comes the question, how is it possible for matter to be composed of ether? How is it possible for a solid to be made out of fluid? A solid possesses the properties of rigidity, impenetrability, elasticity, and such-like; how can these be imitated by a perfect fluid such as the ether must be?

The answer is, they can be imitated by a _fluid in motion_; a statement which we make with confidence as the result of a great part of Lord Kelvin's work.

It may be ill.u.s.trated by a few experiments.

A wheel of spokes, transparent or permeable when stationary, becomes opaque when revolving, so that a ball thrown against it does not go through, but rebounds. The motion only affects permeability to matter; transparency to light is unaffected.

A silk cord hanging from a pulley becomes rigid and viscous when put into rapid motion; and pulses or waves which may be generated on the cord travel along it with a speed equal to its own velocity, whatever that velocity may be, so that they appear to stand still. This is a genuine case of kinetic rigidity; and the fact that the wave-transmission velocity is equal to the rotatory speed of the material, is typical and important,--for in all cases of kinetic elasticity these two velocities are of the same order of magnitude.

A flexible chain, set spinning, can stand up on end while the motion continues.

A jet of water at sufficient speed can be struck with a hammer, and resists being cut with a sword.

A spinning disk of paper becomes elastic like flexible metal, and can act like a circular saw. Sir William White tells me that in naval construction steel plates are cut by a rapidly revolving disk of soft iron.

A vortex-ring, ejected from an elliptical orifice, oscillates about the stable circular form, as an india-rubber ring would do; thus furnis.h.i.+ng a beautiful example of kinetic elasticity, and showing us clearly a fluid displaying some of the properties of a solid.

A still further example is Lord Kelvin's model of a spring balance, made of nothing but rigid bodies in spinning motion.[9] This arrangement utilises the processional movement of balanced gyrostats--concealed in a case and supporting a book--to imitate the behaviour of a spiral spring, if it were used to support the same book.

If the ether can be set spinning, therefore, we may have some hope of making it imitate the properties of matter, or even of constructing matter by its aid. But _how_ are we to spin the ether? Matter alone seems to have no grip of it. As already described, I have spun steel disks, a yard in diameter, 4000 times a minute, have sent light round and round between them, and tested carefully for the slightest effect on the ether. Not the slightest effect was perceptible. We cannot spin ether mechanically.

But we can vibrate it electrically; and every source of radiation does that. An electrical charge, in sufficiently rapid vibration, is the only source of ether-waves that we know; and if an electric charge is suddenly stopped, it generates the pulses known as X-rays, as the result of the collision. Not speed, but sudden change of speed, is the necessary condition for generating waves in the ether by electricity.

We can also infer some kind of rotary motion in the ether; though we have no such obvious means of detecting the spin as is furnished by vision for detecting some kinds of vibration. Rotation is supposed to exist whenever we put a charge into the neighbourhood of a magnetic pole. Round the line joining the two, the ether is spinning like a top. I do not say it is spinning fast: that is a question of its density; it is in fact spinning with excessive slowness, but it is spinning with a definite moment of momentum. J.J. Thomson's theory makes its moment of momentum exactly equal to _e m_, the product of _charge_ and _pole_; the charge being measured electrostatically and the pole magnetically.

How can this be shown experimentally? Suppose we had a spinning top enclosed in a case, so that the spin was unrecognisable by ordinary means--it could be detected by its gyrostatic behaviour to force. If allowed to "precess" it will respond by moving perpendicularly to a deflecting force. So it is with the charge and the magnetic pole. Try to move the charge suddenly, and it immediately sets off at right angles. A moving charge is a current, and the pole and the current try to revolve round one another;--a fact which may be regarded as exhibiting a true gyrostatic action due to the otherwise unrecognisable etherial spin. The fact of such magnetic rotation was discovered by Faraday.

I know that it is usually worked out in another way, in terms of lines of force and the rest of the circuit; but I am thinking of a current as a stream of projected charges; and no one way of regarding such a matter is likely to exhaust the truth, or to exclude other modes which are equally valid. Anyhow, in whatever way it is regarded, it is an example of the three rectangular vectors.

The three vectors at right angles to each other, which may be labelled Current, Magnetism, and Motion respectively, or more generally E, H, and V, represent the quite fundamental relation between ether and matter, and const.i.tute the link between Electricity, Magnetism, and Mechanics. Where any two of these are present, the third is a necessary consequence. This principle is the basis of all dynamos, of electric motors, of light, of telegraphy, and of most other things.

Indeed, it is a question whether it does not underlie everything that we know in the whole of the physical sciences; and whether it is not the basis of our conception of the three dimensions of s.p.a.ce.

Lastly, we have the fundamental property of matter called _inertia_, which can, to a certain extent, be explained electromagnetically, provided the ethereous density is granted as of the order 10 grammes per cubic centimetre. The elasticity of the ether would then have to be of the order 10 c.g.s.; and if this is due to intrinsic turbulence, the speed of the whirling or rotational elasticity must be of the same order as the velocity of light. This follows hydrodynamically; in the same sort of way as the speed at which a pulse travels on a flexible running endless cord, whose tension is entirely due to the centrifugal force of the motion, is precisely equal to the velocity of the cord itself. And so, on our present view, the intrinsic energy of const.i.tution of the ether is incredibly and portentously great; every cubic millimetre of s.p.a.ce possessing what, if it were matter, would be a ma.s.s of a thousand tons, and an energy equivalent to the output of a million-horse-power station for 40 million years.

The universe we are living in is an extraordinary one; and our investigation of it has only just begun. We know that matter has a psychical significance, since it can const.i.tute _brain_, which links together the physical and the psychical worlds. If any one thinks that the ether, with all its ma.s.siveness and energy, has probably no psychical significance, I find myself unable to agree with him.

FOOTNOTES:

[7] On doing the arithmetic, however, I find the necessary concentration absurdly great, showing that such a ma.s.s is quite insufficient. (See Appendix 1.)

[8] See Lodge, _Philosophical Magazine_, April, 1907. Also Appendix 2 below.

[9] Address to Section A of British a.s.sociation at Montreal, 1884.

CHAPTER IX

STRENGTH OF THE ETHER

To show that the ether cannot be the slight and rarefied substance which at one time, and indeed until quite lately, it was thought to be, it is useful to remember that not only has it to be the vehicle of light and the medium of all electric and magnetic influence, but also that it has to transmit the tremendous forces of gravitation.

Among small bodies gravitational forces are slight, and are altogether exceeded by magnetic and electric or chemical forces. Indeed gravitational attraction between bodies of a certain smallness can be more than counterbalanced even by the pressure which their mutual radiation exerts--almost infinitesimal though that is;--so that as a matter of fact, small enough bodies of any warmth will repel each other unless they are in an enclosure of constant temperature, i.e.

unless the radiation pressure upon them is uniform all round.

The size at which radiation repulsion over-balances gravitational attraction, for equal spheres, depends on the temperature of the spheres and on their density; but at the ordinary temperature to which we are accustomed, say 60 Fahrenheit or thereabouts, equality between the two forces will obtain for two wooden spheres in s.p.a.ce if each is about a foot in diameter; according to Professor Poynting's data (_Philosophical Transactions_, Vol. 202, p. 541). For smaller or hotter bodies, radiation repulsion overpowers mutual gravitation; and it increases with the fourth power of their absolute temperature. The gravitational attractive force between particles is exceedingly small; and that between two atoms or two electrons is negligibly small, even though they be within molecular distance of each other.

For instance, two atoms of, say, gold, at molecular distance, attract each other gravitationally with a force of the order

? (10? x 10?) / (10?8) = 10?44 / 10?6 x 10?7 = 10?5 dyne;

which would cause no perceptible acceleration at all.

The gravitational attraction of two electrons at the same distance is the forty-thousand-millionth part of this, and so one would think must be entirely negligible. And yet it is to the aggregate attraction of myriads of such bodies that the resultant force of attraction is due;--a force which is felt over millions of miles. The force is not only felt indeed, but must be reckoned as one of prodigious magnitude.

When dealing with bodies of astronomical size, the force of gravitation overpowers all other forces; and all electric and magnetic attractions sink by comparison into insignificance.

These immense forces must be transmitted by the ether, and it is instructive to consider their amount.

SOME ASTRONOMICAL FORCES WHICH THE ETHER HAS TO TRANSMIT.

_Arithmetical Calculation of the Pull of the Earth on the Moon._

The ma.s.s of the earth is 6000 trillion (6 10) tons. The ma.s.s of the moon is 1/80th that of the earth. Terrestrial gravity at the moon's distance (which is 60 earth radii) must be reduced in the ratio 1:60; that is, it must be 1/3600th of what it is here.

Consequently the pull of the earth on the moon is

6 10 / 80 3600 tons weight.

A pillar of steel which could transmit this force, provided it could sustain a tension of 40 tons to the square inch, would have a diameter of about 400 miles; as stated in the text, page 102.

If this force were to be transmitted by a forest of weightless pillars each a square foot in cross-section, with a tension of 30 tons to the square inch throughout, there would have to be 5 million million of them.

_Arithmetical Calculation of the Pull of the Sun on the Earth._

The ma.s.s of the earth is 6 10 tons. The intensity of solar gravity at the sun's surface is 25 times ordinary terrestrial gravity.