Kinetic Theories of Gravitation/Guyot, 1832

Another ingenious attack upon the " Problem," in a somewhat similar though really distinct direction, was made by Dr. Jules Guyot — a French physician, — in a very original and suggestive treatise entitled Elements de Physique Generale, 8vo, published in Paris in 1832, at about the age of twenty-seven years. This writer seems to have had, even at this early date, a general idea of correlating the physical forces.

Assuming with other physicists, two kinds of matter, — one sensible in the gaseous liquid and solid forms, the other insensible, in the " simple elementary and atomic" condition of the aetherial medium, filling all space under a state of constant and enormous pressure, and infinitely more subtile than any particle of combinable matter, — and assuming also two kinds of movement, one of translation and the other of vibration, Guyot maintained that these two forms of motion are reciprocally complementary and convertible, their sum being constant. So that motion is essential to matter, is equally indestructible, and is directly proportional to its mass. He held that light, heat, sound, and the excitations of smell and taste, are all the results of molecular motion or vibration, as are also the agencies of electricity, magnetism, and gravitation.

In a work on the pressures resulting from serial motions, published in 1835, Guyot records some curious experiments on the influence of vibratory sounding bodies in causing light objects to approach them ; — experiments which immediately recall the suggestions made by Dr. Robert Hooke more than a century and a half earlier, and which would certainly have delighted that philosopher. Disks of pith and of paper, delicately suspended near a vibrating tuning-fork, were observed to be [228] attracted as it were, to the origin of vibration, with a range of influence approximately proportional to the area of the disk. The same phenomenon was observed with the employment of a bell, when caused to sound by drawing a bow across its edge, excepting that at the nodes of oscillation no "attraction" was exhibited.

In an essay entitled "A synthetic Glance at the Forms and Forces of Matter," published in 1861, the same author, recapitulating his views and observations of 1832 and 1835, and still maintaining that all the properties of bodies are derivatives of their translatory or vibratory movements, and that the equilibrium and the phenomena of the world exist only under the condition of constant pressure of the incoercible tether upon coercible matter, and the reaction of the latter upon the former, argues that, " if it be shown that the vibration of the atoms of bodies may and actually does cause a rarefaction in the sphere of activity of each of the atoms," this constitutes a proof that " the approximation of the atoms of bodies of ponderable matter is due to the rarefaction of the imponderable fluid, and consequently to the diminution of its pressure in the space between the atoms of the same body ; " and hence that " we are compelled to admit that attraction is a mechanical force, consisting, first, of the rarefaction of the aether between molecules, masses, or the heavenly bodies, resulting from the ceaseless vibration of the atoms of ponderable matter, and secondly, of the reaction from the exterior pressure of the aether upon the same, resulting from the general pressure of the imponderable universal medium which constitutes the mother-liquor of the world."

In this article the writer brings out very distinctly an idea first suggested by Newton, and which has recently been fermenting, so to speak, in the minds of various speculative writers, to wit, that matter as experimentally cognizable by our senses — having for its lowest constituent unit the compounded molecule of uniform structure for each elementary substance, the indivisible " atom " of the chemist — has been by some mysterious process evolved in the indefinite past from the structureless impalpable eether filling immensity. That the ultimate molecule of matter as known to us is a highly complex or organized cosmos, appears to be sufficiently demonstrated by the definite multiple periodicities exhibited by gaseous spectra. If the sympathetic responses [229] of the aether indicate a community of nature with the absolute atoms of the molecule, whose tremblings they transmit, we are confronted with the paradox, that while iu the molecule these atoms are so firmly bound together that no known forces have ever been able to divorce them, m their isolated or discrete state constituting "the mother-liquor of the world," their repulsions are so intense that no known forces have ever been able to unite them.

It is impossible not to be struck with the originality of speculation and the ingenuity of experimentation by which, as Dr. Guyot believes, he has solved the great problem of energy or dynamic. But it is apparent at a glance that his system is at variance with every feature of the actual phenomenon of gravitation, and fails to represent any of the six conditions-precedent, perhaps excepting the first. If the resultant motion of translation from an acoustic vibration of air (or from a thermal vibration of aether) may be supposed to occur in a right line, it is not established that it can so continue for any considerable distance ; and the last five conditions are each and all directly incompatible with the assumption.

Perhaps the most palpable fault of the scheme however, is the violence done by it to the established law of the conservation of energy, while being proclaimed apparently in the interest of that law. A vibrating molecule is supposed to impress its motion upon an investing medium, without parting with any of its original vis viva; or in other words, it is miraculously endowed with an inexhaustible fund of dynamic action, and its motion though constantly expended in "work" performed, yet requires no regeneration.

Or on the other hand, if gravitation depend upon the vibrations transmitted from the active molecule as a center to the surrounding aether, this "attractive" action must decline with the expenditure of the vibratory energy, contrary to the observed fact as summed up in the sixth proposition.