Page:Light waves and their uses.djvu/166

148. Thus, if we have a long cylindrical rod and we give one end of it a twist, the twist will travel along from one end to the other. If the medium, instead of being a solid rod, were a tube of liquid, and were twisted at one end, there would be no corresponding transmission of the twist to the other end, for a liquid cannot transmit a torsional strain. Hence this reasoning leads to the conclusion that if the medium which propagates light vibrations has the properties of ordinary matter, it must be considered to be an elastic solid rather than a fluid.

This conclusion was considered one of the most formidable objections to the undulatory theory that light consists of waves. For this medium, notwithstanding the necessity for the assumption that it has the properties of a solid, must yet be of such a nature as to offer little resistance to the motion of a body through it. Take, for example, the motion of the planets around the sun. The resistance of the medium is so small that the earth has been traveling around the sun millions of years without any appreciable increase in the length of the year. Even the vastly lighter and more attenuated comets return to the same point periodically, and the time of such periodical returns has been carefully noted from the earliest historical times, and yet no appreciable increase in it has been detected. We are thus confronted with the apparent inconsistency of a solid body which must at the same time possess in such a marked degree the properties of a perfect fluid as to offer no appreciable resistance to the motion of bodies so very light and extended as the comets. We are, however, not without analogies, for, as was stated in the first lecture, substances such as shoemaker's wax show the properties of an elastic solid when reacting against rapid motions, but act like a liquid under pressures.

In the case of shoemaker's wax both of these contradictory