Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 34.djvu/406

392 welcomed it, its adoption among all physicists of note may be said to be now universal, and a new era in our history begins with it. I mean by the recognition that there is one radiant energy which appears to us as "actinic," or "luminous," or "thermal" radiation, according to the way we observe it. Heat and light, then, are not things in themselves, but, whether different sensations in our own bodies or different effects in other bodies, are merely effects of this mysterious thing we call radiant energy, without doing more in this than give a name to the ignorance which still hangs over the ultimate cause.

I am coming down dangerously near our own time—dangerously for one who would be impartial in dealing with names of those living and with controversies still burning. In such a brief review of this century's study of radiant energy in other forms than light, it has been necessary to pass without mention the labors of such men as Pouillot and Becquerel in France, of Tyndall in England, and of Henry in America. It has been necessary to omit all mention of those who have advanced the knowledge of radiant energy as light, or I should have had to speak of labors so diverse as those of Fraunhofer, of Kirchhoff, of Fresnel, of Stokes, of Lockyer, and many more. I have made no mention, in the instructive history of error, of many celebrated experimental researches; in particular of such a problem as the measurement of solar heat, great in importance, but apparently most simple in solution, yet which has now been carried on from generation to generation, each experimenter materially altering the result of his predecessor, and where our successors will probably correct our own results in time. I have not spoken of certain purely experimental investigations, like those of Dulong and Petit, which have involved immense and conscientious labor, and have apparently rightly earned the name of "classic" from one generation, only to be recognized by the next as leading to wholly untrustworthy results, and leaving the work to be done again with new methods, guided by new principles.

In these instances, painstaking experiments have proved insufficient, less from want of skill in the investigator than from his ignorance of principles not established in time to enable him to interpret his experiments; but, if there were opportunity, it would be profitable to show how inexplicably sometimes error flourishes, grows, and maintains an apparently healthy appearance of truth, without having any root whatever. Perhaps I may cite one instance of this last from my own experience. About fifteen years ago it was generally believed that the earth's atmosphere acted exactly the part of the glass in a hot-bed, and that it kept the planet warm by exerting a specially powerful absorption on the infra-red rays.