Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 66.djvu/65

Rh it anomalous dispersion. For these and numerous other phenomena no adequate theory is possible which does not have its foundation upon some assumed conception as to the constitution of matter.

The development of the modern idea of the ether forms one of the most interesting chapters in the history of physics. We find at first a tendency to assume a number of distinct media corresponding to the various effects (visual, chemical, thermal, phosphorescent, etc.) of light waves, and later the growth of the conception of a single medium, the luminiferous ether.

In the development of electricity and magnetism, meantime, the assumption of media was found to be an intellectual necessity without which no definite philosophy of the phenomena was possible. At first there was the same tendency to a multiplicity of media—there were the positive and negative electric fluids, the magnetic fluid, etc. Then there grew up in the fertile mind of Faraday that wonderful fabric of the scientific imagination, the electric field; the conception upon which all later attempts to form an idea of a thinkable mechanism of electric and magnetic action have been established.

It is the object of science, as has been pointed out by Ostwald, to reduce the number of hypotheses, and the highest development would be that in which a single hypothesis served to elucidate the relations of the entire universe. Maxwell's discovery that the whole theory of optics is capable of expression in terms identical with those found most convenient and suitable in electricity, in a word that optics may be treated simply as a branch of electromagnetics, was the first great step towards such a simplification of our fundamental conceptions. This was followed by Hertz's experimental demonstration of the existence of artificially produced electromagnetic waves in every respect identical with light waves, an achievement which served to establish upon a sure foundation the conception of a single medium. The idea of one universal medium as the mechanical basis for all physical phenomena was not altogether new to the theoretical physicist but the unification of optics and electricity did much to strengthen this conception.

The question of the ultimate structure of matter, as has already been pointed out, is also speculative in the sense that the mechanism upon which its properties are based is out of the range of direct observation. For the older chemistry and the older molecular physics the assumption of an absolutely simple atom and of molecules composed of comparatively simple groupings of such atoms sufficed. Physical chemistry and that new phase of molecular physics which has been termed the physics of the ion demand the breaking up of the atom into still smaller parts and the clothing of these with an electric charge. The extreme step in this direction is the suggestion of Larmor that the electron is a 'disembodied charge' of negative electricity.

Since, however, in the last analysis, the only conception having a