Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 70.djvu/351

Rh these conditions can there be compensation between action and reaction, at least for an observer who should take account only of the movements of matter, that is, of the electrons, and who should be ignorant of those of the ether that he could not see? Evidently not. Even if the compensation should be exact, it could not be simultaneous. The perturbation is propagated with a finite velocity; it, therefore, reaches the second electron only when the first has long ago entered upon its rest. This second electron, therefore, will undergo, after a delay, the action of the first, but will certainly not at that moment react upon it, since around this first electron nothing any longer budges.

The analysis of the facts permits us to be still more precise. Imagine, for example, a Hertzian oscillator, like those used in wireless telegraphy; it sends out energy in every direction; but we can provide it with a parabolic mirror, as Hertz did with his smallest oscillators, so as to send all the energy produced in a single direction. What happens then according to the theory? The apparatus recoils, as if it were a cannon and the projected energy a ball; and that is contrary to the principle of Newton, since our projectile here has no mass, it is not matter, it is energy. The case is still the same, moreover, with a beacon light provided with a reflector, since light is nothing but a perturbation of the electromagnetic field. This beacon light should recoil as if the light it sends out were a projectile. What is the force that should produce this recoil? It is what is called Maxwell-Bartholdi pressure. It is very minute, and it has been difficult to put it in evidence even with the most sensitive radiometers; but it suffices that it exists.

If all the energy issuing from our oscillator falls on a receiver, this will act as if it had received a mechanical shock, which will represent in a sense the compensation of the oscillator's recoil; the reaction will be equal to the action, but it will not be simultaneous; the receiver will move on, but not at the moment when the oscillator recoils. If the energy propagates itself indefinitely without encountering a receiver, the compensation will never occur.

Shall we say that the space which separates the oscillator from the receiver and which the perturbation must pass over in going from the one to the other is not void, that it is full not only of ether, but of air, or even in the interplanetary spaces of some fluid subtile but still ponderable; that this matter undergoes the shock like the receiver at the moment when the energy reaches it, and recoils in its turn when the perturbation quits it? That would save Newton's principle, but that is not true. If energy in its diffusion remained always attached to some material substratum, then matter in motion would carry along light with it, and Fizeau has demonstrated that it does nothing of the sort, at least for air. Michelson and Morley have since confirmed this.