Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/454

448 had written a treatise on electricity which few could read and no one could fully understand. A distinguished French physicist said he understood everything in Maxwell's book except what was meant by a body charged with electricity. Maxwell had given us but a vague idea of electric displacements and displacement currents, because his ideas were bound up in equations without experimental verification, or even illustration.

Then came Hertz's researches which confirmed the fundamental hypotheses of the Faraday Maxwell theory and "annexed to the domain of electricity the territory of light and radiant heat." "Many thinkers," said Lord Kelvin, "have helped to build up the nineteenth-century school of plenum, one ether for light, heat, electricity and magnetism; and Hertz's electrical papers, given to the world in the last decade of the century, will be a permanent monument of the splendid consummation now realized." Some one has said that Hertz enthroned Maxwell in every chair of physics in Europe and America. It appears that many of the ancient philosophers had a shadowy idea of a medium in space, which they personified, and called "Æther." According to Heriod Æther was the son of Erebus and Night and the brother of Day. The Orphic hymns speak of Æther as the soul of the world, the animator of all things, the principle of life. The children of Æther and Day were the objects about us, the heavens with all their stars, the land, the sea. Æther was the lightest and most active form of matter and Day had the power of converting it into heavier matter. Plato speaks of the æther as being a form of matter far purer and lighter than air, so light that "its weight can not be ascertained because distributed through infinite space."

During the fifteen years following the publication of Hertz's researches, it is probable that greater homage was paid to ether by modern physicists than was ever given it by the ancients. The ether was appealed to from every quarter. Light, radiant heat and electric waves were ether waves. An electric charge was an ether strain. An electric current was a phenomenon in the ether and not in the wire in which it appeared to flow. Magnetism and gravitation were phenomena of the ether. Matter itself became an aggregation of ether vortices. Ether and motion were expected to explain everything. Such terms as natural philosophy and physics were discarded by some of our text-book writers who adopted such titles as "matter, ether and motion"; "ether physics"; "ether dynamics"; "the mechanics of the ether." Physics was defined as the science of motion.

The classical mechanics of La Grange was built on what were consee corrected paragraph below [sic] in his treatise on mechanics published in 1894, endeavored to eliminate sideredsee corrected paragraph below [sic] fundamental concepts—mass, force, space and time. Hertz,

The above paragraph should be: The classical mechanics of La Grange was built on what were considered fundamental concepts—mass, force, space and time. Hertz, in his treatise on mechanics published in 1894, endeavored to eliminate — Ineuw talk 01:05, 25 November 2017 (UTC)