Page:The Foundations of Science (1913).djvu/333

 conscious of them. Well, then, if they have done their best to put us into this embarrassment, it is proper also that they help us to get out of it

They must subject to critical examination all these new views I have just outlined before you, and abandon the principles only after having made a loyal effort to save them. What can they do in this sense? That is what I will try to explain.

It is a question before all of endeavoring to obtain a more satisfactory theory of the electrodynamics of bodies in motion. It is there especially, as I have sufficiently shown above, that difficulties accumulate. It is useless to heap up hypotheses, we can not satisfy all the principles at once; so far, one has succeeded in safeguarding some only on condition of sacrificing the others; but all hope of obtaining better results is not yet lost. Let us take, then, the theory of Lorentz, turn it in all senses, modify it little by little, and perhaps everything will arrange itself.

Thus in place of supposing that bodies in motion undergo a contraction in the sense of the motion, and that this contraction is the same whatever be the nature of these bodies and the forces to which they are otherwise subjected, could we not make a more simple and natural hypothesis? We might imagine, for example, that it is the ether which is modified when it is in relative motion in reference to the material medium which penetrates it, that, when it is thus modified, it no longer transmits perturbations with the same velocity in every direction. It might transmit more rapidly those which are propagated parallel to the motion of the medium, whether in the same sense or in the opposite sense, and less rapidly those which are propagated perpendicularly. The wave surfaces would no longer be spheres, but ellipsoids, and we could dispense with that extraordinary contraction of all bodies.

I cite this only as an example, since the modifications that might be essayed would be evidently susceptible of infinite variation.

Aberration and Astronomy.—It is possible also that astronomy may some day furnish us data on this point; she it was in the main who raised the question in making us acquainted with the