It was Faraday who put a stop to the invention of ethers, by suggesting that the so-called luminiferous ether might be the one concerned in all the different phenomena, and who pointed out that the arrangement of iron filings about a magnet was indicative of the direction of the stresses in the ether. This suggestion did not meet the approval of the mathematical physicists of his day, for it necessitated
the abandonment of the conceptions they had worked with, as well as the terminology which had been employed, and made it needful to reconstruct all their work to make it intelligible—a labour which was the more distasteful as it was forced upon them by one who, although expert enough in experimentation, was not a mathematician, and who boasted that the most complicated mathematical work he ever did was to turn the crank of a calculating machine; who did all his work, formed his conclusions, and then said—“The work is done; hand it over to the computers.”
It has turned out that Faraday's mechanical conceptions were right. Every one now knows of Maxwell's work, which was to start with Faraday's conceptions as to magnetic phenomena, and follow them out to their logical conclusions, applying them to molecules and the reactions of the latter upon the ether. Thus he was led to conclude that light was an electro-magnetic phenomenon; that is, that the waves which constitute light, and the waves produced by changing magnetism were identical in their nature, were in the same medium, travelled with the same velocity, were capable of refraction, and so on. Now that all this is a matter of common knowledge to-day, it is curious to look back no further than ten years. Maxwell's conclusions
were adopted by scarcely a physicist in the world. Although it was known that inductive action travelled with finite velocity in space, and that an electro-magnet would affect the space about it practically inversely as the square of the distance, and that such phenomena as are involved in telephonic induction between circuits could have no other meaning than the one assigned by Maxwell, yet nearly all the physicists failed to form the only conception of it that was possible, and waited for Hertz to devise apparatus for producing interference before they grasped it. It was even then so new, to some, that it was proclaimed to be a demonstration of the existence of the ether itself, as well as a method of producing waves short enough to enable one to notice interference phenomena. It is obvious that Hertz himself must have had the mechanics of wave-motion plainly in mind, or he would not have planned such experiments. The outcome of it all is, that we now have experimental demonstration, as well as theoretical reason for believing, that the ether, once considered as only luminiferous, is concerned in all electric and magnetic phenomena, and that waves set up in it by electro-magnetic actions are capable of being reflected, refracted, polarized, and twisted, in the same way as ordinary light-waves can be, and that the laws of optics are applicable to both.
CHAPTER II
PROPERTIES OF MATTER AND ETHER
Properties of Matter and Ether compared—Discontinuity versus Continuity—Size of atoms—Astronomical distances—Number of atoms in the universe—Ether unlimited—Kinds of Matter, permanent qualities of—Atomic structure; vortex-rings, their properties—Ether structureless—Matter gravitative, Ether not—Friction in Matter, Ether frictionless—Chemical properties—Energy in Matter and in Ether—Matter as a transformer of Energy—Elasticity—Vibratory rates and waves—Density—Heat—Indestructibility of Matter—Inertia in Matter and in Ether—Matter not inert—Magnetism and Ether waves—States of Matter—Cohesion and chemism affected by temperature—Shearing stress in Solids and in Ether—Ether pressure—Sensation dependent upon Matter—Nervous system not affected by Ether states—Other stresses in Ether—Transformations of Motion—Terminology.
A common conception of the ether has been that it is a finer-grained substance than ordinary matter, but otherwise so like the latter that the laws found to hold good with matter were equally applicable to the ether, and hence the mechanical conceptions