We may also address ourselves to a more noble form of energy, and ask ourselves whether we are not, for the first time, in presence of a transformation of gravitational energy. It may be singular, but it is not absurd, to suppose that the unit of mass of radium is not attached to the earth with the same intensity as an inert body. M. Sagnac has commenced some experiments, as yet unpublished, in order to study the laws of the fall of a fragment of radium. They are necessarily very delicate, and the energetic and ingenious physicist has not yet succeeded in finishing them. [46] Let us suppose that he succeeds in demonstrating that the intensity of gravity is less for radium than for the platinum or the copper of which the pendulums used to illustrate the law of Newton are generally made; it would then be possible still to think that the laws of universal attraction are perfectly exact as regards the stars, and that ponderability is really a particular case of universal attraction, while in the case of radioactive bodies part of the gravitational energy is transformed in the course of its evolution and appears in the form of active radiation.
But for this explanation to be admitted, it would evidently need to be supported by very numerous facts. It might, no doubt, appear still more probable that the energy borrowed from the external medium by radium is one of those still unknown to us, but of which a vague instinct causes us to suspect the existence around us. It is indisputable, moreover, that the atmosphere in all directions is furrowed with active radiations; those of radium may be secondary radiations reflected by a kind of resonance phenomenon.
Certain experiments by Professors Elster and Geitel, however, are not favourable to this point of view. If an active body be surrounded by a radioactive envelope, a screen should prevent this body from receiving any impression from outside, and yet there is no diminution apparent in the activity presented by a certain quantity of radium when it is lowered to a depth of 800 metres under ground, in a region containing a notable quantity of pitchblende. These negative results are, on the other hand, so many successes for the partisans of the explanation of radioactivity by atomic energy.
CHAPTER X
THE ETHER AND MATTER
§ 1. THE RELATIONS BETWEEN THE ETHER AND MATTER
For some time past it has been the more or less avowed ambition of physicists to construct with the particles of ether all possible forms of corporeal existence; but our knowledge of the inmost nature of things has hitherto seemed too limited for us to attempt such an enterprise with any chance of success. The electronic hypothesis, however, which has furnished a satisfactory image of the most curious phenomena produced in the bosom of matter, has also led to a more complete electromagnetic theory of the ether than that of Maxwell, and this twofold result has given birth to the hope of arriving by means of this hypothesis at a complete co-ordination of the physical world.
The phenomena whose study may bring us to the very threshold of the problem, are those in which the connections between matter and the ether appear clearly and in a relatively simple manner. Thus in the phenomena of emission, ponderable matter is seen to give birth to waves which are transmitted by the ether, and by the phenomena of absorption it is proved that these waves disappear and excite modifications in the interior of the material bodies which receive them. We here catch in operation actual reciprocal actions and reactions between the ether and matter. If we could thoroughly comprehend these actions, we should no doubt be in a position to fill up the gap which separates the two regions separately conquered by physical science.
In recent years numerous researches have supplied valuable materials which ought to be utilized by those endeavouring to construct a theory of radiation. We are, perhaps, still ill informed as to the phenomena of luminescence in which undulations are produced in a complex manner, as in the case of a stick of moist phosphorus which is luminescent in the dark, or in that of a fluorescent screen. But we are very well acquainted with emission or absorption by incandescence, where the only transformation is that of calorific into radiating energy, or vice versa. It is in this case alone that can be correctly applied the celebrated demonstration by which Kirchhoff established, by considerations borrowed from thermodynamics, the proportional relations between the power of emission and that of absorption.