IV. THE BEARING OF THE VIENNA WORK ON THE QUESTION OF THE EXISTENCE OF A SUB-ELECTRON
But let us suppose that these observers do actually work with particles of pure mercury and gold, as they think they do, and that the observational and evaporational errors do not account for the low values of
. Then what conclusion could legitimately be drawn from their data? Merely this and nothing more, that (1) Einstein’s Brownian-movement equation is not universally applicable, and (2) that the law of motion of their very minute charged particles through air is not yet fully known.[128] So long as they find exact multiple relationships, as Dr. Ehrenhaft now does, between the charges carried by a given particle when its charge is changed by the capture of ions or the direct loss of electrons, the charges on these ions must be the same as the ionic charges which I have accurately and consistently measured and found equal to
; for they, in their experiments, capture exactly the same sort of ions, produced in exactly the same way as those which I captured and measured in my experiments. That these same ions have one sort of a charge when captured by a big drop and another sort when captured by a little drop is obviously absurd. If they are not the same ions which are caught, then in order to reconcile the results with the existence of the exact multiple relationship found by Dr. Ehrenhaft as well as ourselves, it would be necessary to assume that there exist in the air an infinite number of different kinds of ionic charges corresponding to the infinite number of possible radii of drops, and that when a powerful electric field drives all of these ions toward a given drop this drop selects in each instance just the charge which corresponds to its particular radius. Such an assumption is not only too grotesque for serious consideration, but it is directly contradicted by my experiments, for I have repeatedly pointed out that with a given value of
I obtain exactly the same value of
, whether I work with big drops or with little ones.