The recent practically complete bridging of the gap between X-rays and light,[177] as well as that between heat waves and wireless waves,[178] with the perfectly continuous passage of the latter over into static electrical fields, appears to demand that, if we attempt to interpret high frequency electromagnetic waves—X-rays and light—in terms of undulatory “darts of light,” we also interpret wireless waves in the same way, and this in turn requires us to use a similar mechanism in the interpretation of static electrical fields. This brings us back to Thomson’s ether-string theory, which seems to be a necessary part of Einstein’s conception, if it is to have any physical basis whatever.
Two very potent objections, however, may be urged against all forms of ether-string theory. The first is that no one has ever yet been able to show that such a theory can predict any one of the facts of interference. The second is that there is direct positive evidence against the view that the ether possesses a fibrous structure. For if a static electrical field has a fibrous structure, as postulated by any form of ether-string theory, “each unit of positive electricity being the origin and each unit of negative electricity the termination of a Faraday tube,”[179] then the force acting on one single electron between the plates of an air condenser cannot possibly vary continuously with the potential difference between the plates. Now in the oil-drop experiments[180] we actually study the behavior in such an electric field of one single, isolated electron and we find, over the widest limits, exact proportionality between the field strength and the force acting on the electron as measured by the velocity with which the oil drop to which it is attached is dragged through the air.
When we maintain the field constant and vary the charge on the drop, the granular structure of electricity is proved by the discontinuous changes in the velocity, but when we maintain the charge constant and vary the field the lack of discontinuous change in the velocity disproves the contention of a fibrous structure in the field, unless the assumption be made that there are an enormous number of ether strings ending in one electron. Such an assumption takes most of the virtue out of an ether-string theory.
Despite, then, the apparently complete success of the Einstein equation, the physical theory of which it was designed to be the symbolic expression is thus far so irreconcilable with a whole group of well-established facts that some of the most penetrating of modern physicists cannot as yet accept it, and we are somewhat in the position of having built a very perfect structure and then knocked out entirely the underpinning without causing the building to fall. It stands complete and apparently well tested, but without any visible means of support. These supports must obviously exist, and the most fascinating problem of modern physics is to find them. Experiment has outrun theory, or, better, guided by unacceptable theory, it has discovered relationships which seem to be of the greatest interest and importance, but the reasons for them are as yet not at all understood.
VII. ATTEMPTS TOWARD A SOLUTION
It is possible, however, to go a certain distance toward a solution and to indicate some conditions which must be satisfied by the solution when it is found. For the energy
, with which the electron is found by experiment to escape from the atom, must have come either from the energy stored up inside of the atom or else from the light. There is no third possibility. Now the fact that the energy of emission is the same, whether the body from which it is emitted is held within an inch of the source, where the light is very intense, or a mile away, where it is very weak, would seem to indicate that the light simply pulls a trigger in the atom which itself furnishes all the energy with which the electron escapes, as was originally suggested by Lenard in 1902,[181] or else, if the light furnishes the energy, that light itself must consist of bundles of energy which keep together as they travel through space, as suggested in the Thomson-Einstein theory.
Yet the fact that the energy of emission is directly proportional to the frequency
