Consider gravely what that number means, and what we are to infer from it. What force is there in space between my eye and that light? What forces are there in space between our eyes and the sun and our eyes and the remotest visible star! There is matter and there is motion, but what magnitude of force may there be?
I move through this "luminiferous ether" as if it were nothing. But were there vibrations with such frequency in a medium of steel or brass, they would be measured by millions and millions and millions of tons action on a square inch of matter. There are no such forces in our air. Comets make a disturbance in the air, and perhaps the luminiferous ether is split up by the motion of a comet through it. So when we explain the nature of electricity, we explain it by a motion of the luminiferous ether. We cannot say that it is electricity. What can this luminiferous ether be? It is something that the planets move through with the greatest ease. It permeates our air; it is nearly in the same condition, so far as our means of judging are concerned, in our air and in the interplanetary space. The air disturbs it but little; you may reduce the air by air pumps to the hundred thousandth of its density, and you make little effect in the transmission of light through it. The luminiferous ether is an elastic solid. The nearest analogy I can give you is this jelly which you see.[6] The nearest analogy to the waves of light is the motion, which you can imagine, of this elastic jelly, with a ball of wood floating in the middle of it. Look there, when with my hand I vibrate the little red ball up and down, or when I turn it quickly round the vertical diameter, alternately in opposite directions; that is the nearest representation I can give you of the vibrations of luminiferous ether.
Another illustration is Scottish shoemaker's wax or Burgundy pitch, but I know Scottish shoemaker's wax better. It is heavier than water, and absolutely answers my purpose. I take a large slab of the wax, place it in a glass jar filled with water, place a number of corks on the lower side and bullets on the upper side. It is brittle like the Trinidad or Burgundy pitch which I have in my hand. You can see how hard it is, but if left to itself it flows like a fluid. The shoemaker's wax breaks with a brittle fracture, but it is viscous, and gradually yields.
What we know of the luminiferous ether is that it has the rigidity of a solid, and gradually yields. Whether or not it is brittle and cracks we cannot yet tell, but I believe the discoveries in electricity, and the motions of comets and the marvelous spurts of light from them, tend to show cracks in the luminiferous ether—show a correspondence between the electric flash and the aurora borealis and cracks in the luminiferous ether. Do not take this as an assertion, it is hardly more than a vague scientific dream; but you may regard the existence of the luminiferous ether as a reality of science, that is, we have an all-pervading medium, an elastic solid, with a great degree of rigidity; its rigidity is so prodigious in proportion to its density that the vibrations of light in it have the frequencies I have mentioned, with the wave lengths I have mentioned.
The fundamental question as to whether or not luminiferous ether has gravity has not been answered. We have no knowledge that the luminiferous ether is attracted by gravity; it is sometimes called imponderable because some people vainly imagine that it has no weight. I call it matter with the same kind of rigidity that this elastic jelly has.
Here are two tourmalines; if you look through them toward the light, you see the white light all around, i. e., they are transparent. If I turn round one of these tourmalines the light is extinguished, it is absolutely black, as though the tourmalines were opaque. This is an illustration of what is called polarization of light. I cannot speak to you about qualities of light without speaking of the polarization of light. I want to show you a most beautiful effect of polarizing light, before illustrating a little further by means of this large mechanical illustration which you have in the bowl of jelly. Now I put in the lantern another instrument called a "Nicol prism." What you saw first were two plates of the crystal tourmaline which came from Brazil, I believe, having the property of letting light pass when both plates are placed in one particular direction as regards their axes of crystallization, and extinguishing it when it passes through the first plate held in another direction. We have now an instrument which also gives rays of polarized light. A Nico prism is a piece of Iceland spar, cut in two and turned, one part relatively to the other, in a very ingenious way, and put together again, and cemented into one by Canada balsam. The Nicol prism takes advantage of the property which the spar has of double refraction, and produces the phenomenon which I now show you.
I turn one prism round in a certain direction and you get light, a maximum of light. I turn it through a right angle and you get blackness. I turn it one-quarter round again and get maximum light; one-quarter more, maximum blackness; one-quarter more, and bright light. We rarely have such a grand specimen of a Nicol prism as this.
There is another way of producing polarized light. I stand before that light, and look at its reflection in a plate of glass on the table through one of the Nicol prisms, which I turn round, so. Now I must incline that piece of glass at a particular angle, rather more than forty-five degrees; I find a particular angle in which, if I look at it and then turn the prism round in the hand, the effect is absolutely to extinguish the light in one position and to give it maximum brightness in another position. I use the term "absolute" somewhat rashly. It is only a reduction to a very small quantity of light, not an absolute annulment as we have in the case of the two Nicol prisms used conjointly. Those of you who have never heard of this before would not know what I am talking about. As to the mechanics of the thing, it could only be explained to you by a course of lectures on physical optics. The thing is this: vibrations of light must be in a definite direction relatively to the line in which the light travels.
Look at this diagram: the light goes from left to right; we have vibrations perpendicular to the line of transmission. There is a line up and down, which is the line of vibration. Imagine here a source of light, violet light, and here in front of it is the line of propagation. Sound vibrations are to and fro; this is transverse to the line of propagation. Here is another, perpendicular to the diagram, still following the law of transverse vibration; here is another circular vibration. Imagine a long rope: you whirl one end of it, and you send a screw-like motion running along; you can get the circular motion in one direction or in the opposite.
Plane polarized light is light with the vibrations all in a single plane, perpendicular to the plane through the ray, which is technically called the "plane of polarization." Circular polarized light consists of undulations of luminiferous ether having a circular motion. Elliptically polarized light is something between the two, not in a straight line, and not in a circular line; the course of vibration is an ellipse. Polarized light is light that performs its motions continually in one mode or direction. If in a straight line, it is plane polarized; if in a circular direction, it is circularly polarized light; when elliptical, it is elliptically polarized light.