A History of Science Volume III Part 15

"If it be considered as now established that in many cases no other effect of motion can be traced except heat, and that no other cause than motion can be found for the heat that is produced, we prefer the a.s.sumption that heat proceeds from motion to the a.s.sumption of a cause without effect and of an effect without a cause. Just as the chemist, instead of allowing oxygen and hydrogen to disappear without further investigation, and water to be produced in some inexplicable manner, establishes a connection between oxygen and hydrogen on the one hand, and water on the other.

"We may conceive the natural connection existing between falling force, motion, and heat as follows: We know that heat makes its appearance when the separate particles of a body approach nearer to each other; condensation produces heat. And what applies to the smallest particles of matter, and the smallest intervals between them, must also apply to large ma.s.ses and to measurable distances. The falling of a weight is a diminution of the bulk of the earth, and must therefore without doubt be related to the quant.i.ty of heat thereby developed; this quant.i.ty of heat must be proportional to the greatness of the weight and its distance from the ground. From this point of view we are easily led to the equations between falling force, motion, and heat that have already been discussed.

"But just as little as the connection between falling force and motion authorizes the conclusion that the essence of falling force is motion, can such a conclusion be adopted in the case of heat. We are, on the contrary, rather inclined to infer that, before it can become heat, motion must cease to exist as motion, whether simple, or vibratory, as in the case of light and radiant heat, etc.

"If falling force and motion are equivalent to heat, heat must also naturally be equivalent to motion and falling force. Just as heat appears as an EFFECT of the diminution of bulk and of the cessation of motion, so also does heat disappear as a CAUSE when its effects are produced in the shape of motion, expansion, or raising of weight.

"In water-mills the continual diminution in bulk which the earth undergoes, owing to the fall of the water, gives rise to motion, which afterwards disappears again, calling forth unceasingly a great quant.i.ty of heat; and, inversely, the steam-engine serves to decompose heat again into motion or the raising of weights. A locomotive with its train may be compared to a distilling apparatus; the heat applied under the boiler pa.s.ses off as motion, and this is deposited again as heat at the axles of the wheels."

Mayer then closes his paper with the following deduction: "The solution of the equations subsisting between falling force and motion requires that the s.p.a.ce fallen through in a given time--e. g., the first second--should be experimentally determined. In like manner, the solution of the equations subsisting between falling force and motion on the one hand and heat on the other requires an answer to the question, How great is the quant.i.ty of heat which corresponds to a given quant.i.ty of motion or falling force? For instance, we must ascertain how high a given weight requires to be raised above the ground in order that its falling force maybe equivalent to the raising of the temperature of an equal weight of water from 0 degrees to 1 degrees centigrade. The attempt to show that such an equation is the expression of a physical truth may be regarded as the substance of the foregoing remarks.

"By applying the principles that have been set forth to the relations subsisting between the temperature and the volume of gases, we find that the sinking of a mercury column by which a gas is compressed is equivalent to the quant.i.ty of heat set free by the compression; and hence it follows, the ratio between the capacity for heat of air under constant pressure and its capacity under constant volume being taken as = 1.421, that the warming of a given weight of water from 0 degrees to equal weight from the height of about three hundred and sixty-five metres. If we compare with this result the working of our best steam-engines, we see how small a part only of the heat applied under the boiler is really transformed into motion or the raising of weights; and this may serve as justification for the attempts at the profitable production of motion by some other method than the expenditure of the chemical difference between carbon and oxygen--more particularly by the transformation into motion of electricity obtained by chemical means."(1)

MAYER AND HELMHOLTZ

Here, then, was this obscure German physician, leading the humdrum life of a village pract.i.tioner, yet seeing such visions as no human being in the world had ever seen before.

The great principle he had discovered became the dominating thought of his life, and filled all his leisure hours. He applied it far and wide, amid all the phenomena of the inorganic and organic worlds. It taught him that both vegetables and animals are machines, bound by the same laws that hold sway over inorganic matter, transforming energy, but creating nothing. Then his mind reached out into s.p.a.ce and met a universe made up of questions. Each star that blinked down at him as he rode in answer to a night-call seemed an interrogation-point asking, How do I exist? Why have I not long since burned out if your theory of conservation be true? No one had hitherto even tried to answer that question; few had so much as realized that it demanded an answer. But the Heilbronn physician understood the question and found an answer.

His meteoric hypothesis, published in 1848, gave for the first time a tenable explanation of the persistent light and heat of our sun and the myriad other suns--an explanation to which we shall recur in another connection.

All this time our isolated philosopher, his brain aflame with the glow of creative thought, was quite unaware that any one else in the world was working along the same lines. And the outside world was equally heedless of the work of the Heilbronn physician. There was no friend to inspire enthusiasm and give courage, no kindred spirit to react on this masterful but lonely mind. And this is the more remarkable because there are few other cases where a master-originator in science has come upon the scene except as the pupil or friend of some other master-originator.

Of the men we have noticed in the present connection, Young was the friend and confrere of Davy; Davy, the protege of Rumford; Faraday, the pupil of Davy; Fresnel, the co-worker with Arago; Colding, the confrere of Oersted; Joule, the pupil of Dalton. But Mayer is an isolated phenomenon--one of the lone mountain-peak intellects of the century.

That estimate may be exaggerated which has called him the Galileo of the nineteenth century, but surely no lukewarm praise can do him justice.

Yet for a long time his work attracted no attention whatever. In 1847, when another German physician, Hermann von Helmholtz, one of the most ma.s.sive and towering intellects of any age, had been independently led to comprehension of the doctrine of the conservation of energy and published his treatise on the subject, he had hardly heard of his countryman Mayer. When he did hear of him, however, he hastened to renounce all claim to the doctrine of conservation, though the world at large gives him credit of independent even though subsequent discovery.

JOULE'S PAPER OF 1843

Meantime, in England, Joule was going on from one experimental demonstration to another, oblivious of his German compet.i.tors and almost as little noticed by his own countrymen. He read his first paper before the chemical section of the British a.s.sociation for the Advancement of Science in 1843, and no one heeded it in the least. It is well worth our while, however, to consider it at length. It bears the t.i.tle, "On the Calorific Effects of Magneto-Electricity, and the Mechanical Value of Heat." The full text, as published in the Report of the British a.s.sociation, is as follows:

"Although it has been long known that fine platinum wire can be ignited by magneto-electricity, it still remained a matter of doubt whether heat was evolved by the COILS in which the magneto-electricity was generated; and it seemed indeed not unreasonable to suppose that COLD was produced there in order to make up for the heat evolved by the other part of the circuit. The author therefore has endeavored to clear up this uncertainty by experiment. His apparatus consisted of a small compound electro-magnet, immersed in water, revolving between the poles of a powerful stationary magnet. The magneto-electricity developed in the coils of the revolving electro-magnet was measured by an accurate galvanometer; and the temperature of the water was taken before and after each experiment by a very delicate thermometer. The influence of the temperature of the surrounding atmospheric air was guarded against by covering the revolving tube with flannel, etc., and by the adoption of a system of interpolation. By an extensive series of experiments with the above apparatus the author succeeded in proving that heat is evolved by the coils of the magneto-electrical machine, as well as by any other part of the circuit, in proportion to the resistance to conduction of the wire and the square of the current; the magneto having, under comparable circ.u.mstances, the same calorific power as the voltaic electricity.

"Professor Jacobi, of St. Petersburg, bad shown that the motion of an electro-magnetic machine generates magneto-electricity in opposition to the voltaic current of the battery. The author had observed the same phenomenon on arranging his apparatus as an electro-magnetic machine; but had found that no additional heat was evolved on account of the conflict of forces in the coil of the electro-magnet, and that the heat evolved by the coil remained, as before, proportional to the square of the current. Again, by turning the machine contrary to the direction of the attractive forces, so as to increase the intensity of the voltaic current by the a.s.sistance of the magneto-electricity, he found that the evolution of heat was still proportional to the square of the current.

The author discovered, therefore, that the heat evolved by the voltaic current is invariably proportional to the square of the current, however the intensity of the current may be varied by magnetic induction. But Dr. Faraday has shown that the chemical effects of the current are simply as its quant.i.ty. Therefore he concluded that in the electro-magnetic engine a part of the heat due to the chemical actions of the battery is lost by the circuit, and converted into mechanical power; and that when the electro-magnetic engine is turned CONTRARY to the direction of the attractive forces, a greater quant.i.ty of heat is evolved by the circuit than is due to the chemical reactions of the battery, the over-plus quant.i.ty being produced by the conversion of the mechanical force exerted in turning the machine. By a dynamometrical apparatus attached to his machine, the author has ascertained that, in all the above cases, a quant.i.ty of heat, capable of increasing the temperature of a pound of water by one degree of Fahrenheit's scale, is equal to the mechanical force capable of raising a weight of about eight hundred and thirty pounds to the height of one foot."(2)

JOULE OR MAYER?

Two years later Joule wished to read another paper, but the chairman hinted that time was limited, and asked him to confine himself to a brief verbal synopsis of the results of his experiments. Had the chairman but known it, he was curtailing a paper vastly more important than all the other papers of the meeting put together. However, the synopsis was given, and one man was there to hear it who had the genius to appreciate its importance. This was William Thomson, the present Lord Kelvin, now known to all the world as among the greatest of natural philosophers, but then only a novitiate in science. He came to Joule's aid, started rolling the ball of controversy, and subsequently a.s.sociated himself with the Manchester experimenter in pursuing his investigations.

But meantime the acknowledged leaders of British science viewed the new doctrine askance. Faraday, Brewster, Herschel--those were the great names in physics at that day, and no one of them could quite accept the new views regarding energy. For several years no older physicist, speaking with recognized authority, came forward in support of the doctrine of conservation. This culminating thought of the first half of the nineteenth century came silently into the world, unheralded and unopposed. The fifth decade of the century had seen it elaborated and substantially demonstrated in at least three different countries, yet even the leaders of thought did not so much as know of its existence.

In 1853 Whewell, the historian of the inductive sciences, published a second edition of his history, and, as Huxley has pointed out, he did not so much as refer to the revolutionizing thought which even then was a full decade old.

By this time, however, the battle was brewing. The rising generation saw the importance of a law which their elders could not appreciate, and soon it was noised abroad that there were more than one claimant to the honor of discovery. Chiefly through the efforts of Professor Tyndall, the work of Mayer became known to the British public, and a most regrettable controversy ensued between the partisans of Mayer and those of Joule--a bitter controversy, in which Davy's contention that science knows no country was not always regarded, and which left its scars upon the hearts and minds of the great men whose personal interests were involved.

And so to this day the question who is the chief discoverer of the law of the conservation of energy is not susceptible of a categorical answer that would satisfy all philosophers. It is generally held that the first choice lies between Joule and Mayer. Professor Tyndall has expressed the belief that in future each of these men will be equally remembered in connection with this work. But history gives us no warrant for such a hope. Posterity in the long run demands always that its heroes shall stand alone. Who remembers now that Robert Hooke contested with Newton the discovery of the doctrine of universal gravitation? The judgment of posterity is unjust, but it is inexorable. And so we can little doubt that a century from now one name will be mentioned as that of the originator of the great doctrine of the conservation of energy. The man whose name is thus remembered will perhaps be spoken of as the Galileo, the Newton, of the nineteenth century; but whether the name thus dignified by the final verdict of history will be that of Colding, Mohr, Mayer, Helmholtz, or Joule, is not as, yet decided.

LORD KELVIN AND THE DISSIPATION OF ENERGY

The gradual permeation of the field by the great doctrine of conservation simply repeated the history of the introduction of every novel and revolutionary thought. Necessarily the elder generation, to whom all forms of energy were imponderable fluids, must pa.s.s away before the new conception could claim the field. Even the word energy, though Young had introduced it in 1807, did not come into general use till some time after the middle of the century. To the generality of philosophers (the word physicist was even less in favor at this time) the various forms of energy were still subtile fluids, and never was idea relinquished with greater unwillingness than this. The experiments of Young and Fresnel had convinced a large number of philosophers that light is a vibration and not a substance; but so great an authority as Biot clung to the old emission idea to the end of his life, in 1862, and held a following.

Meantime, however, the company of brilliant young men who had just served their apprentices.h.i.+p when the doctrine of conservation came upon the scene had grown into authoritative positions, and were battling actively for the new ideas. Confirmatory evidence that energy is a molecular motion and not an "imponderable" form of matter acc.u.mulated day by day. The experiments of two Frenchmen, Hippolyte L. Fizeau and Leon Foucault, served finally to convince the last lingering sceptics that light is an undulation; and by implication brought heat into the same category, since James David Forbes, the Scotch physicist, had shown in 1837 that radiant heat conforms to the same laws of polarization and double refraction that govern light. But, for that matter, the experiments that had established the mechanical equivalent of heat hardly left room for doubt as to the immateriality of this "imponderable." Doubters had indeed, expressed scepticism as to the validity of Joule's experiments, but the further researches, experimental and mathematical, of such workers as Thomson (Lord Kelvin), Rankine, and Tyndall in Great Britain, of Helmholtz and Clausius in Germany, and of Regnault in France, dealing with various manifestations of heat, placed the evidence beyond the reach of criticism.

Out of these studies, just at the middle of the century, to which the experiments of Mayer and Joule had led, grew the new science of thermo-dynamics. Out of them also grew in the mind of one of the investigators a new generalization, only second in importance to the doctrine of conservation itself. Professor William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) in his studies in thermodynamics was early impressed with the fact that whereas all the molar motion developed through labor or gravity could be converted into heat, the process is not fully reversible. Heat can, indeed, be converted into molar motion or work, but in the process a certain amount of the heat is radiated into s.p.a.ce and lost. The same thing happens whenever any other form of energy is converted into molar motion. Indeed, every trans.m.u.tation of energy, of whatever character, seems complicated by a tendency to develop heat, part of which is lost. This observation led Professor Thomson to his doctrine of the dissipation of energy, which he formulated before the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1852, and published also in the Philosophical Magazine the same year, the t.i.tle borne being, "On a Universal Tendency in Nature to the Dissipation of Mechanical Energy."

From the principle here expressed Professor Thomson drew the startling conclusion that, "since any restoration of this mechanical energy without more than an equivalent dissipation is impossible," the universe, as known to us, must be in the condition of a machine gradually running down; and in particular that the world we live on has been within a finite time unfit for human habitation, and must again become so within a finite future. This thought seems such a commonplace to-day that it is difficult to realize how startling it appeared half a century ago. A generation trained, as ours has been, in the doctrines of the conservation and dissipation of energy as the very alphabet of physical science can but ill appreciate the mental att.i.tude of a generation which for the most part had not even thought it problematical whether the sun could continue to give out heat and light forever. But those advance thinkers who had grasped the import of the doctrine of conservation could at once appreciate the force of Thomson's doctrine of dissipation, and realize the complementary character of the two conceptions.

Here and there a thinker like Rankine did, indeed, attempt to fancy conditions under which the energy lost through dissipation might be restored to availability, but no such effort has met with success, and in time Professor Thomson's generalization and his conclusions as to the consequences of the law involved came to be universally accepted.

The introduction of the new views regarding the nature of energy followed, as I have said, the course of every other growth of new ideas.

Young and imaginative men could accept the new point of view; older philosophers, their minds channelled by preconceptions, could not get into the new groove. So strikingly true is this in the particular case now before us that it is worth while to note the ages at the time of the revolutionary experiments of the men whose work has been mentioned as entering into the scheme of evolution of the idea that energy is merely a manifestation of matter in motion. Such a list will tell the story better than a volume of commentary.

Observe, then, that Davy made his epochal experiment of melting ice by friction when he was a youth of twenty. Young was no older when he made his first communication to the Royal Society, and was in his twenty-seventh year when he first actively espoused the undulatory theory. Fresnel was twenty-six when he made his first important discoveries in the same field; and Arago, who at once became his champion, was then but two years his senior, though for a decade he had been so famous that one involuntarily thinks of him as belonging to an elder generation.

Forbes was under thirty when he discovered the polarization of heat, which pointed the way to Mohr, then thirty-one, to the mechanical equivalent. Joule was twenty-two in 1840, when his great work was begun; and Mayer, whose discoveries date from the same year, was then twenty-six, which was also the age of Helmholtz when he published his independent discovery of the same law. William Thomson was a youth just past his majority when he came to the aid of Joule before the British Society, and but seven years older when he formulated his own doctrine of the dissipation of energy. And Clausius and Rankine, who are usually mentioned with Thomson as the great developers of thermo-dynamics, were both far advanced with their novel studies before they were thirty.

With such a list in mind, we may well agree with the father of inductive science that "the man who is young in years may be old in hours."

Yet we must not forget that the s.h.i.+eld has a reverse side. For was not the greatest of observing astronomers, Herschel, past thirty-five before he ever saw a telescope, and past fifty before he discovered the heat rays of the spectrum? And had not Faraday reached middle life before he turned his attention especially to electricity? Clearly, then, to make this phrase complete, Bacon should have added that "the man who is old in years may be young in imagination." Here, however, even more appropriate than in the other case--more's the pity--would have been the application of his qualifying clause: "but that happeneth rarely."

THE FINAL UNIFICATION

There are only a few great generalizations as yet thought out in any single field of science. Naturally, then, after a great generalization has found definitive expression, there is a period of lull before another forward move. In the case of the doctrines of energy, the lull has lasted half a century. Throughout this period, it is true, a mult.i.tude of workers have been delving in the field, and to the casual observer it might seem as if their activity had been boundless, while the practical applications of their ideas--as exemplified, for example, in the telephone, phonograph, electric light, and so on--have been little less than revolutionary. Yet the most competent of living authorities, Lord Kelvin, could a.s.sert in 1895 that in fifty years he had learned nothing new regarding the nature of energy.

This, however, must not be interpreted as meaning that the world has stood still during these two generations. It means rather that the rank and file have been moving forward along the road the leaders had already travelled. Only a few men in the world had the range of thought regarding the new doctrine of energy that Lord Kelvin had at the middle of the century. The few leaders then saw clearly enough that if one form of energy is in reality merely an undulation or vibration among the particles of "ponderable" matter or of ether, all other manifestations of energy must be of the same nature. But the rank and file were not even within sight of this truth for a long time after they had partly grasped the meaning of the doctrine of conservation. When, late in the fifties, that marvellous young Scotchman, James Clerk-Maxwell, formulating in other words an idea of Faraday's, expressed his belief that electricity and magnetism are but manifestations of various conditions of stress and motion in the ethereal medium (electricity a displacement of strain, magnetism a whirl in the ether), the idea met with no immediate popularity. And even less cordial was the reception given the same thinker's theory, put forward in 1863, that the ethereal undulations producing the phenomenon we call light differ in no respect except in their wave-length from the pulsations of electro-magnetism.

At about the same time Helmholtz formulated a somewhat similar electro-magnetic theory of light; but even the weight of this combined authority could not give the doctrine vogue until very recently, when the experiments of Heinrich Hertz, the pupil of Helmholtz, have shown that a condition of electrical strain may be developed into a wave system by recurrent interruptions of the electric state in the generator, and that such waves travel through the ether with the rapidity of light. Since then the electro-magnetic theory of light has been enthusiastically referred to as the greatest generalization of the century; but the sober thinker must see that it is really only what Hertz himself called it--one pier beneath the great arch of conservation. It is an interesting detail of the architecture, but the part cannot equal the size of the whole.

More than that, this particular pier is as yet by no means a very firm one. It has, indeed, been demonstrated that waves of electro-magnetism pa.s.s through s.p.a.ce with the speed of light, but as yet no one has developed electric waves even remotely approximating the shortness of the visual rays. The most that can positively be a.s.serted, therefore, is that all the known forms of radiant energy-heat, light, electro-magnetism--travel through s.p.a.ce at the same rate of speed, and consist of traverse vibrations--"lateral quivers," as Fresnel said of light--known to differ in length, and not positively known to differ otherwise. It has, indeed, been suggested that the newest form of radiant energy, the famous X-ray of Professor Roentgen's discovery, is a longitudinal vibration, but this is a mere surmise. Be that as it may, there is no one now to question that all forms of radiant energy, whatever their exact affinities, consist essentially of undulatory motions of one uniform medium.

A full century of experiment, calculation, and controversy has thus sufficed to correlate the "imponderable fluids" of our forebears, and reduce them all to manifestations of motion among particles of matter.

At first glimpse that seems an enormous change of view. And yet, when closely considered, that change in thought is not so radical as the change in phrase might seem to imply. For the nineteenth-century physicist, in displacing the "imponderable fluids" of many kinds--one each for light, heat, electricity, magnetism--has been obliged to subst.i.tute for them one all-pervading fluid, whose various quivers, waves, ripples, whirls or strains produce the manifestations which in popular parlance are termed forms of force. This all-pervading fluid the physicist terms the ether, and he thinks of it as having no weight. In effect, then, the physicist has dispossessed the many imponderables in favor of a single imponderable--though the word imponderable has been banished from his vocabulary. In this view the ether--which, considered as a recognized scientific verity, is essentially a nineteenth-century discovery--is about the most interesting thing in the universe.

Something more as to its properties, real or a.s.sumed, we shall have occasion to examine as we turn to the obverse side of physics, which demands our attention in the next chapter.

IX. THE ETHER AND PONDERABLE MATTER

"Whatever difficulties we may have in forming a consistent idea of the const.i.tution of the ether, there can be no doubt that the interplanetary and interstellar s.p.a.ces are not empty, but are occupied by a material substance or body which is certainly the largest and probably the most uniform body of which we have any knowledge."

Such was the verdict p.r.o.nounced some thirty years ago by James Clerk-Maxwell, one of the very greatest of nineteenth-century physicists, regarding the existence of an all-pervading plenum in the universe, in which every particle of tangible matter is immersed.

And this verdict may be said to express the att.i.tude of the entire philosophical world of our day. Without exception, the authoritative physicists of our time accept this plenum as a verity, and reason about it with something of the same confidence they manifest in speaking of "ponderable" matter or of, energy. It is true there are those among them who are disposed to deny that this all-pervading plenum merits the name of matter. But that it is a something, and a vastly important something at that, all are agreed. Without it, they allege, we should know nothing of light, of radiant heat, of electricity or magnetism; without it there would probably be no such thing as gravitation; nay, they even hint that without this strange something, ether, there would be no such thing as matter in the universe. If these contentions of the modern physicist are justified, then this intangible ether is incomparably the most important as well as the "largest and most uniform substance or body" in the universe. Its discovery may well be looked upon as one of the most important feats of the nineteenth century.

For a discovery of that century it surely is, in the sense that all the known evidences of its existence were gathered in that epoch.