The Machinery of the Universe Part 1

The Machinery of the Universe.

by Amos Emerson Dolbear.

PREFACE

For thirty years or more the expressions "Correlation of the Physical Forces" and "The Conservation of Energy" have been common, yet few persons have taken the necessary pains to think out clearly what mechanical changes take place when one form of energy is transformed into another.

Since Tyndall gave us his book called _Heat as a Mode of Motion_ neither lecturers nor text-books have attempted to explain how all phenomena are the necessary outcome of the various forms of motion. In general, phenomena have been attributed to _forces_--a metaphysical term, which explains nothing and is merely a stop-gap, and is really not at all needful in these days, seeing that transformable modes of motion, easily perceived and understood, may be subst.i.tuted in all cases for forces.

In December 1895 the author gave a lecture before the Franklin Inst.i.tute of Philadelphia, on "Mechanical Conceptions of Electrical Phenomena," in which he undertook to make clear what happens when electrical phenomena appear. The publication of this lecture in _The Journal of the Franklin Inst.i.tute_ and in _Nature_ brought an urgent request that it should be enlarged somewhat and published in a form more convenient for the public. The enlargement consists in the addition of a chapter on the "_Contrasted Properties of Matter and the Ether_," a chapter containing something which the author believes to be of philosophical importance in these days when electricity is so generally described as a phenomenon of the ether.

A. E. DOLBEAR.

CHAPTER I

Ideas of phenomena ancient and modern, metaphysical and mechanical--Imponderables--Forces, invented and discarded--Explanations--Energy, its factors, Kinetic and Potential--Motions, kinds and transformations of--Mechanical, molecular, and atomic--Invention of Ethers, Faraday's conceptions.

'And now we might add something concerning a most subtle spirit which pervades and lies hid in all gross bodies, by the force and action of which spirit the particles of bodies attract each other at near distances, and cohere if contiguous, and electric bodies operate at greater distances, as well repelling as attracting neighbouring corpuscles, and light is emitted, reflected, inflected, and heats bodies, and all sensation is excited, and members of animal bodies move at the command of the will.'--NEWTON, _Principia_.

In Newton's day the whole field of nature was practically lying fallow.

No fundamental principles were known until the law of gravitation was discovered. This law was behind all the work of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, and what they had done needed interpretation. It was quite natural that the most obvious and mechanical phenomena should first be reduced, and so the _Principia_ was concerned with mechanical principles applied to astronomical problems. To us, who have grown up familiar with the principles and conceptions underlying them, all varieties of mechanical phenomena seem so obvious, that it is difficult for us to understand how any one could be obtuse to them; but the records of Newton's time, and immediately after this, show that they were not so easy of apprehension. It may be remembered that they were not adopted in France till long after Newton's day. In spite of what is thought to be reasonable, it really requires something more than complete demonstration to convince most of us of the truth of an idea, should the truth happen to be of a kind not familiar, or should it chance to be opposed to our more or less well-defined notions of what it is or ought to be. If those who labour for and attain what they think to be the truth about any matter, were a little better informed concerning mental processes and the conditions under which ideas grow and displace others, they would be more patient with mankind; teachers of every rank might then discover that what is often called stupidity may be nothing else than mental inertia, which can no more be made active by simply willing than can the movement of a cannon ball by a like effort. We _grow_ into our beliefs and opinions upon all matters, and scientific ideas are no exceptions.

Whewell, in his _History of the Inductive Sciences_, says that the Greeks made no headway in physical science because they lacked appropriate ideas. The evidence is overwhelming that they were as observing, as acute, as reasonable as any who live to-day. With this view, it would appear that the great discoverers must have been men who started out with appropriate ideas: were looking for what they found.

If, then, one reflects upon the exceeding great difficulty there is in discovering one new truth, and the immense amount of work needed to disentangle it, it would appear as if even the most successful have but indistinct ideas of what is really appropriate, and that their mechanical conceptions become clarified by doing their work. This is not always the fact. In the statement of Newton quoted at the head of this chapter, he speaks of a spirit which lies hid in all gross bodies, etc., by means of which all kinds of phenomena are to be explained; but he deliberately abandons that idea when he comes to the study of light, for he a.s.sumes the existence and activity of light corpuscles, for which he has no experimental evidence; and the probability is that he did this because the latter conception was one which he could handle mathematically, while he saw no way for thus dealing with the other. His mechanical instincts were more to be trusted than his carefully calculated results; for, as all know, what he called "spirits," is what to-day we call the ether, and the corpuscular theory of light has now no more than a historic interest. The corpuscular theory was a mechanical conception, but each such corpuscle was ideally endowed with qualities which were out of all relation with the ordinary matter with which it was cla.s.sed.

Until the middle of the present century the reigning physical philosophy held to the existence of what were called imponderables. The phenomena of heat were explained as due to an imponderable substance called "caloric," which ordinary matter could absorb and emit. A hot body was one which had absorbed an imponderable substance. It was, therefore, no heavier than before, but it possessed ability to do work proportional to the amount absorbed. Carnot's ideal engine was described by him in terms that imply the materiality of heat. Light was another imponderable substance, the existence of which was maintained by Sir David Brewster as long as he lived. Electricity and magnetism were imponderable fluids, which, when allied with ordinary matter, endowed the latter with their peculiar qualities. The conceptions in each case were properly mechanical ones _part_ (but not all) _of the time_; for when the immaterial substances were dissociated from matter, where they had manifested themselves, no one concerned himself to inquire as to their whereabouts. They were simply off duty, but could be summoned, like the genii in the story of Aladdin's Lamp. Now, a mechanical conception of any phenomenon, or a mechanical explanation of any kind of action, must be mechanical all the time, in the antecedents as well as the consequents. Nothing else will do except a miracle.

During the fifty years, from about 1820 to 1870, a somewhat different kind of explanation of physical events grew up. The interest that was aroused by the discoveries in all the fields of physical science--in heat, electricity, magnetism and chemistry--by Faraday, Joule, Helmholtz, and others, compelled a change of conceptions; for it was noticed that each special kind of phenomenon was preceded by some other definite and known kind; as, for instance, that chemical action preceded electrical currents, that mechanical or electrical activity resulted from changing magnetism, and so on. As each kind of action was believed to be due to a special force, there were invented such terms as mechanical force, electrical force, magnetic, chemical and vital forces, and these were discovered to be convertible into one another, and the "doctrine of the correlation of the physical forces" became a common expression in philosophies of all sorts. By "convertible into one another," was meant, that whenever any given force appeared, it was at the expense of some other force; thus, in a battery chemical force was changed into electrical force; in a magnet, electrical force was changed into magnetic force, and so on. The idea here was the _transformation of forces_, and _forces_ were not so clearly defined that one could have a mechanical idea of just what had happened. That part of the philosophy was no clearer than that of the imponderables, which had largely dropped out of mind. The terminology represented an advance in knowledge, but was lacking in lucidity, for no one knew what a force of any kind was.

The first to discover this and to repudiate the prevailing terminology were the physiologists, who early announced their disbelief in a vital force, and their belief that all physiological activities were of purely physical and chemical origin, and that there was no need to a.s.sume any such thing as a vital force. Then came the discovery that chemical force, or affinity, had only an advent.i.tious existence, and that, at absolute zero, there was no such activity. The discovery of, or rather the appreciation of, what is implied by the term _absolute zero_, and especially of the nature of heat itself, as expressed in the statement that heat is a mode of motion, dismissed another of the so-called forces as being a metaphysical agency having no real existence, though standing for phenomena needing further attention and explanation; and by explanation is meant _the presentation of the mechanical antecedents for a phenomenon, in so complete a way that no supplementary or unknown factors are necessary_. The train moves because the engine pulls it; the engine pulls because the steam pushes it. There is no more necessity for a.s.suming a steam force between the steam and the engine, than for a.s.suming an engine force between the engine and the train. All the processes are mechanical, and have to do only with ordinary matter and its conditions, from the coal-pile to the moving freight, though there are many transformations of the forms of motion and of energy between the two extremes.

During the past thirty years there has come into common use another term, unknown in any technical sense before that time, namely, _energy_.

What was once called the conservation of force is now called the conservation of energy, and we now often hear of forms of energy. Thus, heat is said to be a form of energy, and the forms of energy are convertible into one another, as the so-called forces were formerly supposed to be transformable into one another. We are asked to consider gravitative energy, heat energy, mechanical energy, chemical energy, and electrical energy. When we inquire what is meant by energy, we are informed that it means ability to do work, and that work is measurable as a pressure into a distance, and is specified as foot-pounds. A ma.s.s of matter moves because energy has been spent upon it, and has acquired energy equal to the work done on it, and this is believed to hold true, no matter what the kind of energy was that moved it. If a body moves, it moves because another body has exerted pressure upon it, and its energy is called _kinetic energy_; but a body may be subject to pressure and not move appreciably, and then the body is said to possess potential energy. Thus, a bent spring and a raised weight are said to possess potential energy. In either case, _an energized body receives its energy by pressure, and has ability to produce pressure on another body_.

Whether or not it does work on another body depends on the rigidity of the body it acts upon. In any case, it is simply a mechanical action--body A pushes upon body B (Fig. 1). There is no need to a.s.sume anything more mysterious than mechanical action. Whether body B moves this way or that depends upon the direction of the push, the point of its application. Whether the body be a ma.s.s as large as the earth or as small as a molecule, makes no difference in that particular. Suppose, then, that _a_ (Fig. 2) spends its energy on _b_, _b_ on _c_, _c_ on _d_, and so on. The energy of _a_ gives translatory motion to _b_, _b_ sets _c_ vibrating, and _c_ makes _d_ spin on some axis. Each of these has had energy spent on it, and each has some form of energy different from the other, but no new factor has been introduced between _a_ and _d_, and the only factor that has gone from _a_ to _d_ has been motion--motion that has had its direction and quality changed, but not its nature. If we agree that energy is neither created nor annihilated, by any physical process, and if we a.s.sume that _a_ gave to _b_ all its energy, that is, all its motion; that _b_ likewise gave its all to _c_, and so on; then the succession of phenomena from _a_ to _d_ has been simply the transference of a definite amount of motion, and therefore of energy, from the one to the other; for _motion has been the only variable factor_. If, furthermore, we should agree to call the translatory motion [alpha], the vibratory motion [beta], the rotary [gamma], then we should have had a conversion of [alpha]

into [beta], of [beta] into [gamma]. If we should consider the amount of transfer motion instead of the kind of motion, we should have to say that the [alpha] energy had been transformed into [beta] and the [beta] into [gamma].

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 1.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 2.]

What a given amount of energy will do depends only upon its _form_, that is, the kind of motion that embodies it.

The energy spent upon a stone thrown into the air, giving it translatory motion, would, if spent upon a tuning fork, make it sound, but not move it from its place; while if spent upon a top, would enable the latter to stand upon its point as easily as a person stands on his two feet, and to do other surprising things, which otherwise it could not do. One can, without difficulty, form a mechanical conception of the whole series without a.s.suming imponderables, or fluids or forces. Mechanical motion only, by pressure, has been transferred in certain directions at certain rates. Suppose now that some one should suddenly come upon a spinning top (Fig. 3) while it was standing upon its point, and, as its motion might not be visible, should cautiously touch it. It would bound away with surprising promptness, and, if he were not instructed in the mechanical principles involved, he might fairly well draw the conclusion that it was actuated by other than simple mechanical principles, and, for that reason, it would be difficult to persuade him that there was nothing essentially different in the body that appeared and acted thus, than in a stone thrown into the air; nevertheless, that statement would be the simple truth.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 3.]

All our experience, without a single exception, enforces the proposition that no body moves in any direction, or in any way, except when some other body _in contact_ with it presses upon it. The action is direct.

In Newton's letter to his friend Bentley, he says--"That one body should act upon another through empty s.p.a.ce, without the mediation of anything else by and through which their action and pressure may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it."

For mathematical purposes, it has sometimes been convenient to treat a problem as if one body could act upon another without any physical medium between them; but such a conception has no degree of rationality, and I know of no one who believes in it as a fact. If this be granted, then our philosophy agrees with our experience, and every body moves because it is pushed, and the mechanical antecedent of every kind of phenomenon is to be looked for in some adjacent body possessing energy--that is, the ability to push or produce pressure.

It must not be forgotten that energy is not a simple factor, but is always a product of two factors--a ma.s.s with a velocity, a ma.s.s with a temperature, a quant.i.ty of electricity into a pressure, and so on. One may sometimes meet the statement that matter and energy are the two realities; both are spoken of as ent.i.ties. It is much more philosophical to speak of matter and motion, for in the absence of motion there is no energy, and the energy varies with the amount of motion; and furthermore, to understand any manifestation of energy one must inquire what kind of motion is involved. This we do when we speak of mechanical energy as the energy involved in a body having a translatory motion; also, when we speak of heat as a vibratory, and of light as a wave motion. To speak of energy without stating or implying these distinctions, is to speak loosely and to keep far within the bounds of actual knowledge. To speak thus of a body possessing energy, or expending energy, is to imply that the body possesses some kind of motion, and produces pressure upon another body because it has motion.

Tait and others have pointed out the fact, that what is called potential energy must, in its nature, be kinetic. Tait says--"Now it is impossible to conceive of a truly dormant form of energy, whose magnitude should depend, in any way, upon the unit of time; and we are forced to conclude that potential energy, like kinetic energy, depends (even if unexplained or unimagined) upon motion." All this means that it is now too late to stop with energy as a final factor in any phenomenon, that the _form of motion_ which embodies the energy is the factor that determines _what_ happens, as distinguished from how _much_ happens. Here, then, are to be found the distinctions which have heretofore been called forces; here is embodied the proof that direct pressure of one body upon another is what causes the latter to move, and that the direction of movement depends on the point of application, with reference to the centre of ma.s.s.

It is needful now to look at the other term in the product we call energy, namely, the substance moving, sometimes called matter or ma.s.s.

It has been mentioned that the idea of a medium filling s.p.a.ce was present to Newton, but his gravitation problem did not require that he should consider other factors than ma.s.ses and distances. The law of gravitation as considered by him was--Every particle of matter attracts every other particle of matter with a stress which is proportional to the product of their ma.s.ses, and inversely to the squares of the distance between them. Here we are concerned only with the statement that every particle of matter attracts every other particle of matter.

Everything then that possesses gravitative attraction is matter in the sense in which that term is used in this law. If there be any other substance in the universe that is not thus subject to gravitation, then it is improper to call it matter, otherwise the law should read, "Some particles of matter attract," etc., which will never do.

We are now a.s.sured that there is something else in the universe which has no gravitative property at all, namely, the ether. It was first imagined in order to account for the phenomena of light, which was observed to take about eight minutes to come from the sun to the earth.

Then Young applied the wave theory to the explanation of polarization and other phenomena; and in 1851 Foucault proved experimentally that the velocity of light was less in water than in air, as it should be if the wave theory be true, and this has been considered a crucial experiment which took away the last hope for the corpuscular theory, and demonstrated the existence of the ether as a s.p.a.ce-filling medium capable of transmitting light-waves known to have a velocity of 186,000 miles per second. It was called the luminiferous ether, to distinguish it from other ethers which had also been imagined, such as electric ether for electrical phenomena, magnetic ether for magnetic phenomena, and so on--as many ethers, in fact, as there were different kinds of phenomena to be explained.

It was Faraday who put a stop to the invention of ethers, by suggesting that the so-called luminiferous ether might be the one concerned in all the different phenomena, and who pointed out that the arrangement of iron filings about a magnet was indicative of the direction of the stresses in the ether. This suggestion did not meet the approval of the mathematical physicists of his day, for it necessitated the abandonment of the conceptions they had worked with, as well as the terminology which had been employed, and made it needful to reconstruct all their work to make it intelligible--a labour which was the more distasteful as it was forced upon them by one who, although expert enough in experimentation, was not a mathematician, and who boasted that the most complicated mathematical work he ever did was to turn the crank of a calculating machine; who did all his work, formed his conclusions, and then said--"The work is done; hand it over to the computers."

It has turned out that Faraday's mechanical conceptions were right.

Every one now knows of Maxwell's work, which was to start with Faraday's conceptions as to magnetic phenomena, and follow them out to their logical conclusions, applying them to molecules and the reactions of the latter upon the ether. Thus he was led to conclude that light was an electro-magnetic phenomenon; that is, that the waves which const.i.tute light, and the waves produced by changing magnetism were identical in their nature, were in the same medium, travelled with the same velocity, were capable of refraction, and so on. Now that all this is a matter of common knowledge to-day, it is curious to look back no further than ten years. Maxwell's conclusions were adopted by scarcely a physicist in the world. Although it was known that inductive action travelled with finite velocity in s.p.a.ce, and that an electro-magnet would affect the s.p.a.ce about it practically inversely as the square of the distance, and that such phenomena as are involved in telephonic induction between circuits could have no other meaning than the one a.s.signed by Maxwell, yet nearly all the physicists failed to form the only conception of it that was possible, and waited for Hertz to devise apparatus for producing interference before they grasped it. It was even then so new, to some, that it was proclaimed to be a demonstration of the existence of the ether itself, as well as a method of producing waves short enough to enable one to notice interference phenomena. It is obvious that Hertz himself must have had the mechanics of wave-motion plainly in mind, or he would not have planned such experiments. The outcome of it all is, that we now have experimental demonstration, as well as theoretical reason for believing, that the ether, once considered as only luminiferous, is concerned in all electric and magnetic phenomena, and that waves set up in it by electro-magnetic actions are capable of being reflected, refracted, polarized, and twisted, in the same way as ordinary light-waves can be, and that the laws of optics are applicable to both.

CHAPTER II

PROPERTIES OF MATTER AND ETHER

Properties of Matter and Ether compared--Discontinuity _versus_ Continuity--Size of atoms--Astronomical distances--Number of atoms in the universe--Ether unlimited--Kinds of Matter, permanent qualities of--Atomic structure; vortex-rings, their properties--Ether structureless--Matter gravitative, Ether not--Friction in Matter, Ether frictionless--Chemical properties--Energy in Matter and in Ether--Matter as a transformer of Energy--Elasticity--Vibratory rates and waves--Density--Heat--Indestructibility of Matter--Inertia in Matter and in Ether--Matter not inert--Magnetism and Ether waves--States of Matter--Cohesion and chemism affected by temperature--Shearing stress in Solids and in Ether--Ether pressure--Sensation dependent upon Matter--Nervous system not affected by Ether states--Other stresses in Ether--Transformations of Motion--Terminology.

A common conception of the ether has been that it is a finer-grained substance than ordinary matter, but otherwise so like the latter that the laws found to hold good with matter were equally applicable to the ether, and hence the mechanical conceptions formed from experience in regard to the one have been transferred to the other, and the properties belonging to one, such as density, elasticity, etc., have been a.s.serted as properties of the other.

There is so considerable a body of knowledge bearing upon the similarities and dissimilarities of these two ent.i.ties that it will be well to compare them. After such comparison one will be better able to judge of the propriety of a.s.suming them to be subject to identical laws.

1. MATTER IS DISCONTINUOUS.

Matter is made up of atoms having dimensions approximately determined to be in the neighbourhood of the one fifty-millionth of an inch in diameter. These atoms may have various degrees of aggregation;--they may be in practical contact, as in most solid bodies such as metals and rocks; in molecular groupings as in water, and in gases such as hydrogen, oxygen, and so forth, where two, three, or more atoms cohere so strongly as to enable the molecules to act under ordinary circ.u.mstances like simple particles. Any or all of these molecules and atoms may be separated by any a.s.signable distance from each other. Thus, in common air the molecules, though rapidly changing their positions, are on the average about two hundred and fifty times their own diameter apart. This is a distance relatively greater than the distance apart of the earth and the moon, for two hundred and fifty times the diameter of the earth will be 8000 250 = 2,000,000 miles, while the distance to the moon is but 240,000 miles. The sun is 93,000,000 miles from the earth, and the most of the bodies of the solar system are still more widely separated, Neptune being nearly 3000 millions of miles from the sun. As for the fixed stars, they are so far separated from us that, at the present rate of motion of the solar system in its drift through s.p.a.ce--500 millions of miles in a year--it would take not less than 40,000 years to reach the nearest star among its neighbours, while for the more remote ones millions of years must be reckoned. The huge s.p.a.ce separating these ma.s.ses is practically devoid of matter; it is a vacuum.

THE ETHER IS CONTINUOUS.

The idea of continuity as distinguished from discontinuity may be gained by considering what would be made visible by magnification. Water appears to the eye as if it were without pores, but if sugar or salt be put into it, either will be dissolved and quite disappear among the molecules of the water as steam does in the air, which shows that there are some unoccupied s.p.a.ces between the molecules. If a microscope be employed to magnify a minute drop of water it still shows the same lack of structure as that looked at with the unaided eye. If the magnifying power be the highest it may reveal a speck as small as the hundred-thousandth part of an inch, yet the speck looks no different in character. We know that water is composed of two different kinds of atoms, hydrogen and oxygen, for they can be separated by chemical means and kept in separate bottles, and again made to combine to form water having all the qualities that belonged to it before it was decomposed.

If a very much higher magnifying power were available, we should ultimately be able to see the individual water molecules, and recognize their hydrogen and oxygen const.i.tuents by their difference in size, rate of movements, and we might possibly separate them by mechanical methods.

What one would see would be something very different in structure from the water as it appears to our eyes. If the ether were similarly to be examined through higher and still higher magnifying powers, even up to infinity, there is no reason for thinking that the last examination would show anything different in structure or quality from that which was examined with low power or with no microscope at all. This is all expressed by saying that the ether is a continuous substance, without interstices, that it fills s.p.a.ce completely, and, unlike gases, liquids, and solids, is incapable of absorbing or dissolving anything.