Electricity and Matter

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Yale University Press, 1904 - 162 pages
 

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Page 51 - I wish to put before you is that it is not merely a part of the mass of a body which arises in this way, but that the whole mass of any body is just the mass of ether surrounding the body which is carried along by the Faraday tubes associated with the atoms of the body. In fact, that all mass is mass of the ether, all momentum, momentum of the ether, and all kinetic energy, kinetic energy of the ether. This view, it should be said, requires the density of the ether to be immensely greater than that...
Page 73 - If we accept the hypothesis that the elementary substances are composed of atoms, we cannot avoid concluding that electricity also, positive as well as negative, is divided into definite elementary portions, which behave like atoms of electricity.
Page 116 - When the number exceeds 5 however, this law no longer holds: thus 6 magnets do not arrange themselves at the corners of a hexagon, but divide into two systems consisting of 1 in the middle surrounded by 5 at the corners of a pentagon. For 8 we have two in the inside and 6 outside; this arrangement in two systems, an inner and an outer, lasts up to 18 magnets. After this we have three systems: an inner, a middle, and an outer; for a still larger number of...
Page 93 - Let us then take as our primordial system an electrical doublet, with a negative corpuscle at one end and an equal positive charge at the other, the two ends being connected by lines of electric force which we suppose to have a material existence. For reasons which will appear later on, we shall suppose that the volume over which the positive electricity is spread is very much larger than the volume of the corpuscle. The lines of force will therefore be very much more condensed near the corpuscle...
Page 89 - ... is a gain of positive electrification to the place where there is a gain of negative. A positively electrified body is one that has lost some of its corpuscles.
Page 76 - ... the charged particles. Now if we know the amount of expansion produced we can calculate the cooling of the gas, and therefore the amount of water deposited. Thus, we know the volume of water in the form of drops, so that if we know the volume of one drop we can deduce the number of drops. To find the size of a drop we make use of an investigation by Sir George Stokes on the rate at which small spheres fall through the air. In consequence of the viscosity of the air small bodies fall exceedingly...
Page 103 - ... if we regard the systems containing different numbers of units as corresponding to the different chemical elements, then as the universe gets older, elements of higher and higher atomic weight may be expected to appear. Their appearance, however, will not involve the annihilation of the elements of lower atomic...

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