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The Project Gutenberg EBook of Matter, Ether, and Motion, Rev. ed., enl., by Amos Emerson Dolbear This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: Matter, Ether, and Motion, Rev. ed., enl. The Factors and Relations of Physical Science Author: Amos Emerson Dolbear Release Date: February 27, 2010 [EBook #31428] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MATTER, ETHER, AND MOTION *** Produced by Andrew D. Hwang, Peter Vachuska, Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net transcriber’s note Minor typographical corrections and presentational changes have been made without comment. Illustrations may have been moved slightly relative to the surrounding text. Aside from clear misspellings, every effort has been made to preserve variations of spelling and hyphenation from the original. This PDF file is optimized for screen viewing, but may easily be recompiled for printing. Please see the preamble of the LATEX source file for instructions. By Profe&or A. E. Dol´ar MATTER, ETHER AND MOTION The Factors and Relations of Physical Science Enlarged Edition Cloth Illustrated $2.00 THE TELEPHONE With directions for making a Speaking Telephone Illustrated 50 cents THE ART OF PROJECTING A Manual of Experimentation in Physics, Chemistry, and Natural History, with the Porte Lumiere` and Magic Lantern New Edition Revised Illustrated $2.00 Lee and S˙«rd Publis˙rs Bo<on Matter,Ether, and Motion THE FACTORS AND RELATIONS OF PHYSICAL SCIENCE BY A. E. DOLBEAR Ph.D. PROFESSOR OF PHYSICS TUFTS COLLEGE AUTHOR OF “THE TELEPHONE” “THE ART OF PROJECTING” ETC. REVISED EDITION, ENLARGED BOSTON LEE AND SHEPARD PUBLISHERS 10 MILK STREET 1894 Copyright, 1892, 1894, by Lee and Shepard All Rights Reserved Matter,Ether, and Motion C. J. Peters &Son, Type-Setters and Electrotypers, 145 High Street,Boston. PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION The issue of a new edition of this book gives me an opportunity to make some needed corrections, and enlarge it by the addition of three new chapters, which I hope will make it more useful to such as have a taste for fundamental physical problems. The first of these, Properties of Matter as Modes of Motion, presents the evidence that all the characteristic properties of matter are due to energy embodied in various forms of motion. The second, on The Implications of Physical Phenomena, points out what assumptions are made in explaining phenomena. It is the substance of a series of articles published in the Psychical Review in 1892 and 1893. The third, on The Relations between Physical and Psychical Phenomena, was read as a paper before the Psychical Congress at the World’s Fair in August, 1893. Judging from some of the comments made about my statements as to Modern Geometry on page 67, and as to Vital Force, p. 336, I have thought it would be useful to some to see corroboratory statements; and I have therefore added, in an appendix, a few iii PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION iv pages of quotations from some of the most eminent mathematicians and biologists on these subjects, and from them one may judge whether or not my statements are correct. As the work is a treatise on Physics, there is no special reason for going beyond it; but if this presentation of the subject is any approach to the truth, there is an important conclusion to be drawn from it. If the ether be the homogeneous and uniform medium it is believed with reason to be, then, in the absence of what we call matter, no physical change which we call a phenomenon could possibly arise in it; for every such phenomenon is a product, and in the absence of one of the essential factors, viz., matter, it could not be. If matter itself be a form of motion of the ether, the ether must have existed prior to matter; also, if the atom be a form of energy, then must energy have existed before matter existed. Hence there must have been some other agency radically different from any physical energy we know, and independent of everything we know, which was capable of producing orderly physical phenomena, by acting upon the ether; for a homogeneous medium could not originate it. Some philosophers call this antecedent power The Unknowable; others call it God. If energy as we know it implies antecedent energy as we do not know it, so, likewise, mind as we know it implies PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION v antecedent mind under totally different conditions from those in which we find it embodied. In whatever direction one pursues physical science, he is at last confronted with a physical phenomenon with a superphysical antecedent where all physical methods of investigation are impotent. Such considerations raise the theistic hypothesis of creation to the rank of such physical theories as the nebula theory of the origin of the solar system, and the undulatory theory of light. PREFACE Within the past fifty years the advance in physical knowledge has not only been rapid, but it has been well-nigh revolutionary. Not that knowledge that was felt to be well grounded before has been set aside,—for it has not been,—but the fundamental principles of natural philosophy that were applied by Sir Isaac Newton and others to masses of visible magnitude have been applied to molecules; and it has thus been discovered that all kinds of phenomena are subject to the same mechanical laws. It was thought before that physics embraced several distinct provinces of knowledge which were not necessarily related to each other, such as mechanics, heat, electricity, etc. Such terms as imponderable matter, latent heat, electric fluid, forces of nature, and others in common use in text-books and elsewhere, served to maintain the distinctions; and even to-day some of these obsolete physical agencies are to be met in books and places where one would hope not to find them. As all physical phenomena are reducible to the principles of mechanics, atoms and molecules are subject to them as much as masses of vi PREFACE vii visible magnitude; and it has become apparent that however different one phenomenon is from another, the factors of both are the same,—matter, ether, and motion; so that all the so-called forces of nature, considered as objective things controlling phenomena, are seen to have no existence; that all phenomena are reducible to nothing more mysterious than a push or a pull. Some say that science is simply classified knowledge. To the author it is more than that, it is a consistent body of knowledge; and a true explanation of any phenomenon cannot be inconsistent with the best established body of knowledge we have. If physical factors are fundamental, then theorizers must square their theories to them. The text-books have not kept pace with the advance of knowledge; and there is a large body of persons desirous of knowing more of natural philosophy, and especially of its trend, who have neither time nor opportunity to read and digest monographs on a thousand topics. To meet the wants of such, this book has been written. It undertakes to present in a systematic way the mechanical principles that underlie the phenomena in each of the different departments of the science, in a readable form, and in an untechnical manner. The aim has been to simplify and reduce to mechanical conceptions wherever it was possible to do PREFACE viii so. One may often hear the question asked, What is electricity? but a similar question as to the nature of heat or light or chemism is just as pertinent, although there chances now to be less popular interest in these than in the former; not, however, because they are in themselves better understood, or less interesting. It is hoped that some of those whose interests lie along such special lines as chemistry, electricity, and even biology, will find something helpful in the chapters dealing with those subjects. In covering so much ground in so small a treatise, it was necessary to select such facts as give prominence to fundamental principles. Doubtless others might have selected different materials, even with the same end in view, for otherwise competent persons are generally more familiar with certain details of a given science than with others; and I have used what was closest at hand. Aside from the topics usually treated upon in a book of physics, the reader will find a chapter on Physical Fields, which is unique, as it extends the principle of sympathetic action—recognized in acoustics—to the whole range of phenomena, including living things. The chapter on Life, in a treatise on physics, must justify itself; while the one on Machines points out their functions in a more complete way than has been done before. Lastly, however large the physical universe may be, and however exact such relations as we have established may be, it is daily becoming more certain that even in the physical universe we have to do with a factor,—the ether,—the properties of which we vainly strive to interpret in terms of matter, the undiscovered properties of which ought to warn every one against the danger of strongly asserting what is possible and what impossible in the nature of things. With the electro-magnetic theory of light now just established, and the vortex ring theory of matter still sub judice, but with daily increasing evidence in its favor, one may now be sure that matter itself is more wonderful than any philosopher ever thought.

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