Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1921 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER VII THE STRUCTURE OF ENERGY 17. THE SUCCESS OF THE ELECTRONIC THEORY J THE EXPLANATION OF THE RELATIONS OF MATTER AND RADIATION. We have just seen that a body is inert and has weight in proportion to the energy it contains, so that the concept- of matter is subsumed under the more general one of energy, and that the principle of the conservation of mass becomes merged in that of the conservation of energy. Energy, as Ostwald would have it, becomes the only existing reality, into which are absorbed the ether and the numerous imponderable agents to which the physics of the beginning of the nineteenth century was partial. Nevertheless it appears that energy presents itself essentially in a double aspect: in the form of resinous (negative) electricity endowed with a corpuscular structure and in the form of free radiation. In its first aspect it is made up of grains of electricity, capable of moving with velocities ranging from 0 to V, its aggregates constituting atomic and molecular structures, relatively stable and with astonishing vacant spaces, and appearing to our senses in the form of continuous bodies. In its second aspect it appears as made up of transverse no waves, infinitely expansible and divisible, sweeping through all space with the uniform velocity of light. In the first case it takes the name of matter; in the second that of radiant energy. The specific character of a portion of matter must no longer be sought in its mass and its weight, since radiant energy is likewise inert and endowed with weight, and mass is no longer an invariable scalar quantity, but takes the character of a tensorial quantity, which is unsymmetric and variable as a function of the velocity and the internal energy of bodies. That character must...