THE ETHER AND MOVING MATTER
BY DEWITT BRISTOL BRACE
[Dewitt Bristol Brace, Professor of Physics, University of Nebraska. b. Wilson, New York, 1859; died, October 2, 1905. A.B. Boston, 1881; A.M. Boston, 1882; Ph.D. Berlin, 1885; post-graduate, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1879-81; Johns Hopkins University, 1881-83; University of Berlin, 1883-85. Acting Assistant Professor of Physics, University of Michigan, 1886. Vice-President of American Association for the Advancement of Science; Vice-President of American Physical Society. Author of Radiation and Absorption.]
The question whether the luminiferous ether passes freely through matter or participates in the translation of the same, considered as a moving system, stands to-day without positive answer, notwithstanding the numerous experimental attempts and the varied hypotheses which have been made since the discovery of aberration by Bradley in 1726. The simple explanation of this phenomenon on the corpuscular theory may have caused the century of delay in the closer examination of the question until it became necessary to consider it from the standpoint of undulations in an ether. As compared with the many efforts to examine the question in the second or ether period we have perhaps but two belonging to the first or corpuscular period. Boscovich, in 1742, reasoning from this theory on the ground of a difference of velocity in air and water, proposed to examine the aberration of a star with a telescope whose tube was filled with water. This experiment was not carried out till long after by Airy in 1872, who found that the variation in the aberration was absolutely insensible. Arago, in the second instance, reasoning on the same theory, concluded that the deviation produced by a prism would vary with the direction of the earth's motion; but he was unable to detect any such change, a result verified later by more delicate means in the hands of Maxwell, Mascart, and others. This experiment, which demonstrated the absence of any effect of the earth's movement on refraction is of great historical interest. This negative result, which to Arago was inconsistent with the corpuscular theory, suggested to Fresnel the important hypothesis of a quiescent ether penetrating the earth freely but undergoing a change
