Popular Science Monthly/Volume 34/December 1888/The History of a Doctrine I
| THE HISTORY OF A DOCTRINE.[1] |
By Prof. S. P. LANGLEY.
I.
IN these days, when a man can take but a very little portion of knowledge to be his province, it has become customary that your president's address shall deal with some limited topic, with which his own labors have made him familiar; and accordingly I have selected as my theme the history of our present views about radiant energy, not only because of the intrinsic importance of the subject, but because the study of this energy in the form of radiant heat is one to which I have given special attention.
Just as the observing youth, who leaves his own household to look abroad for himself, comes back with the report that the world, after all, is very like his own family, so may the specialist, when he looks out from his own department, be surprised to find that, after all, the history of the narrowest specialty is amazingly like that of scientific doctrine in general, and contains the same lessons for us. To find some of the most useful ones, it is important, however, to look with our own eyes at the very words of the masters themselves, and to take down the dusty copy of Newton, or Boyle, or Leslie, instead of a modern abstract; for, strange as it may seem, there is something of great moment in the original that has never yet been incorporated into any encyclopædia, something really essential in the words of the man himself which has not been indexed in any text-book, and never will be.
It is not for us, then, here to-day, to try—
"How index-learning turns no student pale,
Yet holds the eel of science by the tail";
but, on the contrary, to remark that from this index-learning, from these histories of science and summaries of its progress, we are apt to get wrong ideas of the very conditions on which this progress depends. We often hear it, for instance, likened to the march of an army toward some definite end; but this, it has seemed to me, is not the way science usually does move, but only the way it seems to move in the retrospective view of the compiler, who probably knows almost nothing of the real confusion, diversity, and retrograde motion of the individuals comprising the body, and only shows us such parts of it as he, looking backward from his present standpoint, now sees to have been in the right direction.
I believe this comparison of the progress of science to that of the army which obeys an impulse from one head has more error than truth in it; and, though all similes are more or less misleading, I would almost prefer to ask you to think rather of a moving crowd, where the direction of the whole comes somehow from the independent impulses of its individual members, not wholly unlike a pack of hounds, which, in the long run, perhaps catches its game, but where, nevertheless, when at fault, each individual goes his own way by scent, not by sight, some running back and some forward; where the louder-voiced bring many to follow them, nearly as often in a wrong path as in a right one; where the entire pack even has been known to move off bodily on a false scent; for this, if a less dignified illustration, would be one which had the merit of having a considerable truth in it, but one left out of sight by the writers of books.
At any rate, the actual movement has been tortuous, or often even retrograde, to a degree of which you will get no idea from the account in the text-book or encyclopædia, where, in the main, only the resultant of all these vacillating motions is given. With rare exceptions, the backward steps—that is, the errors and mistakes, which count in reality for nearly half, and sometimes for more than half the whole—are left out of scientific history; and the reader, while he knows that mistakes have been made, has no just idea how intimately error and truth are mingled in a sort of chemical union, even in the work of the great discoverers, and how it is the test of time chiefly which enables us to say which is progress when the man himself could not. If this be a truism, it is one which is often forgotten, and which we shall do well to here keep before us.
This is not the occasion to review the vague speculations of the ancient natural philosophers from Aristotle to Zeno, or to give the opinion of the school-men on our subject. We take it up with the immediate predecessors of Newton, among whom we may have been prepared to expect some obscure recognition of heat as a mode of motion, but where it has been, to me at least, surprising, on consulting their original works, to find how general and how clear an anticipation of our modern doctrine may be fairly said to exist. Whether this early recognition of the atomic and vibratory theories be a legacy from the Lucretian philosophy, it is not necessary to here consider. The interesting fact, however it came about, is the extent to which seventeenth-century thought is found to be occupied with views which we are apt to think very recent.
Descartes, in 1664, commences his "Le Monde" by a treatise on the propagation of light, and what we should now call radiant heat, by vibrations, and further associates this view of heat as motion with the distinct additional conception that in the cause of light and radiant heat we may expect to find something quite different from the sense of vision or of warmth; and he expresses himself with the aid of the same simile of sound employed by Draper over two hundred years later. The writings of Boyle on the mechanical production of heat contain illustrations (like that of the hammer driving the nail, which grows hot in proportion as its bodily motion is arrested) which show a singularly complete apprehension of views we are apt to think we have made our own; and it seems to me that any one who consults the originals will admit that, though its full consequences have not been wrought out till our own time, yet the fundamental idea of heat as a mode of motion is so far from being a modern one, that it was announced in varying forms by Newton's immediate predecessors, by Descartes, by Bacon, by Hobbes, and in particular by Boyle, while Hooke and Huygens merely continue their work, as at first does Newton himself.
If, however, Newton found the doctrine of vibrations already, so to speak, "in the air," we must, while recognizing that in the history of thought the new always has its root in the old, and that it is not given even to a Newton to create an absolutely new light, still admit that the full dawn of our subject properly begins with him, and admit, too, that it is a bright one, when we read in the "Optics" such passages as these: "Do not all fixed bodies, when heated beyond a certain degree, emit light and shine, and is not this emission performed by the vibrating motions of their parts?" And again: "Do not several sorts of rays make vibrations of several bignesses?" And still again: "Is not the heat conveyed by the vibrations of a much subtler medium than air?"
Here is the undulatory theory; here is the connection of the ethereal vibrations with those of the material solid; here is "heat as a mode of motion"; here is the identity of radiant heat and light; here is the idea of wave-lengths. What a step forward this first one is! And the second?—the second is, as we now know, backward. The second is the rejection of this, and the adoption of the corpuscular hypothesis, with which alone the name of Newton (a father of the undulatory theory) is, in the minds of most, associated to-day.
Do not let us forget, however, that it was on the balancing of arguments from the facts then known that he decided, and that perhaps it was rather an evidence of his superiority to Huygens, that apprehending before the latter, and equally clearly, the undulatory theory, he recognized also more clearly that this theory, as then understood, failed utterly to account for several of the most important phenomena. With an equally judicial mind, Huygens would perhaps have decided so too, in the face of difficulties, all of which have not been cleared up even to-day.
These two great men, then, each looked around in the then darkness as far as his light carried him. All beyond that was chance to each; and Fate willed that Newton, whose light shone further than his rival's, found it extend just far enough to show the entrance to the wrong way. He reaches the conclusion that we all know; and with the result on other men's thought that, light being conceded to be material, heat, if affiliated to light, must be regarded as material too, for we may see this strange conclusion drawn from experiments of Herschel a century later.
It would seem that the result of this unhappy corpuscular theory was more far-reaching than we commonly suppose, and that it is hardly too much to say that the whole promising movement of that age toward the true doctrine of radiant energy is not only arrested by it, but turned the other way; so that in this respect the philosophy of fifty years later is actually further from the truth than that of Newton's predecessors.
The immense repute of Newton as a leader, on the whole so rightly earned, here leads astray others than his conscious disciples, and, it seems to me, affects men's opinions on topics which appear at first far removed from those he discussed. The adoption of phlogiston was, as we may reasonably infer, facilitated by it, and remotely Newton is, perhaps, also responsible in part for the doctrine of caloric a hundred years later. After him, at any rate, there is a great backward movement. We have a distinct retrogression from the ideas of Bacon and Hobbes and Boyle. Night settles in again on our subject almost as thick as in the days of the school-men, and there seems to be hardly an important contribution to our knowledge, in the first part of the eighteenth century, due to a physicist.
"Physics, beware of metaphysics," said Newton—words which physicists are apt so exclusively to quote, that it seems only due to candor to observe that the most important step, perhaps, in the fifty years which followed the "Optics," came from Berkeley, who, reasoning as a metaphysician, gave us during Newton's lifetime a conception wonderfully in advance of his age. Yet the "New Theory of Vision" was generally viewed by contemporary philosophers as only an amusing paradox, while "coxcombs vanquish [ed] Berkeley with a grin"; and this contribution to science—an exceptional if not a unique instance of a great physical generalization reached by a priori reasoning—though published in 1709, remains in advance of the popular knowledge even in these closing years of the nineteenth century.
In the mean time a new error had risen among men—a new truth, as it seemed to them, and a thing destined to have a strong reflex action on the doctrine of radiant energy. It began with the generalization of a large class of phenomena (which we now associate with the action of oxygen, then of course unknown)—a generalization useful in itself, and accompanied by an explanation which was not in its origin objectionable. Let us consider, in illustration, any familiar instance of oxidation, and try to look first for what was reasonable in the eighteenth-century views of the cause of such phenomena. A piece of dry wood has in it the power of giving out heat and light when set on fire; but after it is consumed there is left of it only inert ashes, which can give neither. Something, then, has left the wood in the process of becoming ashes; virtue has gone out of it, or, as we should say, its potential energy has gone.
This is, so far, an important observation, extending over a wide range of phenomena, and, if it had presented itself to the predecessors of Newton, it would probably have been allied to the vibratory theories, and become proportionately fruitful. But to his disciples, and to chemists and others who, without being perhaps disciples, were, like all then, more or less consciously influenced by the materiality of the corpuscular theory, it appeared that this also was a material emanation, that this energy was an actual ingredient of the wood—a crudeness of conception which seems most strange to us, but it is not, perhaps, unaccountable in view of the then current thought.
I have said that the progress of science is not so much that of an army as of a crowd of searchers, and that a call in a false direction may be responded to, not by one only, but by the whole body. In illustration, observe that during the greater part of the entire eighteenth century this doctrine was adopted by almost every chemist and by most physicists. It had quite as general an acceptance among scientific men then as the kinetic theory of gases, for instance, has now, and, as far as time is any test of truth, it was tested more severely than the kinetic theory has yet been; for it was not only the lamp and guide of chemists, and, to a great extent, of physicists also, but it remained the time-honored and highest generalization of chemico-physical science for over half a century, and it was accepted not so much as a conditional hypothesis as a final guide and a conquest for truth which should endure always. And now where is it? Dissipated so utterly from men's minds that, to the unprofessional part of even an educated audience like this, "phlogiston," once a name to conjure with, has become an unmeaning sound.
There is no need to insist on the application of the obvious moral to hypotheses of our own day. I have tried to recall for a moment all that "phlogiston" meant a little more than a hundred years ago, partly because it seems to me that, though a chemical conception, physics is not wholly blameless for it, but chiefly because before it quitted the world it appears to have returned to physics the wrong in a multiplied form by generating an offspring especially inimical to true ideas about radiant heat, and which is represented by a yet familiar term. I mean "caloric."
This word is still used loosely as a synonym for heat, but has quite ceased to be the very definite and technical term it once was. To me it has been new to find that this so familiar word "caloric," so far as my limited search has gone, was apparently coined only toward the last quarter of the last century. It is not to be found in the earliest edition of Johnson's Dictionary, and, as far as I can learn, appears first in the corresponding French form in the works of Fourcroy. It expressed an idea which was the natural sequence of the phlogiston theory, and which is another illustration that the evil which such theories do lives after them.
"Caloric" first seemingly appears, then, as a new word coined by the French chemists, and meant originally to signify the unknown cause of the sensation heat, without any implication as to its nature. But words, we know, though but wise men's counters, are the money of fools; and this one very soon came to commit its users to an idea which was more likely to have had its origin in the mind of a chemist at that time than of any other—the idea of the cause of heat as a material ingredient of the hot body; something not, it is true, having weight, but which it would have been only a slight extension of the conception to think might one day be isolated by a higher chemical art, and exhibited in a tangible form.
We may desire to recognize the perverted truth which usually underlies error, and gives it currency, and be willing to believe that even "caloric" may have had some justification for its existence; but this error certainly seems to have been almost altogether pernicious for nearly the next eighty years, and down even to our own time. With this conception as a guide to the philosophers of the last years of the eighteenth century, it is not, at any rate, surprising if we find that at the end of a hundred years from Newton the crowd seems to be still going constantly further and further away from its true goal.
Although Provost gave us his most material contribution about 1790, we have, it seems to me, on the whole, little to interest us during that barren time in the history of radiant energy called the eighteenth century—a century whose latter years are given up, till near its very close, to bad a priori theories in our subject, except in the work of two Americans; for in the general dearth, at this time, of experiments in radiant heat, it is a pleasure to fancy Benjamin Franklin sitting down before the fire, with a white stocking on one leg and a black one on the other, to see which leg would burn first, and to recall again how Benjamin Thompson (Count Rumford) not only weighed "caloric" literally in the balance and found it wanting, but made that memorable experiment in the Munich foundries which showed that heat was perpetually and without limit created from motion.
It was in the last years of the century, too, that he provided for the medal called by his name, and which, though to be given for researches in heat and light, has, I believe, been allotted in nearly every instance to men who, like Leslie, Mains, Davy, Brewster, Fresnel, Melloni, Faraday, Arago, Stokes, Maxwell, and Tyndall, have contributed toward the subject of radiant energy in particular.
We observe that till Rumford's time the scientific literature of the century scarcely considers the idea even of radiant heat, still less of radiant energy; so that we have been obliged here to discuss the views of its physicists about heat in general, heat and light in most eighteenth-century minds being distinct entities. We must remember, then, to his greater honor, that the idea of radiant heat as a separate study has before Rumford scarcely an existence; all the ways for pilgrims to this special shrine of truth being barred, like those in Bunyan's allegory, by two unfriendly monsters who are called Phlogiston and Caloric, so that there are few scientific pilgrims who do not pay them toll.
The doctrine of caloric is, however, even then recognized as a chemical hypothesis rather than one acceptable to physicists, some of whom still stand out for vibratory theories even through the darkest years of the century; and, further, we may find, on strict search, that the old idea of heat as a mode of motion has not so utterly died that it does not appear here and there during the last century, not only among philosophers, but even in a popular form.
In an old English translation of Father Regnault's compilation on physics, dated about 1730, I find the most explicit statement of the doctrine of heat as a mode of motion. Here heat is defined (with the aid of a simile due, I believe, to Boyle) as "any Agitation whatever of the insensible parts. Thus a Nail which is drove into the Wood by the stroke of a Hammer does not appear to be hot, because its immediate parts have but one common Movement. But should the Nail cease to drive, it would acquire a sensible Heat, because its insensible Parts which receive the Motion of the Hammer now acquire an agitation every way rapid." We certainly must admit that the user of this illustration had just and clear ideas; and the interesting point here appears to be, that as Father Regnault's was not an original work, but a mere compendium or popular scientific treatise of the period, we see, if only from this instance, that the doctrine of heat as a mode of motion was not confined to the great men of an earlier or a later time, but formed a part of the common pabulum during the eighteenth century to an extent that has been singularly forgotten.
The last years of the eighteenth century were destined to see the most remarkable experiments in heat made in the whole of the hundred; for the memoir of Rumford appeared in the "Philosophical Transactions" for 1798; and in the very year 1800 appeared in the same place Sir William Herschel's paper, in which he describes how he placed a thermometer in successive colors of the solar spectrum, finding the heat increase progressively from the violet to the red, and increase yet more beyond the red where there was no color or light whatever; so that there are, he observes, invisible rays as well as visible. More than that, the first outnumber the second; and these dark rays are found in the very source and fount of light itself. These dark rays can also be obtained, he observes, from a candle or a piece of non-luminous hot iron, and, what is very significant, they are found to pass through glass, and to be refracted by it like luminous ones.
And now Herschel, searching for the final verity through a series of excellent experiments, asks a question which shows that he has truth, so to speak, in his hands—he asks himself the great question whether heat and light be occasioned by the same or different rays.
Remember the importance of this (which the querist himself fully recognized); remember that, after long hunting in the blindfold search, he has laid hands, as we now know, on Truth herself, and then see him—let go. He decides that heat and light are not occasioned by the same rays, and we seem to see the fugitive escape from his grasp, and not to be again fairly caught till the next generation. I hardly know more remarkable papers than these of Herschel's in the "Philosophical Transactions" for 1800, or anything more instructive in little men's successes than in this great man's failure, which came in the moment of success. I would strongly recommend the reading of these remarkable original memoirs to any physicist who knows them only at second hand.
One more significant lesson remains, in the effect of this on the minds of his contemporaries. Herschel's observation is to us almost a demonstration of the identity of radiant heat and light; but now, though the nineteenth century is opening, it is with the doctrine still in the minds of most physicists, and perhaps of all chemists, that heat is occasioned by a certain material fluid. Phlogiston is by this time dead or dying, but caloric is very much alive, and never more perniciously active than now, when, for instance, years after Herschel's observation, we find this cited as "demonstrating the existence of caloric," which was, it seems, the way it looked to a contemporary.
In the year 1804 appeared what should be a very notable book in the history of our subject, written by Sir John Leslie, whose name survives perhaps in the minds of many students chiefly in connection with the "cube," which is still called after him. Leslie, however, ought to be remembered as a man of original genius, worthy to be mentioned with Herschel and Melloni; and his, too, is one of the books which the student may be recommended to read, at least in part, in the original; not so much for the writer's instructive experiments (which will be found in our text-books) as for his most instructive mistakes, which the text-book will probably not mention.
He began by introducing the use of the simple instrument which bears his name, and a new and more delicate heat-measure (the differential thermometer); and with these, and concave reflectors of glass and metal, he commenced experiments in radiant heat, than which, he tells us, no part of physical science then appeared so dark, so dubious, and so neglected. It is interesting, and it marks the degree of neglect he alludes to, that his first discovery was that different substances have different radiating and absorbing powers. It gives us a vivid idea of the density of previous ignorance, that it was left to the present century to demonstrate this elementary fact, and that Leslie, in view of such discoveries, says,"I was transported at the prospect of a new world emerging to view."
Next he shows that the radiating and absorbing powers are proportional, next that cold as well as heat seems to be radiated, and next undertakes to see whether this radiant heat has any affinity to light. He then experiments in the ability of radiant heat to pass through a transparent glass, which transmits light freely, and thinks he finds that none does pass. Radiant heat with him seems to mean heat from non-luminous sources; and the ability or non-ability of this to pass through glass is to Leslie and his successors a most crucial test, and its failure to do so a proof that this heat is not affiliated to light.
Let us pause a moment here to reflect that we are apt to unconsciously assume, while judging from our own present standpoint where past error is so plain, that the false conclusion can only be chosen by an able, earnest, conscientious seeker, after a sort of struggle. Not so. Such a man is found welcoming the false with rapture as very Truth herself. "What, then," says Leslie, "is this calorific and frigorific fluid after which we are inquiring? It is not light, it has no relation to ether, it bears no analogy to the fluids, real or imaginary, of magnetism and electricity. But why have recourse to invisible agents? Quod petis, hic est. It is merely the ambient AIR."
The capitals are Leslie's own, but ere we smile with superior knowledge let us put ourselves in his place, and then we may comprehend the exultation with which he announces the identity of radiant heat and common air, for he feels that he is beginning a daring revolt against the orthodox doctrine of caloric, and so he is.
[To be continued.]
- ↑ President's address before the American Association for the Advancement of Science, at Cleveland, Ohio, August 15, 1888. Reprinted from "Science."