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CHAPTER V.
THE AETHER AS AN ELASTIC SOLID.
When Young and Fresnel put forward the view that the vibrations of light are performed at right angles to its direction of propagation, they at the same time pointed out that this peculiarity might be explained by making a new hypothesis regarding the nature of the luminiferous medium; namely, that it possesses the power of resisting attempts to distort its shape. It is by the possession of such a power that solid bodies are distinguished from fluids, which offer no resistance to distortion; the idea of Young and Fresnel may therefore be expressed by the simple statement that the aether behaves as an elastic solid. After the death of Fresnel this conception was developed in a brilliant series of memoirs to which our attention must now be directed.
The elastic-solid theory meets with one obvious difficulty at the outset. If the aether has the qualities of a solid, how is it that the planets in their orbital motions are able to journey through it at immense speeds without encountering any perceptible resistance? This objection was first satisfactorily answered by Sir George Gabriel Stokes[1] (b. 1819, d. 1903), who remarked that such substances as pitch and shoemaker's wax, though so rigid as to be capable of elastic vibration, are yet sufficiently plastic to permit other bodies to pass slowly through them. The aether, he suggested, may have this combination of qualities in an extreme degree, behaving like an elastic solid for vibrations so rapid as those of light, but yielding like a fluid to the much slower progressive motions of the planets.
Stokes's explanation harmonizes in a curious way with Fresnel's hypothesis that the velocity of longitudinal waves in
- ↑ Trans. Camb. Phil. Soc., viii, p. 287 (1845).
