William Thomson (Lord Kelvin, b. 1824, d. 1908), who devoted much attention to the labile aether, was at one time led to doubt the validity of this explanation of light[1]; for when investigating the radiation of energy from a vibrating rigid globe embedded in an infinite elastic-solid aether, he found that in some cases the irrotational waves would carry away a considerable part of the energy if the aether were of the labile type. This difficulty, however, was removed by the observation[2] that it is sufficient for the fulfilment of Fresnel's laws if the velocity of the irrotational waves in one of the two media is very small, without regard to the other medium. Following up this idea, Thomson assumed that in space void of ponderable matter the aether is practically incompressible by the forces concerned in light-waves, but that in the space occupied by liquids and solids it has a negative compressibility, so as to give zero velocity for longitudinal aether-waves in these bodies. This assumption was based on the conception that material atoms move through space without displacing the aether: a conception which, as Thomson remarked, contradicts the old scholastic axiom that two different portions of matter cannot simultaneously occupy the same space.[3] He supposed the aether to be attracted and repelled by the atoms, and thereby to be condensed or rarefied.[4]
The year 1839, which saw the publication of MacCullagh's dynamical theory of light and Cauchy's theory of the labile aether, was memorable also for the appearance of a memoir by Green on crystal-optics.[5] This really contains two distinct theories, which respectively resemble Cauchy's First and Second Theories: in one of them, the stresses in the undisturbed state
- ↑ Baltimore Lectures (edition 1904), p. 214.
- ↑ Ibid. (ed. 1904), p. 411.
- ↑ Michell and Boscovich in the eighteenth century had taught the doctrine of the mutual penetration of matter, i.e. that two substances may be in the same place at the same time without excluding each other: cf. Priestley's History i., P. 392.
- ↑ Cf. Baltimore Lectures (ed. 1904), pp. 413-14, 463, and Appendices A and E.
- ↑ Cambridge Pbil. Trans., 1839; Green's Math. Papers, p. 293.
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