THE MODERN THEORY OF LIGHT

Scientific American Supplement, No. 717, September 28, 1889, by Various, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. THE MODERN THEORY OF LIGHT.1

THE MODERN THEORY OF LIGHT.

By Prof. Oliver Lodge.

To persons occupied in other branches of learning, and not directly engaged in the study of physical science, some rumor must probably have traveled of the stir and activity manifest at the present time among the votaries of that department of knowledge.

It may serve a useful purpose if I try and explain to outsiders what this stir is mainly about, and why it exists. There is a proximate and there is an ultimate cause. The proximate cause is certain experiments exhibiting in a marked and easily recognizable way the already theoretically predicted connection between electricity and light. The ultimate cause is that we begin to feel inklings and foretastes of theories, wider than that of gravitation, more fundamental than any theories which have yet been advanced; theories which if successfully worked out will carry the banner of physical science far into the dark continent of metaphysics, and will illuminate with a clear philosophy much that is at present only dimly guessed. More explicitly, we begin to perceive chinks of insight into the natures of electricity, of ether, of elasticity, and even of matter itself. We begin to have a kinetic theory of the physical universe.

We are living, not in a Newtonian, but at the beginning of a perhaps still greater Thomsonian era. Greater, not because any one man is probably greater than Newton,2 but because of the stupendousness of the problems now waiting to be solved. There are a dozen men of great magnitude, either now living or but recently deceased, to whom what we now know toward these generalizations is in some measure due, and the epoch of complete development may hardly be seen by those now alive. It is proverbially rash to attempt prediction, but it seems to me that it may well take a period of fifty years for these great strides to be fully accomplished. If it does, and if progress goes on at anything like its present rate, the aspect of physical science bequeathed to the latter half of the twentieth century will indeed excite admiration, and when the populace are sufficiently educated to appreciate it, will form a worthy theme for poetry, for oratorios, and for great works of art.

To attempt to give any idea of the drift of progress in all the directions which I have hastily mentioned, to attempt to explain the beginnings of the theories of elasticity and of matter, would take too long, and might only result in confusion. I will limit myself chiefly to giving some notion of what we have gained in knowledge concerning electricity, ether, and light. Even that is far too much. I find I must confine myself principally to light, and only treat of the others as incidental to that.

For now well nigh a century we have had a wave theory of light; and a wave theory of light is quite certainly true. It is directly demonstrable that light consists of waves of some kind or other, and that these waves travel at a certain well-known velocity, seven times the circumference of the earth per second, taking eight minutes on the journey from the sun to the earth. This propagation in time of an undulatory disturbance necessarily involves a medium. If waves setting out from the sun exist in space eight minutes before striking our eyes, there must necessarily be in space some medium in which they exist and which conveys them. Waves we cannot have unless they be waves in something.

No ordinary medium is competent to transmit waves at anything like the speed of light; hence the luminiferous medium must be a special kind of substance, and it is called the ether. The luminiferous ether it used to be called, because the conveyance of light was all it was then known to be capable of; but now that it is known to do a variety of other things also, the qualifying adjective may be dropped.

Wave motion in ether, light certainly is; but what does one mean by the term wave? The popular notion is, I suppose, of something heaving up and down, or, perhaps, of something breaking on the shore in which it is possible to bathe. But if you ask a mathematician what he means by a wave, he will probably reply that the simplest wave is

y = a sin (p t - n x),

and he might possibly refuse to give any other answer.

And in refusing to give any other answer than this, or its equivalent in ordinary words, he is entirely justified; that is what is meant by the term wave, and nothing less general would be all-inclusive.

Translated into ordinary English the phrase signifies "a disturbance periodic both in space and time." Anything thus doubly periodic is a wave; and all waves, whether in air as sound waves, or in ether as light waves, or on the surface of water as ocean waves, are comprehended in the definition.

What properties are essential to a medium capable of transmitting wave motion? Roughly we may say two—elasticity and inertia. Elasticity in some form, or some equivalent of it, in order to be able to store up energy and effect recoil; inertia, in order to enable the disturbed substance to overshoot the mark and oscillate beyond its place of equilibrium to and fro. Any medium possessing these two properties can transmit waves, and unless a medium possesses these properties in some form or other, or some equivalent for them, it may be said with moderate security to be incompetent to transmit waves. But if we make this latter statement, one must be prepared to extend to the terms elasticity and inertia their very largest and broadest signification, so as to include any possible kind of restoring force and any possible kind of persistence of motion respectively.

These matters may be illustrated in many ways, but perhaps a simple loaded lath or spring in a vise will serve well enough. Pull aside one end, and its elasticity tends to make it recoil; let it go, and its inertia causes it to overshoot its normal position; both causes together cause it to swing to and fro till its energy is exhausted. A regular series of such springs at equal intervals in space, set going at regular intervals of time one after the other, gives you at once a wave motion and appearance which the most casual observer must recognize as such. A series of pendulums will do just as well. Any wave-transmitting medium must similarly possess some form of elasticity and of inertia.

But now proceed to ask what is this ether which in the case of light is thus vibrating? What corresponds to the elastic displacement and recoil of the spring or pendulum? What corresponds to the inertia whereby it overshoots its mark? Do we know these properties in the ether in any other way?

The answer, given first by Clerk Maxwell, and now reiterated and insisted on by experiments performed in every important laboratory in the world, is:

The elastic displacement corresponds to electrostatic charge (roughly speaking, to electricity).

The inertia corresponds to magnetism.

This is the basis of the modern electro-magnetic theory of light. Now let me illustrate electrically how this can be.

The old and familiar operation of charging a Leyden jar—the storing up of energy in a strained dielectric, any electrostatic charging whatever—is quite analogous to the drawing aside of our flexible spring. It is making use of the elasticity of the ether to produce a tendency to recoil. Letting go the spring is analogous to permitting a discharge of the jar—permitting the strained dielectric to recover itself, the electrostatic disturbance to subside.

In nearly all the experiments of electrostatics, ethereal elasticity is manifest.

Next consider inertia. How would one illustrate the fact that water, for instance, possesses inertia—the power of persisting in motion against obstacles—the power of possessing kinetic energy? The most direct way would be to take a stream of water and try suddenly to stop it. Open a water tap freely and then suddenly shut it. The impetus or momentum of the stopped water makes itself manifest by a violent shock to the pipe, with which everybody must be familiar. The momentum of water is utilized by engineers in the "water ram."

A precisely analogous experiment in electricity is what Faraday called "the extra current." Send a current through a coil of wire round a piece of iron, or take any other arrangement for developing powerful magnetism, and then suddenly stop the current by breaking the circuit. A violent flash occurs if the stoppage is sudden enough, a flash which means the bursting of the insulating air partition by the accumulated electro-magnetic momentum.

Briefly, we may say that nearly all electro-magnetic experiments illustrate the fact of ethereal inertia.

Now return to consider what happens when a charged conductor (say a Leyden jar) is discharged. The recoil of the strained dielectric causes a current, the inertia of this current causes it to overshoot the mark, and for an instant the charge of the jar is reversed; the current now flows backward and charges the jar up as at first; back again flows the current, and so on, charging and reversing the charge with rapid oscillations until the energy is all dissipated into heat. The operation is precisely analogous to the release of a strained spring or to the plucking of a stretched string.

But the discharging body thus thrown into strong electrical vibration is embedded in the all-pervading ether, and we have just seen that the ether possesses the two properties requisite for the generation and transmission of waves—viz., elasticity and inertia or density; hence, just as a tuning fork vibrating in air excites aerial waves or sound, so a discharging Leyden jar in ether excites ethereal waves or light.

Ethereal waves can therefore be actually produced by direct electrical means. I discharge here a jar, and the room is for an instant filled with light. With light, I say, though you can see nothing. You can see and hear the spark indeed—but that is a mere secondary disturbance we can for the present ignore—I do not mean any secondary disturbance. I mean the true ethereal waves emitted by the electric oscillation going on in the neighborhood of this recoiling dielectric. You pull aside the prong of a tuning fork and let it go; vibration follows and sound is produced. You charge a Leyden jar and let it discharge; vibration follows and light is excited.

It is light just as good as any other light. It travels at the same pace, it is reflected and refracted according to the same laws; every experiment known to optics can be performed with this ethereal radiation electrically produced, and yet you cannot see it. Why not? For no fault of the light; the fault (if there be a fault) is in the eye. The retina is incompetent to respond to these vibrations—they are too slow. The vibrations set up when this large jar is discharged are from a hundred thousand to a million per second, but that is too slow for the retina. It responds only to vibrations between 4,000 billions and 7,000 billions per second. The vibrations are too quick for the ear, which responds only to vibrations between 40 and 40,000 per second. Between the highest audible and the lowest visible vibrations there has been hitherto a great gap, which these electric oscillations go far to fill up. There has been a great gap simply because we have no intermediate sense organ to detect rates of vibration between 40,000 and 4,000,000,000,000,000 per second. It was, therefore, an unexplored territory. Waves have been there all the time in any quantity, but we have not thought about them nor attended to them.

It happens that I have myself succeeded in getting electric oscillations so slow as to be audible. The lowest I have got at present are 125 per second, and for some way above this the sparks emit a musical note; but no one has yet succeeded in directly making electric oscillations which are visible, though indirectly every one does it when they light a candle.

Here, however, is an electric oscillator, which vibrates 300 million times a second, and emits ethereal waves a yard long. The whole range of vibrations between musical tones and some thousand million per second is now filled up.

These electro-magnetic waves have long been known on the side of theory, but interest in them has been immensely quickened by the discovery of a receiver or detector for them. The great though simple discovery by Hertz of an "electric eye," as Sir W. Thomson calls it, makes experiments on these waves for the first time easy or even possible. We have now a sort of artificial sense organ for their appreciation—an electric arrangement which can virtually "see" these intermediate rates of vibration.

The Hertz receiver is the simplest thing in the world—nothing but a bit of wire or a pair of bits of wire adjusted so that when immersed in strong electric radiation they give minute sparks across a microscopic air gap.

The receiver I have here is adapted for the yard-long waves emitted from this small oscillator; but for the far longer waves emitted by a discharging Leyden jar an excellent receiver is a gilt wall paper or other interrupted metallic surface. The waves falling upon the metallic surface are reflected, and in the act of reflection excite electric currents, which cause sparks. Similarly, gigantic solar waves may produce auroræ; and minute waves from a candle do electrically disturb the retina.

The smaller waves are, however, far the most interesting and the most tractable to ordinary optical experiments. From a small oscillator, which may be a couple of small cylinders kept sparking into each other end to end by an induction coil, waves are emitted on which all manner of optical experiments can be performed.

They can be reflected by plain sheets of metal, concentrated by parabolic reflectors, refracted by prisms, concentrated by lenses. I have at the college a large lens of pitch, weighing over three hundredweight, for concentrating them to a focus. They can be made to show the phenomenon of interference, and thus have their wave length accurately measured. They are stopped by all conductors and transmitted by all insulators. Metals are opaque, but even imperfect insulators such as wood or stone are strikingly transparent, and waves may be received in one room from a source in another, the door between the two being shut.

The real nature of metallic opacity and of transparency has long been clear in Maxwell's theory of light, and these electrically produced waves only illustrate and bring home the well known facts. The experiments of Hertz are in fact the apotheosis of that theory.

Thus, then, in every way Maxwell's 1865 brilliant perception of the real nature of light is abundantly justified; and for the first time we have a true theory of light, no longer based upon analogy with sound, nor upon a hypothetical jelly or elastic solid.

Light is an electro-magnetic disturbance of the ether. Optics is a branch of electricity. Outstanding problems in optics are being rapidly solved now that we have the means of definitely exciting light with a full perception of what we are doing and of the precise mode of its vibration.

It remains to find out how to shorten down the waves—to hurry up the vibration until the light becomes visible. Nothing is wanted but quicker modes of vibrations. Smaller oscillators must be used—very much smaller—oscillators not much bigger than molecules. In all probability—one may almost say certainly—ordinary light is the result of electric oscillation in the molecules of hot bodies, or sometimes of bodies not hot—as in the phenomenon of phosphorescence.

The direct generation of visible light by electric means, so soon as we have learnt how to attain the necessary frequency of vibration, will have most important practical consequences.

Speaking in this university, it is happily quite unnecessary for me to bespeak interest in a subject by any reference to possible practical applications. But any practical application of what I have dealt with this evening is apparently so far distant as to be free from any sordid gloss of competition and company promotion, and is interesting in itself as a matter of pure science.

For consider our present methods of making artificial light; they are both wasteful and ineffective.

We want a certain range of oscillation, between 7,000 and 4,000 billion vibrations per second; no other is useful to us, because no other has any effect upon our retina; but we do not know how to produce vibrations of this rate. We can produce a definite vibration of one or two hundred or thousand per second; in other words, we can excite a pure tone of definite pitch; and we can demand any desired range of such tones continuously by means of bellows and a keyboard. We can also (though the fact is less well known) excite momentarily definite ethereal vibrations of some million per second, as I have explained at length; but we do not at present seem to know how to maintain this rate quite continuously. To get much faster rates of vibration than this we have to fall back upon atoms. We know how to make atoms vibrate; it is done by what we call "heating" the substance, and if we could deal with individual atoms unhampered by others, it is possible that we might get a pure and simple mode of vibration from them. It is possible, but unlikely; for atoms, even when isolated, have a multitude of modes of vibration special to themselves, of which only a few are of practical use to us, and we do not know how to excite some without also the others. However, we do not at present even deal with individual atoms; we treat them crowded together in a compact mass, so that their modes of vibration are really infinite.

We take a lump of matter, say a carbon filament or a piece of quicklime, and by raising its temperature we impress upon its atoms higher and higher modes of vibration, not transmuting the lower into the higher, but superposing the higher upon the lower, until at length we get such rates of vibration as our retina is constructed for, and we are satisfied. But how wasteful and indirect and empirical is the process. We want a small range of rapid vibrations, and we know no better than to make the whole series leading up to them. It is as though, in order to sound some little shrill octave of pipes in an organ, we are obliged to depress every key and every pedal, and to blow a young hurricane.

I have purposely selected as examples the more perfect methods of obtaining artificial light, wherein the waste radiation is only useless and not noxious. But the old-fashioned plan was cruder even than this; it consisted simply in setting something burning; whereby not the fuel but the air was consumed, whereby also a most powerful radiation was produced, in the waste waves of which we were content to sit stewing, for the sake of the minute—almost infinitesimal—fraction of it which enabled us to see.

Every one knows now, however, that combustion is not a pleasant or healthy mode of obtaining light; but every one does not realize that neither is incandescence a satisfactory and unwasteful method which is likely to be practiced for more than a few decades, or perhaps a century.

Look at the furnaces and boilers of a great steam engine driving a group of dynamos, and estimate the energy expended; and then look at the incandescent filaments of the lamps excited by them, and estimate how much of their radiated energy is of real service to the eye. It will be as the energy of a pitch pipe to an entire orchestra.

It is not too much to say that a boy turning a handle could, if his energy were properly directed, produce quite as much real light as is produced by all this mass of mechanism and consumption of material. There might, perhaps, be something contrary to the laws of nature in thus hoping to get and utilize some specific kind of radiation without the rest, but Lord Rayleigh has shown in a short communication to the British Association at York that it is not so, and that, therefore, we have a right to try to do it.

We do not yet know how, it is true, but it is one of the things we have got to learn.

Any one looking at a common glow-worm must be struck with the fact that not by ordinary combustion, nor yet on the steam engine and dynamo principle, is that easy light produced. Very little waste radiation is there from phosphorescent things in general. Light of the kind able to affect the retina is directly emitted; and for this, for even a large supply of this, a modicum of energy suffices.

Solar radiation consists of waves of all sizes, it is true; but then solar radiation has innumerable things to do besides making things visible. The whole of its energy is useful. In artificial lighting nothing but light is desired; when heat is wanted it is best obtained separately by combustion. And so soon as we clearly recognize that light is an electric vibration, so soon shall we begin to beat about for some mode of exciting and maintaining an electrical vibration of any required degree of rapidity. When this has been accomplished the problem of artificial lighting will have been solved.

[1] Being the general substance of a lecture to the Ashmolean Society in the University of Oxford, on Monday, June 3, 1889. [Reprinted from the Liverpool University College Magazine.]

[2] Though, indeed, a century hence it may be premature to offer an opinion on such a point.

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