The Evolution of Matter - the book The Evolution of Matter - Table of Contents
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MODERN science formerly established a complete separation between matter and energy. The classic ideas on this scission will be found very plainly stated in the following passage of a recent work by Professor Janet:-
"The world we live in is, in reality, a double world; or, rather, it is composed of two distinct worlds: one the world of matter, the other the world of energy. Copper, iron, and coal are forms of matter, mechanical labour and heat are forms of energy. These two worlds are each ruled by one and the same law. Matter can neither be created nor destroyed. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed.
"Matter and energy can assume various forms without matter ever transforming itself into energy or energy into matter. . . . We can no more conceive energy without matter than we can conceive matter without energy." [1]
Never, in fact, as says M. Janet, has it been possible till now to transform matter into energy; or, to be more precise, matter has never appeared to manifest any energy save that which had first been supplied to it. Incapable of creating energy, it could only give it back. The fundamental principles of thermodynamics taught that a material system isolated from all external action cannot spontaneously generate energy.
[1]Janet, Lecons d'electricite, 2nd edition, pp. 2 and 5.
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All previous scientific observations seemed to confirm this notion that no substance is able to produce energy without having first obtained it from outside. Matter may serve as a support to electricity, as in the case of a condenser; it may radiate heat as in the case of a mass of metal previously heated; it may manifest forces produced by simple changes of equilibrium as in the case of chemical transformations; but in all these circumstances the energy disengaged is but the restitution in quantity exactly equal to that first communicated to the portion of matter or employed in producing the combination. In all the cases just mentioned, as in all others of the same order, matter does no more than give back the energy which had first been given to it in some shape or other. It has created nothing, nothing has gone forth from itself.
The impossibility of transforming matter into energy seemed therefore evident, and it was rightly invoked in the works which have become classic to establish a sharp separation between the world of matter and the world of energy. For this separation to disappear, it was necessary to succeed in transforming matter into energy without external addition. Now, it is exactly this spontaneous transformation of matter into energy which is the result of all the experiments on the dissociation of matter set forth in this work. We shall see from them that matter can vanish without return, leaving behind it only the energy produced by its dissociation. The spontaneous production of energy thus established, a production so contrary to the scientific ideas of the present time, appeared at first entirely inexplicable
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to physicists busied in seeking outside matter and failing to find it, the origin of the energy manifested. We have shown that the explanation becomes very simple so soon as one consents to recognize that matter contains a reservoir of energy which it can lose in part, either spontaneously or by the effect of slight influences.
These slight influences act somewhat like a spark on a quantity of gunpowder - that is to say, by liberating energies far beyond those of the spark. Strictly it might be urged, doubtless, that in that case it is not matter which transforms itself into energy, but simply an intra-atomic energy which is expended; but as this matter cannot be generated without matter vanishing without return, we have a right to say that things happen exactly as if matter were transformed into energy.
Such a transformation becomes, moreover, very comprehensible so soon as one is thoroughly penetrated with the idea that matter is simply that form of energy endowed with stability which we have called intra-atomic energy. It results from this that when we say that matter is transformed into energy, it simply signifies that intra-atomic energy has changed its aspect to assume those divers forms to which we give the names of light, electricity, etc. And if, as we have shown above, a very small quantity of matter can produce, in the course of dissociation, a large amount of energy, it is because one of the most characteristic properties of the intra-atomic forces is their condensation, in immense quantities, within an extremely circumscribed space. For an analogous reason a gas compressed to a very high degree in a very small reservoir can give a
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considerable volume of gas when the tap is opened which before prevented its escape.
The preceding notions were quite new when I formulated them for the first time. Several physicists are now arriving at them by different ways, but they do not reach them without serious difficulties, because some of these new notions are extremely hard to reconcile with certain classic principles. Many scholars have as much trouble in admitting them as they experienced fifty years ago in acknowledging as exact the principle of the conservatism of energy. Nothing is more difficult than to rid oneself of the inherited ideas which unconsciously direct our thoughts.
These difficulties may be appreciated by reading a recent communication from one of the most eminent of living physicists, Lord Kelvin, at a meeting of the British Association, regarding the heat spontaneously given out by radium during its dissociation. Yet this emission is no more surprising than the continuous emission of particles having a speed of the same order as that of light, which can be obtained not ouly from radium; but from any substance whatever.
"It is utterly impossible," writes Lord Kelvin, "that the heat produced can proceed from the stored energy of radium. It therefore seems to me absolutely certain that if the emission of heat continues at the same rate, this heat must be sppplied from outside." [1]
And Lord Kelvin falls back upon the common-place
[1] Philosophical Magazine, February 1904, p. 122. Lord Kelvin, however, withdrew this at the Cambridge Meeting of the British Association (1904), and admitted that the whole energy of radio-active bodies must be self-contained.-F. L.
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hypothesis formed at the outset on the origin of the energy of radio-active bodies, which were attributable, as it was thought, to certain mysterious forces from the ambient medium. This supposition had no experimental support. It was simply the theoretical consequence of the idea that matter, being entirely unable to create energy, could only give back what had been supplied to it. The fundamental principles of thermodynamics which Lord Kelvin has helped so much to found, tell us, in fact, that a material system isolated from all external action cannot spontaneously generate energy. But experiment has ever been superior to principles, and when once it has spoken, those scientific laws which appeared to be the most stable are condemned to rejoin in oblivion, the used-up, out-worn dogmas and doctrines past service.
Other and bolder physicists, like Rutherford, after having admitted the principles of intra-atomic energy, remain in doubt. This is what the latter writes in a paper later than his book on radio-activity:-
"It would be desirable to see appear some kind of chemical theory to explain the facts, and to enable us to know whether the energy is borrowed from the atom itself or from external sources." [1]
Many physicists then, like Lord Kelvin, still keep to the old principles: that is why the phenomena of radio-activity, especially the spontaneous emission of particles animated with great speed and the rise in temperature during radio-activity, seem to them utterly unexplicable, and constitute a scientific enigma, as M. Mascart has recently said. The enigma, however, is very simple with the explanation I have given.
[1] Archives des Sciences physiques de Geneve, 1905, p. 53·
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One could not hope, moreover, that ideas so opposed to classic dogmas as intra-atomic energy and the transforming of matter into energy should spread very rapidly. It is even contrary to the usual evolution of scientific ideas that they should be already widely spread, and should have produced all the discussions of which a summary will be found in the chapter devoted to the examination of objections.
One can only explain this relative success by remembering that faith in certain scientific principles had already been greatly shaken by such unforeseen discoveries as those of the X rays and of radium.
The fact is that the scientific ideas which rule the minds of scholars at various epochs have all the solidity of religious dogmas. Very slow to be established, they are very slow likewise to disappear. New scientific truths have, assuredly, experience and reason as a basis, but they are only propagated by prestige - that is, when they are enunciated by scholars whose official position gives them prestige in the eyes of the scientific public. Now, it is this very category of scholars which not only does not enunciate them, but employs its authority to combat them. Truths of such capital importance as Ohm's law, which governs the whole of electricity, and the law of the conservation of energy which governs all physics, were received, on their first appearance, with indifference or contempt, and remained without effect until the day when they were enunciated anew by scholars endowed with influence.
It is only by studying the history of sciences, so little pursued at the present date, that one succeeds in understanding the genesis of beliefs and the laws governing their diffusion. I have just alluded to two
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discoveries which were among the most important of the past century, and which are summarized in two laws, of which one can say that they ought to have appealed to all minds by their marvellous simplicity and their imposing grandeur. Not only did they strike no one, but the most eminent scholars of the epoch did not concern themselves about them except to try to cover them with ridicule.[1]
That the simple enunciation of such doctrines should have appealed to no one shows with what difficulty a new idea is accepted when it does not fit in with former dogmas. Prestige, I repeat, and to a very slight extent experience are alone the ordinary foundation of our convictions - scientific and otherwise. Experiments - even those most convincing in
[1] When Ohm discovered the law which will immortalize his name, and on which the whole science of electricity rests, he published it in a book filled with experiments so simple and so conclusive that they might have been understood by any pupil in an elementary school. Not only did he fail to convince any one, but the most influential scholars of his time treated him in such a way that he lost the berth he occupied, and, to avoid dying of starvation, was only too glad to take a situation in a college at 1,200 francs per annum, where he remained for six years. Justice was only rendered to him at the close of his life. Robert Mayer, less fortunate, did not even obtain this tardy satisfaction. When he discovered the most important of modern scientific laws, that of the conservation of energy, he had great difficulty in finding a review which would consent to publish his memoir, but no scholar bestowed the least attention upon it; any more, in fact, than on his subsequent publications, among them the one on the mechanical equivalent of heat, published in 1850. After attempting suicide, Mayer went out of his mind, and remained for a long time unknown, to such a degree that when Helmholtz re-made the same discovery, he was not aware that he had been forestalled. Helmholtz himself did not meet with any greater encouragement at the outset, and the most important of the scientific journals of that epoch, the Atmales de Foggwdorff, declined to insert his celebrated memoir, "The Conservation of Energy,'' regarding it as a fanciful speculation unworthy the attention of serious readers.
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appearance - have never constituted an immediately demonstrable foundation when they clashed with long since accepted ideas. Galileo learned this to his cost, when, having brought together all the philosophers of the celebrated University of Pisa, he thought to prove to them by experiment that, contrary to the then accepted ideas, bodies of different weights fell with the same velocity. Galileo's demonstration was assuredly very conclusive, since by letting fall at the same moment from the top of a tower a small leaden ball and a cannon-shot of the same metal, he showed that both bodies reached the ground together. The professors contented themselves with appealing to the authority of Aristotle, and in nowise modified their opinions.
Many years have passed away since that time, but the degree of receptivity of minds for new things has not sensibly increased.
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The Evolution of Matter - the book The Evolution of Matter - Table of Contents