Chapter 27

Beyond the waves of violet light are the still shorter and more rapid waves--the "ultra-violet" waves--which are precious to the photographer. As every amateur knows, his plate may safely be exposed to light that comes through a red or an orange screen. Such a screen means "no thoroughfare" for the blue and "beyond-blue" waves, and it is these which arrange the little grains of silver on the plate. It is the same waves which supply the energy to the little green grains of matter (chlorophyll) in the plant, preparing our food and timber for us, as will be seen later. The tree struggles upward and spreads out its leaves fanwise to the blue sky to receive them. In our coal-measures, the mighty dead forests of long ago, are vast stores of sunlight which we are prodigally using up.

The X-rays are the extreme end, the highest octave, of the series of waves. Their power of penetration implies that they are excessively minute, but even these have not held their secret from the modern physicist. From a series of beautiful experiments, in which they were made to pass amongst the atoms of a crystal, we learned their length. It is about the ten-millionth of a millimetre, and a millimetre is about the 1/25 of an inch!

One of the most recent discoveries, made during a recent eclipse of the sun, is that light is subject to gravitation. A ray of light from a star is bent out of its straight path when it passes near the mass of the sun. Professor Eddington tells us that we have as much right to speak of a pound of light as of a pound of sugar. Professor Eddington even calculates that the earth receives 160 tons of light from the sun every year!

ENERGY: HOW ALL LIFE DEPENDS ON IT

As we have seen in an earlier chapter, one of the fundamental entities of the universe is matter. A second, not less important, is called energy. Energy is indispensable if the world is to continue to exist, since all phenomena, including life, depend on it. Just as it is humanly impossible to create or to destroy a particle of matter, so is it impossible to create or to destroy energy. This statement will be more readily understood when we have considered what energy is.

Energy, like matter, is indestructible, and just as matter exists in various forms so does energy. And we may add, just as we are ignorant of what the negative and positive particles of electricity which constitute matter really are, so we are ignorant of the true nature of energy. At the same time, energy is not so completely mysterious as it once was. It is another of nature's mysteries which the advance of modern science has in some measure unveiled. It was only during the nineteenth century that energy came to be known as something as distinct and permanent as matter itself.

Forms of Energy

The existence of various forms of energy had been known, of course, for ages; there was the energy of a falling stone, the energy produced by burning wood or coal or any other substance, but the essential _identity_ of all these forms of energy had not been suspected. The conception of energy as something which, like matter, was constant in amount, which could not be created nor destroyed, was one of the great scientific acquisitions of the past century.

It is not possible to enter deeply into this subject here. It is sufficient if we briefly outline its salient aspects. Energy is recognised in two forms, kinetic and potential. The form of energy which is most apparent to us is the _energy of motion_; for example, a rolling stone, running water, a falling body, and so on. We call the energy of motion _kinetic energy_. Potential energy is the energy a body has in virtue of its position--it is its capacity, in other words, to acquire kinetic energy, as in the case of a stone resting on the edge of a cliff.

Energy may assume different forms; one kind of energy may be converted directly or indirectly into some other form. The energy of burning coal, for example, is converted into heat, and from heat energy we have mechanical energy, such as that manifested by the steam-engine. In this way we can transfer energy from one body to another. There is the energy of the great waterfalls of Niagara, for instance, which are used to supply the energy of huge electric power stations.

What Heat is

An important fact about energy is, that all energy _tends to take the form of heat energy_. The impact of a falling stone generates heat; a waterfall is hotter at the bottom than at the top--the falling particles of water, on striking the ground, generate heat; and most chemical changes are attended by heat changes. Energy may remain latent indefinitely in a lump of wood, but in combustion it is liberated, and we have heat as a result. The atom of radium or of any other radio-active substance, as it disintegrates, generates heat. "Every hour radium generates sufficient heat to raise the temperature of its own weight of water, from the freezing point to the boiling point." And what is heat? _Heat is molecular motion._ The molecules of every substance, as we have seen on a previous page, are in a state of continual motion, and the more vigorous the motion the hotter the body. As wood or coal burns, the invisible molecules of these substances are violently agitated, and give rise to ether waves which our senses interpret as light and heat. In this constant movement of the molecules, then, we have a manifestation of the energy of motion and of heat.

That energy which disappears in one form reappears in another has been found to be universally true. It was Joule who, by churning water, first showed that a measurable quantity of mechanical energy could be transformed into a measurable quantity of heat energy. By causing an apparatus to stir water vigorously, that apparatus being driven by falling weights or a rotating flywheel or by any other mechanical means, the water became heated. A certain amount of mechanical energy had been used up and a certain amount of heat had appeared. The relation between these two things was found to be invariable. Every physical change in nature involves a transformation of energy, but the total quantity of energy in the universe remains unaltered. This is the great doctrine of the Conservation of Energy.

§ 13

Substitutes for Coal

Consider the source of nearly all the energy which is used in modern civilisation--coal. The great forests of the Carboniferous epoch now exists as beds of coal. By the burning of coal--a chemical transformation--the heat energy is produced on which at present our whole civilisation depends. Whence is the energy locked up in the coal derived? From the sun. For millions of years the energy of the sun's rays had gone to form the vast vegetation of the Carboniferous era and had been transformed, by various subtle processes, into the potential energy that slumbers in those immense fossilized forests.

The exhaustion of our coal deposits would mean, so far as our knowledge extends at present, the end of the world's civilisation. There are other known sources of energy, it is true. There is the energy of falling water; the great falls of Niagara are used to supply the energy of huge electric power stations. Perhaps, also, something could be done to utilise the energy of the tides--another instance of the energy of moving water. And attempts have been made to utilise directly the energy of the sun's rays. But all these sources of energy are small compared with the energy of coal. A suggestion was made at a recent British Association meeting that deep borings might be sunk in order to utilise the internal heat of the earth, but this is not, perhaps, a very practical proposal. By far the most effective substitutes for coal would be found in the interior energy of the atom, a source of energy which, as we have seen, is practically illimitable. If the immense electrical energy in the interior of the atom can ever be liberated and controlled, then our steadily decreasing coal supply will no longer be the bugbear it now is to all thoughtful men.

The stored-up energy of the great coal-fields can be used up, but we cannot replace it or create fresh supplies. As we have seen, energy cannot be destroyed, but it can become _unavailable_. Let us consider what this important fact means.

§ 14

Dissipation of Energy

Energy may become dissipated. Where does it go? since if it is indestructible it must still exist. It is easier to ask the question than to give a final answer, and it is not possible in this OUTLINE, where an advanced knowledge of physics is not assumed on the part of the reader, to go fully into the somewhat difficult theories put forward by physicists and chemists. We may raise the temperature, say, of iron, until it is white-hot. If we stop the process the temperature of the iron will gradually settle down to the temperature of surrounding bodies. As it does so, where does its previous energy go? In some measure it may pass to other bodies in contact with the piece of iron, but ultimately the heat becomes radiated away in space where we cannot follow it. It has been added to the vast reservoir of _unavailable_ heat energy of uniform temperature. It is sufficient here to say that if all bodies had a uniform temperature we should experience no such thing as heat, because heat only travels from one body to another, having the effect of cooling the one and warming the other. In time the two bodies acquire the same temperature. The sum-total of the heat in any body is measured in terms of the kinetic energy of its moving molecules.

There must come a time, so far as we can see at present, when, even if all the heat energy of the universe is not radiated away into empty infinite space, yet a uniform temperature will prevail. If one body is hotter than another it radiates heat to that body until both are at the same temperature. Each body may still possess a considerable quantity of heat energy, which it has absorbed, but that energy, so far as reactions between those two bodies are concerned, _is now unavailable_. The same principle applies whatever number of bodies we consider. Before heat energy can be utilised we must have bodies with different temperature. If the whole universe were at some uniform temperature, then, although it might possess an enormous amount of heat energy, this energy would be unavailable.

What a Uniform Temperature would mean

And what does this imply? It implies a great deal: for if all the energy in the world became unavailable, the universe, as it now is, would cease to be. It is possible that, by the constant interchange of heat radiations, the whole universe is tending to some uniform temperature, in which case, although all molecular motion would not have ceased, it would have become unavailable. In this sense it may be said that the universe is running down.

If all the molecules of a substance were brought to a standstill, that substance would be at the absolute zero of temperature. There could be nothing colder. The temperature at which all molecular motions would cease is known: it is -273° C. No body could possibly attain a lower temperature than this: a lower temperature could not exist. Unless there exists in nature some process, of which we know nothing at present, whereby energy is renewed, our solar system must one day sink to this absolute zero of temperature. The sun, the earth, and every other body in the universe is steadily radiating heat, and this radiation cannot go on for ever, because heat continually tends to diffuse and to equalise temperatures.

But we can see, theoretically, that there is a way of evading this law. If the chaotic molecular motions which constitute heat could be _regulated_, then the heat energy of a body could be utilised directly. Some authorities think that some of the processes which go on in the living body do not involve any waste energy, that the chemical energy of food is transformed directly into work without any of it being dissipated as useless heat energy. It may be, therefore, that man will finally discover some way of escape from the natural law that, while energy cannot be destroyed, it has a tendency to become unavailable.

The primary reservoir of energy is the atom; it is the energy of the atom, the atom of elements in the sun, the stars, the earth, from which nature draws for all her supply of energy. Shall we ever discover how we can replenish the dwindling resources of energy, or find out how we can call into being the at present unavailable energy which is stored up in uniform temperature?

It looks as if our successors would witness an interesting race, between the progress of science on the one hand and the depletion of natural resources upon the other. The natural rate of flow of energy from its primary atomic reservoirs to the sea of waste heat energy of uniform temperature, allows life to proceed at a complete pace sternly regulated by the inexorable laws of supply and demand, which the biologists have recognised in their field as the struggle for existence.[5]

[5] _Matter and Energy_, by Professor Soddy.

It is certain that energy is an actual entity just as much as matter, and that it cannot be created or destroyed. Matter and ether are receptacles or vehicles of energy. As we have said, what these entities really are in themselves we do not know. It may be that all forms of energy are in some fundamental way aspects of the same primary entity which constitutes matter: how all matter is constituted of particles of electricity we have already seen. The question to which we await an answer is: What is electricity?

§ 15

MATTER, ETHER, AND EINSTEIN

The supreme synthesis, the crown of all this progressive conquest of nature, would be to discover that the particles of positive and negative electricity, which make up the atoms of matter, are points or centres of disturbances of some kind in a universal ether, and that all our "energies" (light, magnetism, gravitation, etc.) are waves or strains of some kind set up in the ether by these clusters of electrons.

It is a fascinating, tantalising dream. Larmor suggested in 1900 that the electron is a tiny whirlpool, or "vortex," in ether; and, as such a vortex may turn in either of two opposite ways, we seem to see a possibility of explaining positive and negative electricity. But the difficulties have proved very serious, and the nature of the electron is unknown. A recent view is that it is "a ring of negative electricity rotating about its axis at a high speed," though that does not carry us very far. The unit of positive electricity is even less known. We must be content to know the general lines on which thought is moving toward the final unification.

We say "unification," but it would be a grave error to think that ether is the only possible basis for such unity, or to make it an essential part of one's philosophy of the universe. Ether was never more than an imagined entity to which we ascribed the most extraordinary properties, and which seemed then to promise considerable aid. It was conceived as an elastic solid of very great density, stretching from end to end of the universe, transmitting waves from star to star at the rate of 186,000 miles a second; yet it was believed that the most solid matter passed through it as if it did not exist.

Some years ago a delicate experiment was tried for the purpose of detecting the ether. Since the earth, in travelling round the sun, must move through the ether if the ether exists, there ought to be a stream of ether flowing through every laboratory; just as the motion of a ship through a still atmosphere will make "a wind." In 1887 Michelson and Morley tried to detect this. Theoretically, a ray of light in the direction of the stream ought to travel at a different rate from a ray of light against the stream or across it. They found no difference, and scores of other experiments have failed. This does not prove that there is no ether, as there is reason to suppose that our instruments would appear to shrink in precisely the same proportion as the alteration of the light; but the fact remains that we have no proof of the existence of ether. J. H. Jeans says that "nature acts as if no such thing existed." Even the phenomena of light and magnetism, he says, do not imply ether; and he thinks that the hypothesis may be abandoned. The primary reason, of course, for giving up the notion of the ether is that, as Einstein has shown, there is no way of detecting its existence. If there is an ether, then, since the earth is moving through it, there should be some way of detecting this motion. The experiment has been tried, as we have said, but, although the method used was very sensitive, no motion was discovered. It is Einstein who, by revolutionising our conceptions of space and time, showed that no such motion ever could be discovered, whatever means were employed, and that the usual notion of the ether must be abandoned. We shall explain this theory more fully in a later section.

INFLUENCE OF THE TIDES: ORIGIN OF THE MOON: THE EARTH SLOWING DOWN

§ 16

Until comparatively recent times, until, in fact, the full dawn of modern science, the tides ranked amongst the greatest of nature's mysteries. And, indeed, what agency could be invoked to explain this mysteriously regular flux and reflux of the waters of the ocean? It is not surprising that that steady, rhythmical rise and fall suggested to some imaginative minds the breathing of a mighty animal. And even when man first became aware of the fact that this regular movement was somehow associated with the moon, was he much nearer an explanation? What bond could exist between the movements of that distant world and the diurnal variation of the waters of the earth? It is reported that an ancient astronomer, despairing of ever resolving the mystery, drowned himself in the sea.

The Earth Pulled by the Moon

But it was part of the merit of Newton's mighty theory of gravitation that it furnished an explanation even of this age-old mystery. We can see, in broad outlines at any rate, that the theory of universal attraction can be applied to this case. For the moon, Newton taught us, pulls every particle of matter throughout the earth. If we imagine that part of the earth's surface which comprises the Pacific Ocean, for instance, to be turned towards the moon, we see that the moon's pull, _acting on the loose and mobile water_, would tend to heap it up into a sort of mound. The whole earth is pulled by the moon, but the water is more free to obey this pull than is the solid earth, although small tides are also caused in the earth's solid crust. It can be shown also that a corresponding hump would tend to be produced on the other side of the earth, owing, in this case, to the tendency of the water, being more loosely connected, to lag behind the solid earth. If the earth's surface were entirely fluid the rotation of the earth would give the impression that these two humps were continually travelling round the world, once every day. At any given part of the earth's surface, therefore, there would be two humps daily, i.e. two periods of high water. Such is the simplest possible outline of the gravitational theory of the tides.

The actually observed phenomena are vastly more complicated, and the complete theory bears very little resemblance to the simple form we have just outlined. Everyone who lives in the neighbourhood of a port knows, for instance, that high water seldom coincides with the time when the moon crosses the meridian. It may be several hours early or late. High water at London Bridge, for instance, occurs about one and a half hours after the moon has passed the meridian, while at Dublin high water occurs about one and a half hours before the moon crosses the meridian. The actually observed phenomena, then, are far from simple; they have, nevertheless, been very completely worked out, and the times of high water for every port in the world can now be prophesied for a considerable time ahead.

The Action of Sun and Moon