The Electromagnetic Ether

The idea of attributing the phenomena of electricity to perturbations produced in the medium which transmits the light is already of old standing; and the physicists who witnessed the triumph of Fresnel’s theories could not fail to conceive that this fluid, which fills the whole of space and penetrates into all bodies, might also play a preponderant part in electrical actions.

Some even formed too hasty hypotheses on this point; for the hour had not arrived when it was possible to place them on a sufficiently sound basis, and the known facts were not numerous enough to give the necessary precision.

The founders of modern electricity also thought it wiser to adopt, with regard to this science, the attitude taken by Newton in connection with gravitation: “In the first place to observe facts, to vary the circumstances of these as much as possible, to accompany this first work by precise measurements in order to deduce from them general laws founded solely on experiment, and to deduce from these laws, independently of all hypotheses on the nature of the forces producing the phenomena, the mathematical value of these forces—that is to say, the formula representing them. Such was the system pursued by Newton.

It has, in general, been adopted in France by the scholars to whom physics owe the great progress made of late years, and it has served as my guide in all my researches on electrodynamic phenomena…. It is for this reason that I have avoided speaking of the ideas I may have on the nature of the cause of the force emanating from voltaic conductors.”

Thus did Ampère express himself.

The illustrious physicist rightly considered the results obtained by him through following this wise method as worthy of comparison with the laws of attraction; but he knew that when this first halting-place was reached there was still further to go, and that the evolution of ideas must necessarily continue.

“With whatever physical cause,” he adds, “we may wish to connect the phenomena produced by electro-dynamic action, the formula I have obtained will always remain the expression of the facts,” and he explicitly indicated that if one could succeed in deducing his formula from the consideration of the vibrations of a fluid distributed through space, an enormous step would have been taken in this department of physics.

He added, however, that this research appeared to him premature, and would change nothing in the results of his work, since, to accord with facts, the hypothesis adopted would always have to agree with the formula which exactly represents them.

It is not devoid of interest to observe that Ampère himself, notwithstanding his caution, really formed some hypotheses, and recognized that electrical phenomena were governed by the laws of mechanics. Yet the principles of Newton then appeared to be unshakable.

Faraday was the first to demonstrate, by clear experiment, the influence of the media in electricity and magnetic phenomena, and he attributed this influence to certain modifications in the ether which these media enclose. His fundamental conception was to reject action at a distance, and to localize in the ether the energy whose evolution is the cause of the actions manifested, as, for example, in the discharge of a condenser.

Consider the barrel of a pump placed in a vacuum and closed by a piston at each end, and let us introduce between these a certain mass of air. The two pistons, through the elastic force of the gas, repel each other with a force which, according to the law of Mariotte, varies in inverse ratio to the distance. The method favoured by Ampère would first of all allow this law of repulsion between the two pistons to be discovered, even if the existence of a gas enclosed in the barrel of the pump were unsuspected; and it would then be natural to localize the potential energy of the system on the surface of the two pistons.

But if the phenomenon is more carefully examined, we shall discover the presence of the air, and we shall understand that every part of the volume of this air could, if it were drawn off into a recipient of equal volume, carry away with it a fraction of the energy of the system, and that consequently this energy belongs really to the air and not to the pistons, which are there solely for the purpose of enabling this energy to manifest its existence.

Faraday made, in some sort, an equivalent discovery when he perceived that the electrical energy belongs, not to the coatings of the condenser, but to the dielectric which separates them. His audacious views revealed to him a new world, but to explore this world a surer and more patient method was needed.

Maxwell succeeded in stating with precision certain points of Faraday’s ideas, and he gave them the mathematical form which, often wrongly, impresses physicists, but which when it exactly encloses a theory, is a certain proof that this theory is at least coherent and logical. [23]

The work of Maxwell is over-elaborated, complex, difficult to read, and often ill-understood, even at the present day. Maxwell is more concerned in discovering whether it is possible to give an explanation of electrical and magnetic phenomena which shall be founded on the mechanical properties of a single medium, than in stating this explanation in precise terms. He is aware that if we could succeed in constructing such an interpretation, it would be easy to propose an infinity of others, entirely equivalent from the point of view of the experimentally verifiable consequences; and his especial ambition is therefore to extract from the premises a general view, and to place in evidence something which would remain the common property of all the theories.

He succeeded in showing that if the electrostatic energy of an electromagnetic field be considered to represent potential energy, and its electrodynamic the kinetic energy, it becomes possible to satisfy both the principle of least action and that of the conservation of energy; from that moment—if we eliminate a few difficulties which exist regarding the stability of the solutions—the possibility of finding mechanical explanations of electromagnetic phenomena must be considered as demonstrated.

He thus succeeded, moreover, in stating precisely the notion of two electric and magnetic fields which are produced in all points of space, and which are strictly inter-connected, since the variation of the one immediately and compulsorily gives birth to the other.

From this hypothesis he deduced that, in the medium where this energy is localized, an electromagnetic wave is propagated with a velocity equal to the relation of the units of electric mass in the electromagnetic and electrostatic systems. Now, experiments made known since his time have proved that this relation is numerically equal to the speed of light, and the more precise experiments made in consequence—among which should be cited the particularly careful ones of M. Max Abraham—have only rendered the coincidence still more complete.

It is natural henceforth to suppose that this medium is identical with the luminous ether, and that a luminous wave is an electromagnetic wave—that is to say, a succession of alternating currents, which exist in the dielectric and even in the void, and possess an enormous frequency, inasmuch as they change their direction thousands of billions of times per second, and by reason of this frequency produce considerable induction effects. Maxwell did not admit the existence of open currents.

To his mind, therefore, an electrical vibration could not produce condensations of electricity. It was, in consequence, necessarily transverse, and thus coincided with the vibration of Fresnel; while the corresponding magnetic vibration was perpendicular to it, and would coincide with the luminous vibration of Neumann.

Maxwell’s theory thus establishes a close correlation between the phenomena of the luminous and those of the electromagnetic waves, or, we might even say, the complete identity of the two. But it does not follow from this that we ought to regard the variation of an electric field produced at some one point as necessarily consisting of a real displacement of the ether round that point. The idea of thus bringing electrical phenomena back to the mechanics of the ether is not, then, forced upon us, and the contrary idea even seems more probable. It is not the optics of Fresnel which absorbs the science of electricity, it is rather the optics which is swallowed up by a more general theory. The attempts of popularizers who endeavour to represent, in all their details, the mechanism of the electric phenomena, thus appear vain enough, and even puerile. It is useless to find out to what material body the ether may be compared, if we content ourselves with seeing in it a medium of which, at every point, two vectors define the properties.

For a long time, therefore, we could remark that the theory of Fresnel simply supposed a medium in which something periodical was propagated, without its being necessary to admit this something to be a movement; but we had to wait not only for Maxwell, but also for Hertz, before this idea assumed a really scientific shape.

Hertz insisted on the fact that the 6 equations of the electric field permit all the phenomena to be anticipated without its being necessary to construct one hypothesis or another, and he put these equations into a very symmetrical form, which brings completely in evidence the perfect reciprocity between electrical and magnetic actions. He did yet more, for he brought to the ideas of Maxwell the most striking confirmation by his memorable researches on electric oscillations.