THE WONDER OF MATTER (1904)
THE endless circulation of matter in the universe is, perhaps, one of the most wonderful facts with which chemistry has to deal. It is this endless change which causes the history of the most common and insignificant objects about us to be more astonishing than any fairy tale. What a wonderful story, for example, could be written of the material which forms our bodies ! It came into existence in the immense depths of space millions upon millions of years ago, and wandered for ages through darkness and void until it reached our earth. Perhaps it fell upon the earth in a fiery meteorite, or perhaps it merely joined the huge fire mist from which our solid world condensed. Since then it has run round age after age in an endless circle of change.
First it formed part of that vast primeval atmosphere which surrounded the globe, and blew in mighty winds around our planet; then it was absorbed into the body of some humble living being, and when this being died and its body decayed, the matter passed into the rich mother earth. Thence it passed into some plant by means of its roots ; and from the plant it passed, by the process of being devoured, into the body of some animal ; and from the animal again it passed to earth and thence to plants and animals again; and so on through an endless cycle of change, coursing through the bodies of innumerable multitudes of living forms, which stretch far back in a dim unending vista into the depths of time.
Finally it reached man; yes, the very atoms which thrill and flash in our brains and muscles once formed part of a living plant or animal millions of years ago, and will again form part of a living plant or animal millions of years hence. In some form or other the matter which now forms our bodies will exist long after the whole present order of creation has passed away; indeed, it may well yet blow in the winds of worlds as yet unborn, and thrill in forms of life not yet evolved.
This ceaseless round of matter seems to have impressed Shakespeare, who has caused Hamlet, not pleasantly, to refer to the subject more than once. In Act IV. Scene 3, we have the man eating the fish that has fed on a worm, which in its turn was sustained upon a dead emperor, and are shown " how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar." In Act V. Scene 1, there is the notable speech of Hamlet, when he says,
" Alexander died, Alexander was buried,
Alexander returneth into dust:
the dust is earth; of earth we make loam:
and why of that loam, whereto he was converted,
might they not stop a beer-barrel?
Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.
O, that that earth, which kept the world in awe,
Should patch a wall to expel the winter's flaw “
Not only the material forming our bodies, but every piece of material around us possesses an antiquity so vast as to be almost incredible. What endless convolutions and vicissitudes, for example, has a common lump of earth passed through before it reached its present form? It has been part of continents which have long since vanished, and has borne the tread of races long since extinct. It has been on the top of mountains and at the bottom of oceans ; it has often formed part of the molten fire underground, and, in spite of all this, it still remains, and will remain during endless ages yet to come.
All these wonders arise from the patient labor of generations of scientific men, that matter is indestructible, that it can be neither generated nor destroyed by any means in our power but may only be transformed. It may pass into a totally different series of forms, but at the end of a whole series of changes the same weight of matter remains as was there in the beginning. For example, when a candle burns away it disappears, and the matter forming it is apparently annihilated.
This is not really so, for the candle merely burned to invisible gaseous forms of matter, which, when collected and weighed, are found to contain the same weight of carbon and hydrogen (the kinds of matter which make up the candle) as was originally in the candle itself. This latter fact, indeed, can be shown easily by means of a very simple experiment. A candle C is fixed in a stoppered bottle A (Fig. 1), which is then weighed. The candle is now lighted by making a platinum wire BB, which encircles the wick, white hot by means of an electric current. The candle burns for a short time, and then goes out. On reweighing the bottle when it is cold, no alteration in weight will be found to have occurred, although part of the candle has burned into invisible gas.
In the light of recent discoveries, however, it may be doubted whether matter is absolutely indestructible, but there is no doubt that ordinary matter, if decomposable at all, decomposes so slowly that a single pound of it will endure through millions of millions of centuries, a time longer than that required for the whole solar system to evolve. It is indeed hard to conceive that anyone in full possession of his senses can look into the heavens on a dark starry night and remain unmoved. The fact that he looks into a vast void extending upwards for ever and ever, strewn with innumerable myriads of suns and world-systems, must fill even the most brutalized mind with a feeling of awe and bewilderment.
Yet the inter-space between world and world is not truly empty in the popular sense, for it is filled with a wonderful medium, termed the ETHER, which fills all the depths of space, and bears through it to us, in the form of minute ripples or quiverings, the light of the distant stars. Matter moves through this vast sea of ether, apparently without resistance, much as a sieve moves through water, or a wind rushes through the trees ; but what " matter" is, we do not know. All that we do know is that it is totally unlike anything which our crude senses conceive it to be, and is probably far more wonderful than anything we can even imagine.
We know that the solid objects about us are not really solid and impenetrable. They consist of countless millions of tiny particles, tiny atoms as chemists call them, in unceasing and swift motion. A single grain of lycopodium powder is made up of over a trillion of such atoms ; earth, the paper on which I write, the very air we breathe, consists of unimaginable millions of these tiny worlds, rushing and revolving as rapidly as rifle bullets. Mendeleef likens the atoms to the heavenly bodies, the stars, sun, planets, satellites, and comets, and he considers that the building up of molecules from atoms, and of substances from molecules, resembles the building up of systems, such as the solar system, or of twin stars, from these individual bodies.
Even these atoms which build up ordinary matter are by no means solid masses. Far from it. Each atom is probably composed of a few thousands of tiny specks of negatively electrified particles, which fly about in astronomical orbits inside the atoms (much as a swarm of bees would fly about inside the dome of a great cathedral) forming a kind of cosmic system under their strong mutual forces, and occupying the otherwise empty region of space which we call the atom.
The porosity of matter as thus constituted is extreme, and this explains why it can move through the ether without apparent resistance. Matter hangs in space like a faint cloud, and is perhaps a mere misty modification of the wonderful space-filling fluid. Indeed, there is reason to believe that the one massive constituent of the universe is this invisible ether, and that our matter is a mere gauzy cob-web, a mist, or a milky-way floating in it. The reason why matter appeals to us so strongly and clearly is because our bodies are composed of it, and because our sense organs have been evolved to respond to its various motions.
"Matter," says Francis Gaiton, "is a microcosm of innumerable and, it may be, immaterial motes, and the apparent vacancy of space is a plenum of ether that vibrates throughout like a solid." Nor must we forget that matter, as we know it, is but a collection of sensations generated in our brain by an exciting cause ; the matter itself which lies behind and gives rise to these sensations remains for ever unknowable, hidden behind the veil of changing phenomena. It is none the less real for all that, but still the fundamental fact remains that of the outer world we know nothing except our sensations. A landscape is nothing but a cluster of sensations. So also is a beautiful woman, a lovely flower, a child, a book. Between us and external reality stands as an impenetrable intermediary, our nervous system. When we attempt to understand the inmost nature of the outer world we stand before it as before utter darkness.
Outside of ourselves there exists in Nature neither sound nor silence, brightness nor darkness, neither color, odor, space, force, nor anything that we know as sensation. The multitudinous sounds of Nature, the creaking of carts, the cries of animals, the wail of music, the awful roll of thunder, are all produced by the excitement of our acoustic nerves, and exist only in our brains. As to the excitement itself, there is nothing to indicate that it is sonorous. It is in our brain where noise is produced; outside of it reigns eternal silence, or worse, since silence is the correlation of noise. Similarly light is produced by the excitement of the optic nerve, and shines only in our brains ; the ethereal vibrations themselves are not luminous. Outside us, then, is utter darkness ; the flashing lights and colors of the outer world which incessantly assail us, the sudden glare of lightning, the gleam of gold and scarlet, the green of trees and fields, all the visible glories of the outer world, exist but in our brain! The same is true of all our other senses, and affects to an unknowable degree our conception of matter. We are utterly walled in by our nervous system.
We will now give a brief account of the views of the foremost modern thinkers upon the constitution of matter. A wonderful theory of Professor Osborne Reynolds from Cambridge University assumes that the ultimate particles which make up matter are nothing but empty cracks flitting to and fro like silent ghosts through the vast stagnant sea of ether. The ether is supposed to consist of an arrangement of indefinite extent of uniform spherical grains, generally so close that the grains cannot change their neighbors, although continually in relative motion with each other. The grains are extremely minute, the diameters being 5.534 X 10 -18 centimeters (1 inch is 2.5 cm). The millionth part of an inch could contain half a billion such particles packed side by side. The pressure in the medium is about 10,000 tons per square centimeter. In spaces in which there occur a smaller number of grains than is necessary to render the piling " normal," such local deficiencies are permanent. They can run through the medium without the medium moving with them, much as waves pass over water without a transfer of matter. They attract each other according to the laws of gravitation, and constitute the particles of matter. Hence, in contradistinction to our usual notions, matter consists of merely cracks or gaps in space; it is "emptiness," and not" fullness," as one would naturally suppose.
This theory gives a complete explanation of gravitation, the velocity of light, and numerous other physical phenomena.
According to another theory, matter is an electrical manifestation. It consists in aggregations of electrical particles, called by some authors, "electrons," by others, "corpuscles." The diameter of these particles has been calculated to be only 0.961 X 10-13 centimeters; so that over 20,000,000 could be packed side by side in the millionth of an inch.
All the different elementary chemical atoms are made up of aggregations of many thousands of these minute bodies; these electrons or corpuscles, therefore, correspond to the long-sought primary matter or "protyle, out of which all the chemical elements are built up.
According to Larmor, the electrons are nothing but centers of strain, probably minute eddies, in the ether. These strain centers must not be thought of as parts of the medium for ever separated from the rest, for it is the strain alone which persists, the part of the ether which is affected by it constantly changing as the sub-atom is moved.
In Whetham's words, "Matter is a persistent strain form" flitting through a universal sea of ether, and ether, in its "turn, is a close-packed conglomerate of minute " grains in continual oscillation. . . . But what of the grains "of which the ether is composed ?
" Are they 'strong in solid singleness' like the one-time " atom of Lucretius ? Or have they parts within which "opens a new field of complexity ? Of what substance are they made?
" Has a new ether more subtle than the first to be invoked "to explain their properties, and a third ether to explain " the second ? The mind refuses to rest content at any " step of the process. An ultimate explanation of the "simplest fact remains, apparently for ever, unattainable."
If matter is but a number of minute whirlpools in a universal sea of ether, surely by the slow diminution of their velocities in the course of ages these whirlpools must ultimately die out, again passing into the ether ? The idea of the slow passage of matter into ether has been put forward by many recent writers, amongst whom may be mentioned Le Bon.* According to such a view, the material universe must be slowly disappearing. So that even the stately world-systems of space are smitten with a process of slow decay ; even as the planets circle in silence around their central suns, they are rushing into oblivion, and ultimately must vanish, like clouds in a summer's sky, leaving no wrack behind them to show that they have been and gone. We have, however, no experimental proof of this view.
The most fundamental property of matter for dynamical science is mass. The mass of a body used to be defined as a measure of the quantity of matter it contained. It is explained by the electronic theory of matter as an effect of electricity in motion. If this is so, it can be shown that the mass of a body must increase with its velocity, and, indeed, actual experiments by Kaufmann showed that this is the case. According to this idea, the mass of a body is not invariable, but rapidly increases as its speed approaches that of light (3 X 10- 10 cm. per second, or 186,000 miles per second), and were it actually to attain this speed, its mass would become infinite.
It follows, therefore, that the velocity of no material body can exceed that of light. But if the velocity is less than the tenth part of this, the difference in mass from that at very low velocities is insignificant below one per cent. As a matter of fact (excluding certain Cathode and Beta rays), matter is never observed with such high velocities. Even when planets crash together in space and flash instantly into vast masses of glowing rushing gas heated to a temperature almost inconceivable to us, the flying masses of ejected matter never attain velocities approaching that of light.
Thus the eruptions in the new star of Perseus, in 1901, the result of some tremendous cosmical collision, did not attain a velocity greater than 466 miles per second. The greatest observed velocity of the huge flames on the sun is 528 miles a second a velocity exceeding that of a rifle bullet nearly a thousand times.
Tremendous as these velocities seem, they are barely the four-hundredth part of the speed of light, so that the deviation from the law of constancy of mass must, even in these extreme cases, have been insignificant.
The amount of matter in the universe is so great as to defy all comprehension. Our earth alone is a huge globe nearly 8,000 miles in diameter, weighing nearly 5.5 times as much as an equal bulk of water. The sun exceeds the earth nearly 300,000 times as regards mass ; and there exist a billon suns visible in a large telescope, some of which are larger, some smaller, than our own sun. In addition to these visible suns there is, perhaps, an even larger number of dark suns, bodies whose existence is only revealed to us when they come into collision with other bodies and produce the new stars which, from time to time, suddenly blaze in the sky.
Now, even the smallest grain of dust visible to the eye contains nearly a billion atoms of matter. How many atoms then, occur in the whole giant bulk of the earth? How many in the whole universe ? If a grain of dust is a wonder heap, a structure infinite in its complexity, what shall we say about the universe?
The whole of this tremendous bulk of matter does not consist of the same stuff throughout. Chemists have shown that there exist some eighty or ninety distinct kinds of matter termed elements. Everything we see about us on the earth is built up of atoms of these different elements, and the spectroscope tells us that the same 80-90 elements also build up the world-systems of space.
Chemistry is the science which explores this unknown world of atoms. The wonderful story of how man has succeeded in penetrating this universe of the infinitely small, and how he has actually determined the size, shape, and structure of particles so tiny as to be invisible even under the most powerful microscope ever invented. The chemist of to-day can confidently follow the unseen motions of a realm which the scientists of a few decades ago had thought for ever unexplainable to the intellect of man.
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