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The “new physics”

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441
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
THE “NEW PHYSICS”
Helge Kragh
Physics at the turn of the nineteenth century was not uninfl uenced by the general
intellectual climate of n-de-siècle culture, but neither did it refl ect it to any
considerable degree. In so far that this mentality or Zeitgeist was associated with
negative sentiments or stereotypes such as bourgeois decadence, degeneration,
despair, and escapism, it did not include the world of physics or most other natural
sciences (Hiebert 1990; Staley 2008). Physicists considered their science to be
healthy and progressive, not stagnating or degenerating, and they looked with
excitement and optimism toward the new century and its many opportunities.
On the other hand, the n-de-siècle mentality was complex and ambivalent, and
another strand of it was characterized by hope and optimism. From this point of
view there was no disharmony between the view of the physicists and the n-de-
siècle mentality.
Physics at the time was a highly developed and professional science. Experi-
mental and applied aspects dominated the fi eld, yet the last decades of the century
witnessed the emergence and growth of theoretical physics as distinct from the
earlier tradition of mathematical physics (Jungnickel and McCormmach 1986). In
terms of manpower and institutes it was a small science, comprising between 1,200
and 1,500 academic physicists worldwide, almost all of them from Europe,
North America, or Commonwealth nations such as Australia and New Zealand
(Kragh 1999: 1322). Although international, physics was no more global than the
other sciences.
The period from about 1890 to 1905 saw several attempts at establishing a new,
modern foundation of physics, but what today is known as modern physics –
essentially relativity and quantum physics – had other roots. The notion of a “classical”
physics and the classical-modern dichotomy fi rst appears in 1899, referring to
mechanics (Staley 2005). Only a decade later did physicists begin to talk about the
modern versus the classical physics in the sense used today, and quantum theory did
not become a dominant theme in so-called modern physics until after 1914. When
used in the n-de-siècle period, the term “modern” physics mostly referred to either
programs of the future or to alternatives to the mechanical foundation of physics such
as the electron theories of the early twentieth century.
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— Helge Kragh —
THE MECHANICAL WORLD VIEW
It is often assumed that the revolution in the physical sciences that occurred in the
early twentieth century was preceded by a period in which the Victorian generation of
physicists complacently accepted the supremacy of mechanics in all of science. Physics,
so they are to have believed, was and would remain solidly based on Newton’s
mechanical laws and the forces acting between bodies, either long-range forces as in
astronomy and electricity or short-range forces as in atomic and molecular physics.
According to the philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead, the last
quarter of the nineteenth century was a period of what Thomas Kuhn many years
later would call normal science bound by a paradigm. It was “an age of successful
scientifi c orthodoxy, undisturbed by much thought beyond the conventions,” even
“one of the dullest stages of thought since the time of the First Crusade” (Whitehead
1925: 148). However, Whitehead’s characterization is a caricature of n-de-siècle
physics, a chapter in the history of science that was anything but dull.
Newtonian mechanics was undoubtedly held in great esteem in the late nineteenth
century. It was widely accepted that the goal of physics – or sometimes even its
defi nition – was the reduction of all physical phenomena to the principles of
mechanics. There were physicists who believed that their science was essentially
complete and that future physics would remain mechanical in its foundation, but
this was hardly the generally held view (Badash 1972). Nor was the orthodoxy
complete, for the basis in mechanics was not accepted dogmatically or always
thought to be universally valid. On the contrary, there was in the 1890s a lively and
many-faceted discussion of what the mechanical clockwork universe was, more
precisely, and how valid – and desirable – it was. The two new sciences of thermo-
dynamics and electrodynamics, both going back to the mid-century, differed in
many ways from classical mechanics, and yet it was widely believed that they could
be understood on a mechanical basis, indeed that such an understanding had already
been achieved.
On the other hand, even physicists of a conservative inclination recognized that
there were a few dark clouds on the mechanical heaven. On 27 April 1900 Lord
Kelvin (William Thomson) gave a famous address to the Royal Institution in London
on “Nineteenth-Century Clouds over the Dynamical Theory of Heat and Light” in
which he singled out two problems. One of them was the problem of the stationary
ether and the lack of any physical effect of the earth’s motion through it. The other
and even darker cloud related to the successful kinetic theory of gases as founded on
a mechanical basis by James Clerk Maxwell and the Austrian physicist Ludwig
Boltzmann. Briefl y, this theory seemed to be consistent only if it were assumed that
the molecules or atoms of a gas were rigid bodies with no internal parts. This
assumption contradicted the evidence from spectroscopy, which strongly indicated
that the atom had an internal structure, and a most complex structure at that (Brush
1986: 35363).
There were other problems, some of them relating to the second law of thermo-
dynamics according to which the entropy of a physical system, a measure of its
degree of molecular disorder, increases spontaneously and irreversibly in time. The
fundamental entropy law thus expresses a direction of time, from the past to the
future, but how can this law possibly be explained on the basis of the time-symmetric
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The “new physics”
laws of mechanics? Although the problem received a solution of sorts with
Boltzmann’s probabilistic theory of entropy of 1877, it continued to be controversial.
Some physicists considered the second law an insurmountable obstacle for the
mechanization of nature.
Even Newton’s law of gravitation, the central element in celestial dynamics and a
paragon for the mechanical world view, was not beyond criticism. It had been
known since the late 1850s that it could not account with suffi cient precision for the
motion of Mercury, an anomaly that could only be removed by the addition of
arbitrary hypotheses of an ad hoc nature. There were in the period around 1900
several attempts to improve Newton’s law or to provide it with a non-mechanical
foundation in terms of either hydrodynamics or electrodynamics. Although these
theories were unsuccessful, they indicate a characteristic willingness of n-de-siècle
physicists to challenge even the most sacred parts of the mechanical research
program. More was soon to follow.
Although the supremacy of mechanics was increasingly questioned, in the 1890s
only a minority of physicists saw the situation as a serious crisis in the mechanical
world view. They typically responded to the problems and critiques by reformulating
mechanics and not presenting it as an overarching world view. Rather than explaining
nature mechanically, they retreated to the more modest position of describing it
mechanically (Heilbron 1982; Seth 2007). Such an attitude was consonant with
the popular “descriptionist” idea that science was not concerned with truths, and
certainly not with absolute truths. Scientifi c theories were considered to be just
condensed and economic descriptions of natural phenomena. Similarly, there was
nothing more to understanding than equations and models.
A GOSPEL OF ENERGY
According to some physicists and chemists energy was more fundamental than
matter, and thermodynamics more fundamental than mechanics. The physicist
Georg Helm and the physical chemist Wilhelm Ostwald, a future Nobel laureate,
arrived at this conclusion at about 1890, coining the name energetics for their new
research program of a unifi ed and generalized thermodynamics (Hiebert 1971;
Görs, Psarros, and Ziche 2005). They and their allies promoted energetics as more
than just a new scientifi c theory: it was meant to be an alternative to the existing
understanding of nature, which they claimed was a “scientifi c materialism” based
on mechanics and the hypothesis of matter as composed by atoms and molecules. As
they saw it, mechanics was to be subsumed under the more general laws of energetics
in the sense that Newton’s mechanical laws were held to be reducible to energy
principles.
Moreover, according to Ostwald and a few other energeticists, the generalized
concept of energy was not restricted to physical phenomena but included also mental
phenomena such as willpower and happiness (Hakfoort 1992). Generally, elements
of Lebensphilosophie were part of Ostwald’s version of energetics. While some
critics saw this as a problematic sign of materialism, Ostwald insisted that energetics
was thoroughly anti-materialistic, a much needed revolt against the dominance of
matter in science. He further thought that an energy-based science would eventually
result in a better world, both materially and spiritually. This element of utopianism
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— Helge Kragh —
was not restricted to the energetics movement, but can be found also in other
sciences at the turn of the century (Kemperink and Vermeer 2010).
For a decade or so the energetics movement occupied an important position in
German scientifi c and cultural life. Although primarily German, its infl uence
extended to other countries, including France, Sweden, Italy, and the United States,
in many cases as part of the more general positivistic philosophy known as monism.
The French physicist and philosopher Pierre Duhem arrived, largely independently,
at a vision of a generalized thermodynamics as a non-mechanical, phenomenological
theory of everything. His ideas had much in common with those of Ostwald and
Helm, yet there were also differences. For example, whereas the energetics movement
was anti-religious or at least anti-clerical, Duhem presented his version of energetics
as in harmony with orthodox Catholicism, maintaining that science could not
dispense with the notion of matter. He had no taste for Ostwald’s extension of
thermodynamics beyond the limit of traditional science.
Ostwald and Duhem had in common that they wanted to rid science of visualizable
hypotheses and analogies with mechanics, in particular the seductive illusion of
atoms and molecules as real material entities. Thermodynamics, they argued, had
the great advantage that it was neutral as to the constitution of matter, indeed
neutral as to the existence of matter. In this respect energetics agreed with the ideas
of the Austrian physicist-philosopher Ernst Mach, who from a positivist perspective
held that atoms were nothing but convenient fi ctions. On the other hand, many
scientists considered the controversial anti-atomism of the energetics alternative as
reason enough to dismiss or ignore it. While Ostwald eventually conceded that
atoms existed, Duhem and Mach went into their graves (both in 1916) without
accepting the reality of atoms.
At the annual meeting of the German Association of Natural Scientists and
Physicians in Lübeck in 1895, Ostwald gave a programmatic address in which he
argued that energetics was destined to be the scientifi c world view of the future and
that it was already on its way to overcome the inherent limitations of scientifi c mate-
rialism. In the debate that followed the views of Ostwald and Helm were attacked
by Boltzmann, in particular, who denied that he was a scientifi c materialist in
Ostwald’s sense of the term. He concluded that the energetics program was without
scientifi c merit and that it was closer to ideology than science. Max Planck, who a
few years later would initiate quantum theory, came to agree with Boltzmann. He
considered energetics an unsound and unproductive version of natural philosophy,
what he called a dilettantish speculation. Although other German physicists
expressed some sympathy with the ideas of energetics, its impact on physics was
limited and short-lived. While it made sense to deny the reality of atoms in 1895, ten
years later it was a position that was much harder to defend.
THE HEAT DEATH
Thermodynamics entered n-de-siècle physics also in a cosmological context,
primarily in the form of the so-called heat death and its consequences for the past
and future of the universe. Shortly after the formulation of the second law of
thermodynamics several physicists pointed out that on the assumption that the law
was of unrestricted validity it would lead to an irreversible “degradation” of energy
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The “new physics”
throughout the cosmos. The amount of energy would remain constant, but in the far
future it would be unable to generate further physical activity of any kind. In 1867
the German physicist Rudolf Clausius formulated the pessimistic scenario of a
Wärmetod in terms of the global entropy tending toward a maximum: the closer the
entropy approached this maximum, characterized by a complete disorganization of
material structures, the closer would the universe approach an equilibrium state of
unchanging death.
Disseminating quickly from the world of theoretical physics to the general
cultural arena, the heat death scenario was hotly debated from about 1870 to
1910. Not only was the scientifi cally based prediction of an end to the world
highly controversial, it also seemed to follow from it that the world must have
had a beginning in time. The “entropic creation” argument fi rst stated about
1870 relies on the simple observation that we live in a low-entropy world. Had the
world existed in an eternity of time, entropy would by now have increased to its
maximum value, and consequently the age of the world must be fi nite. There
must have been a beginning. To the mind of most people, whether scientists or non-
scientists, a cosmic beginning implied creation, and creation implied a creator. In
other words, the law of entropy increase could be used apologetically, as a scientifi c
proof of God.
The heat death and the associated notion of cosmic creation were highly
controversial and endlessly debated in the last quarter of the nineteenth century
(Kragh 2008). The subject was an integral part of the more general cultural and
social struggle between, on the one hand, materialists, positivists, and socialists,
and, on the other, protagonists of the established world order and its belief in
religious and spiritual values. As many saw it, reversibility and the mechanical world
view were associated with materialism and implicitly atheism, while these views
were contradicted by the irreversibility expressed by the second law of
thermodynamics. In Germany the issue became part of the Kulturkampf that raged
in the 1870s and 1880s, with many Catholic thinkers arguing for the inevitability of
the heat death and, in some cases, using the authority of thermodynamics as an
argument for divine creation. Those opposed to such reasoning could easily avoid
the conclusions, for example by inventing counter-entropic processes or by claiming
that the second law was inapplicable to an infi nitely large universe.
It should be pointed out that the entropic controversy in the late nineteenth
century mostly involved philosophers, social critics, theologians, and amateur
scientists. Although a few physicists and astronomers contributed to the discussion,
most stayed silent, convinced that it was of a metaphysical rather than scientifi c
nature. The consensus view among astronomers was that the universe was probably
infi nite in size, but they realized that there was no way to prove it observationally
and preferred to limit their science to what could be observed by their telescopes.
The universe at large did not belong to astronomy, its state of entropy even less so.
Generally, the large majority of professional physicists denied that their science was
relevant to the larger themes of n-de-siècle ideology such as degeneration and
decadence. Occasionally inorganic decay or energy degradation as expressed in the
law of entropy increase was associated with the general feeling of degeneration, but
such ideas were rare. Entropy played but a limited symbolic role in the degeneration
ideology, at least among most physicists.
446
— Helge Kragh —
THE MANY FACES OF THE ETHER
According to most physicists in the second half of the nineteenth century, the world
consisted not only of matter in motion but also, and no less importantly, of an
all-pervading ethereal medium. The “luminiferous” ether was considered necessary
to explain the propagation of light, and this was only one of the numerous purposes
it served. In short, and in spite of a few dissenting voices, the ether was generally
regarded indispensable in physics. The basic problem was not whether the
ether existed or not, but the nature of the ether and its interaction with matter.
Was the ether the fundamental substratum out of which matter was built? Or
was matter a more fundamental ontological category of which the ether was
just a special instance? The fi rst view, where primacy was given to structures in
the ether, came to be the one commonly held at the turn of the century and the
years thereafter.
From a technical point of view the ethereal world picture popular among
Victorian physicists was not incompatible with the mechanical world picture, but it
nonetheless differed from it by its emphasis on continuity rather than discreteness
and the corresponding primacy given to ether over matter. According to the vortex
atomic theory originally proposed by William Thomson in 1867, atoms were
nothing but vortical structures in the continuous ether. In this sense the atoms were
quasi-material rather than material bodies. As the ultimate and irreducible quality
of nature, the ether could exist without matter, but matter could not exist without
the ether. Based on Thomson’s idea, in the 1870s and 1880s the ambitious vortex
theory evolved into a major research program. The theory was developed by several
British physicists who examined it mathematically and applied it to a wide range of
physical phenomena, including gravitation, the behavior of gases, optical spectra,
and chemical combination (Kragh 2002). However, in the end this grand Victorian
theory of everything proved unsuccessful.
A contributing reason for the decline of the vortex theory was its foundation in
the laws of mechanics, a feature that appeared unappealing in an environment
increasingly hostile to the mechanical world view. Although the British vortex
theorists presented their ether in a dematerialized form, they did not see it as entirely
different from ordinary matter. It was mechanical in the sense that it possessed
inertia as an irreducible property, and non-material only in the sense that it was
continuous and not derivable from matter. From the perspective of many n-de-
siècle scientists, the emancipation from the thralldom of matter that the vortex
theory offered did not go far enough. At any rate, the demise of the vortex atom did
in no way signal the demise of the ether. At the beginning of the new century the
ether was much alive, believed to be as necessary as ever.
Although a physical concept and the basis of physical theory, the ether also served
other purposes, in particular of an ideological and a spiritual kind (Noakes 2005).
To some physicists, most notably Oliver Lodge, the ether became of deep spiritual
signifi cance, a psychic realm scarcely distinguishable from the mind. Not only was
all nature emergent from the ether, he also came to see it as “the primary instrument
of Mind, the vehicle of Soul, the habitation of Spirit . . . [and] the living garment of
God” (Kragh 2002: 32). Lodge’s extreme view was not shared by his fellow
physicists, but it helped making the ether a popular concept among non-scientists
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The “new physics”
and an ingredient of many n-de-siècle speculations well beyond the limits of
conventional science.
ELECTRODYNAMICS AS WORLD PICTURE
AND WORLD VIEW
The demise of the mechanical ether models was followed by the emergence of a
vigorous research program in which the ether was described by Maxwell’s fi eld
theory of electromagnetism. Although Maxwell’s theory dates from the 1860s, it
was only in the last decade of the nineteenth century that physicists fully realized the
theory’s amazing power. Among avant-garde physicists electromagnetism came to
be seen as more fundamental than mechanics, a unifying principle of all science. The
new electrodynamic approach proved more successful and progressive than the one
of energetics, in part because it fi tted naturally within the ethereal world picture that
it reinterpreted and breathed new life into. The replacement of the mechanical by
the electromagnetic ether was arguably the most important change in fundamental
physics in the years around 1900. While forgotten today, in the n-de-siècle period
it was regarded as a revolutionary advance in the understanding of nature (Jungnickel
and McCormmach 1986: 22744; Kragh 1999: 10519).
Matter possesses mass, a fundamental quality that the vortex atom theory had
been unable to explain in terms of the ether. Electrodynamics did better, for on the
basis of Maxwell’s theory a sphere of electricity could be assigned an “electro-
magnetic mass” with properties corresponding to those of the mass of ordinary
matter. The question then arose of whether the mass of electrical particles could be
completely accounted for in terms of electromagnetism, meaning that material or
ponderable mass could be entirely disregarded. The question was considered in the
1890s by physicists such as Joseph Larmor and Hendrik A. Lorentz, who suggested
the existence of “electrons” pictured as discrete structures in, or excitations of, the
electromagnetic ether. These theoretical entities, localized ether in disguise, turned
into real particles in 1897, when J. J. Thomson in Cambridge discovered negative
electrons in a celebrated series of experiments with cathode rays. By the closing
years of the century, electrodynamics had given birth to electron physics, the con-
ception of discrete subatomic particles wholly or partly of electromagnetic origin.
In a paper of 1900, signifi cantly titled “On the Possibility of an Electromagnetic
Foundation of Mechanics,” the German physicist Wilhelm Wien outlined the basic
features of a new research program the aim of which was to reduce all physical
phenomena to electrodynamics. Five years later his compatriot Max Abraham
referred to the program as the electromagnetic world picture, a name that indicates
the theory’s scope and ambitions. What, then, was the essence of this world picture
or, in some versions, world view?
First of all, it was based on the belief that electrodynamics was more fundamental
than mechanics, in the sense that the laws of mechanics could be fully understood
electromagnetically. On the ontological level, it was claimed that there is nothing
more to physical reality than what the science of electromagnetism tells us. All
matter is made up of ethereal structures in the form of electrons, negative as well as
positive. According to Augusto Righi, a prominent Italian physicist, electron theory
was not so much an electromagnetic theory of matter as it was a replacement of
448
— Helge Kragh —
matter by electromagnetism. On the methodological level, the electromagnetic
research program was markedly reductionistic, a theory of everything similar
to the earlier vortex theory. The vision of the new and enthusiastic generation
of electron physicists was, in a sense, that they were approaching the end of
fundamental physics.
Although the ether was no less indispensable than in earlier theories, with the
advent of electron physics its nature changed and became even more abstract and
devoid of material attributes. Many physicists spoke of the ether as equivalent to the
vacuum, or sometimes to absolute space. According to a German electron theorist,
August Föppl, the conception of space without ether was analogous to the contra-
dictory conception of a forest without trees. However, this abstract and thoroughly
dematerialized ether was more popular among German physicists than among their
British colleagues. J. J. Thomson, Lodge, and Larmor tended to conceive the ether
as a physical medium that played both a physical and metaphysical role. Lodge’s
ether was far from the abstract nothingness that some German physicists ascribed to
the ethereal medium: in 1907 he calculated its energy density to no less than 1030
joule per cubic meter. The same year J. J. Thomson characterized the ether as
an invisible universe that functioned as the workshop of the material universe.
“The natural phenomena that we observe are pictures woven on the looms of this
invisible universe,” he said (Thomson 1908: 550).
By the early years of the twentieth century the electromagnetic view of the world
had taken off and emerged as a highly attractive substitute for what many considered
the outdated materialistic-mechanical view. Electron enthusiasts believed that
physics was at a crossroads and that electrodynamics was on its way to establishing
a new and possibly fi nal paradigm of understanding nature.
DISCOVERIES, EXPECTED AND UNEXPECTED
Physics at the turn of the century caused excitement not only because of the ambi-
tious attempts to establish a new theoretical foundation, but also because of new
discoveries that caught the physicists by surprise and contributed to the sense of
crisis in parts of the physics community. While some of the discoveries could be
interpreted within the framework of ether and electron physics, others stubbornly
resisted explanation. The experimental study of cathode rays from evacuated dis-
charge tubes resulted in Thomson’s electron, and it also led to Wilhelm Conrad
Röntgen’s X-rays announced in early 1896. Thomson’s electron of 1897 was sub-
atomic, with a mass about 1,000 times smaller than the hydrogen atom, and he
originally thought of it as a protyle, the long-sought constituent of all matter. And
this was not all, for he also believed that the electrons making up the cathode rays
were produced by the dissociation of atoms. The cathode-rays tube worked as an
alchemical laboratory! Atoms, he speculated, were not the immutable building
blocks of matter, as traditionally believed, but could be transformed into the atoms
of another element. On a cosmic time-scale, this was what had happened in nature.
While the electron had been anticipated theoretically, the phenomenon of
radioactivity discovered by Henri Becquerel in 1896 was completely unexpected
(Malley 2011). It was only two years later, with Marie and Pierre Curie’s discovery
of the highly active elements polonium and radium, that radioactivity became an
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The “new physics”
exciting fi eld of physical and chemical research, and also one that attracted great
interest among physicians and the general public. Remarkably, radioactivity proved
to be a spontaneous phenomenon that, contrary to chemical reactions, was
independent of external conditions such as pressure, temperature, and catalysts.
Moreover, the property had been detected only for a few heavy elements. Might it
still be a general property of matter? In the fi rst decade of the twentieth century it
was widely believed that all elements were radioactive, only most of them of such a
low activity that it escaped experimental detection.
Although radioactivity cannot be speeded up or slowed down, by 1902 it was
established that the activity spontaneously decreases over time at a characteristic
rate or half-life given by the substance. According to the decay law found by Ernest
Rutherford and Frederick Soddy, atoms of a particular substance decay randomly
and in such a way that the probability is independent of the atom’s age. The decay
or disintegration hypothesis was controversial because it challenged the age-old
dogma of the immutability of the elements, but within a year or two growing evi-
dence forced most physicists and chemists to accept it. Combined with the belief
that radioactivity is a common property of matter, it allowed for speculations about
the ephemeral nature of all matter. Was matter gradually melting away? If so, into
what? Soon after Rutherford and Soddy had shocked the world of science with their
transmutation hypothesis, experiments proved that radioactive change is accompa-
nied by large amounts of energy. From where did the energy come? What was the
cause of radioactivity?
There was no shortage of answers, but they were all speculative, short-lived and
unconvincing. In desperation a few physicists toyed with the idea that energy
conservation might not be valid in radioactive processes. However, the most accepted
hypothesis was that the released energy was stored in the interior of the atom in the
form of unstable confi gurations of electrons. In 1905 an unknown Swiss physicist
by the name of Albert Einstein suggested that the source of energy was to be found
in a loss of mass of the radioactive atoms. Few listened to him. In the decade
following the discovery of radioactivity in 1896, the phenomenon remained deeply
enigmatic and the source of countless speculations.
Not all scientists accepted the Rutherford-Soddy interpretation of radioactivity
based on the transmutation of elements. As an instructive case, consider the eminent
Russian chemist Dmitrii Mendeleev, the father of the periodic system (Gordin 2004:
20738). A conservative and a realist in matters of chemistry and physics, he was
disturbed by the new developments of n-de-siècle physics such as the nonmaterial
ether, the electron, the composite atom, and the evolution of elements based on a
primordial form of matter. In works of 19034 he warned that these developments
might lead to all kinds of mystical and spiritual pseudoscience, leaving the material
foundation of natural science behind. Mendeleev realized that the modern views of
radioactivity and the composite atom made element transmutation a possibility,
which to him was a sure sign of unscientifi c alchemy.
His worries were not unfounded. Alchemy, mixed up with elements of cabalism
and spiritualism, experienced a revival at the turn of the century, often justifying its
excessive claims by the results of the new physics (Morrisson 2007). In France, outré
theories ourished under the aegis of the Société Alchemique de la France and in
England the spiritual and transcendental aspects of alchemy were cultivated within
450
— Helge Kragh —
the Theosophical Society and later the Alchemical Society. Soddy and William
Ramsay, two of Britain’s foremost radiochemists and both of them Nobel laureates
(of 1921 and 1904, respectively), described radioactivity in alchemical terminology.
If the transmutation theory of radium proved correct, said Ramsay in 1904, then
“The philosopher’s stone will have been discovered, and it is not beyond the bounds
of possibility that it may lead to that other goal of the philosophers of the dark ages
– the elixir vitae” (Morrisson 2007: 118). As Mendeleev saw it, there were good
reasons to reject the modern transmutation theory of radioactivity.
MORE MYSTERIOUS RAYS
Cathode rays, X-rays, and radioactivity were not the only kinds of rays that attracted
attention in the years around 1900. In the wake of these discoveries followed several
claims of new rays, most of which turned out to be spurious. The N-rays that the
French physicist René Blondlot claimed to have discovered in 1903 attracted much
interest and were for a couple of years investigated by dozens of physicists, most
of them French. The new rays were emitted not only by discharge tubes but also by
a variety of other sources such as the sun and gas burners. Sensationally, they seemed
to be emitted also by the human nervous system, promising a connection between
physics, physiology, and psychology. Although “seen” and examined by many phys-
icists, by 1905 the consensus view emerged that N-rays do not exist. The effects on
which the claim of the rays was based had no physical reality, but were of a psycho-
sociological origin. To simplify, scientists saw them because they wanted to see
them.
In 1896 another Frenchman, the author, sociologist, and amateur physicist
Gustave Le Bon, announced the discovery of what he called “black light,” a new
kind of invisible radiation that he believed was distinct from, but possibly related to,
X-rays (Nye 1974). Although black light turned out to be no more real than N-rays,
for a while the discovery claim was taken seriously. In 1903 Le Bon was even
nominated for a Nobel Prize in physics. Connected with the black light hypothesis,
he developed a speculative, qualitative, and time-typical theory of cosmic evolution
and devolution, which he presented in the best-selling The Evolution of Matter of
1906. The chief message of Le Bon was that all matter is unstable and degenerating,
constantly emitting rays in the form of X-rays, radioactivity, and black light. Material
qualities were held to be epiphenomena exhibited by matter in the process of
transforming into the imponderable and shapeless ether from which it had once
originated. The ether represented “the fi nal nirvana to which all things return after a
more or less ephemeral existence” (Le Bon 1907: 315). If all chemical elements
emitted radioactive and similar ether-like rays, they would slowly melt away, thereby
proving that matter could not be explained in materialistic terms. Energy and matter
were two sides of the same reality, he declared, different stages in a grand evolutionary
process that in the far future would lead to a kind of heat death, a pure ethereal state.
Although clearly speculative and amateurish, many scientists found Le Bon’s
ideas attractive or came independently to somewhat similar cosmic scenarios. The
views of Lodge in England were in many ways congruent with those of Le Bon. In
both cases, the views appealed to the anti-materialist, evolutionary, and holistic
sentiments that were broadly popular in the n-de-siècle period. It was part of the
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The “new physics”
Zeitgeist, both in France and elsewhere, that many scientists were willing to challenge
established knowledge, including doctrines such as the permanence of the chemical
elements and the law of energy conservation. The very qualities of permanence and
conservation were considered suspicious within an intellectual climate emphasizing
transformation, evolution, and becoming.
Part of the intellectual climate at the time tended toward anti-science, or at least
anti-scientism, in so far that it contrasted the scientifi c world view with an idealistic
understanding of the world that included irrational, emotional, and spiritual
perspectives. Le Bon’s quasi-scientifi c speculations had considerable appeal among
those who were dissatisfi ed with positivistic ideals and longed for an undogmatic,
more youthful science that would better satisfy what they associated with the human
spirit. His ideas struck a chord in a period that has been described as a “revolt
against positivism” (Hughes 1958) and in which science was charged with being
morally bankrupt (MacLeod 1982). Although far from anti-science, Le Bon joined
the trend and fl irted with its values. According to a French newspaper of 1903,
“Poincaré and Le Bon fearlessly undermine the old scientifi c dogmas [and] do not
fear saying that these cannot fulfi ll and satisfy the human spirit. We recognize along
with these teachers . . . the bankruptcy of science” (Nye 1974: 185).
In The Value of Science, a collection of articles from 1905, Poincaré argued that
physics was in a state of crisis, not only because of the uncertainty with respect to
mass and energy conservation, the problems with the second law of thermo-
dynamics, and the new electron theory, but also because of the mysterious radium
– “that grand revolutionist of the present time,” as he called it. Lenin, in his
Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, approvingly quoted Poincaré, and he was
not the only one to consider radioactivity revolutionary in more than the scientifi c
sense. The disintegration hypothesis, and radioactivity generally, was sometimes
seen as subversive not only to the established scientifi c world view but also to the
political order. According to the Spanish physicist and intellectual José Echegaray,
radium appeared as “a revolutionary metal, like an anarchist that comes to disturb
the established order and to destroy all or most of the laws of the classical science”
(Herran 2008: 180).
SPIRITUALISM AND HYPERSPACE
As mentioned, there was in some parts of the n-de-siècle scientifi c community a
tendency to extend results of the new physical world picture to areas of a non-
scientifi c nature, such as alchemy, occultism, spiritualism, and related paranormal
beliefs. In England, the Society for Psychical Research had been founded in 1882
and among its members were luminaries such as Lord Rayleigh, J. J. Thomson,
William Crookes, and Lodge. Membership of the society indicated an interest in the
psychic or spiritual realm, but not necessarily a belief in the reality of psychic
phenomena (Oppenheim 1985). In spite of different attitudes, the scientifi c members
of the society agreed that spirit should not automatically be banished from the world
revealed by modern science.
Although the standard view then as now was to consider spiritualism antithetical
to science, many believers argued that séances with psychic media provided scientifi c
evidence for the survival of the spirit after bodily death. Neither did the majority of
452
— Helge Kragh —
scientists perceive science as inherently inimical to spiritualist belief. They thought
that the reality of psychic phenomena could be examined by the ordinary critical
and experimental methods of science. But there were also those who reached the
conclusion that science and spiritualism, although not in confl ict, could not be
reconciled either: the study of spiritualism was legitimate in its own right, as based
on religious and psychological considerations, but there was no such thing as
spiritualist science.
With few exceptions, physical scientists in the Society for Psychical Research
avoided explaining spiritual phenomena by invoking the ether, electromagnetic
forces, radioactive transmutation, or other parts of modern physics. Yet some did,
such as the chemist and physicist Crookes who had become convinced of the reality
of telepathy. In an address of 1897 he vaguely suggested that telepathic powers
might be explained by X-rays or something like them acting on nervous centers in
the brain. From a different perspective, in 1902 a Spanish socialist magazine
explained to its readers that radioactivity was likely to do away with supernatural
causes of telepathy and similar paranormal phenomena, which instead could be
explained on a sound physical basis (Herran 2008).
Contrary to some of his colleagues in England, the Leipzig astrophysicist Johann
Karl Friedrich Zöllner was convinced that spiritualism belonged to the realm of
science. In the years around 1880 he investigated in great detail the spiritual world
in séances with participation of leading German scientists and philosophers (Treitel
2004). A believer in the reality of spiritualist manifestations, Zöllner published in
1879 his Transcendental Physics, a book that appeared in several editions in both
German and English. To his mind, the project of a transcendental physics including
both material and spiritual phenomena was but a natural extension of the astro-
physical project of accommodating terrestrial and celestial phenomena within the
same theoretical framework. The distinguishing feature in Zöllner’s transcendental
physics was the crucial role played by a hypothetical fourth dimension of space
as the site of paranormal phenomena. He was convinced that the reality of four-
dimensional space could be established experimentally, indeed that there was already
incontrovertible scientifi c evidence for it. This extended space was transcendental
but nonetheless subject to physical analysis, and it was destined to revolutionize
physics.
Ideas of a four-dimensional “hyperspace” were common at the end of the
nineteenth century, if rarely entertained by leading scientists and in most cases
without the direct association to spiritualism that Zöllner advocated. The English-
American mathematician and author Charles Howard Hinton wrote a series of
articles and books, including The Fourth Dimension of 1904, in which he claimed
that the extra space dimension might explain physical phenomena such as the nature
of ether and electricity. Among the few scientists of distinction who entertained
similar ideas was the American astronomer Simon Newcomb, who in 1896
cautiously speculated that “Perhaps the phenomena of radiation and electricity may
yet be explained by vibration in a fourth dimension” (Beichler 1988: 212).
Although hyperspace models of the ether and similar speculations of a fourth
dimension were well known in the n-de-siècle period, they were peripheral to
mainstream developments in physics, such as the turn from mechanics to electro-
dynamics. The fourth dimension caught the public imagination, was eagerly adopted
453
The “new physics”
by occultists and idealist philosophers, and became an important utopian theme in
literature and art in the early twentieth century (Henderson 2009). Most physicists
considered it a harmless speculation of no scientifi c use.
TOWARD MODERN PHYSICS
The spirit of physics in the n-de-siècle period was both conservative and
revolutionary. According to Erwin Hiebert (1990: 240), the transition in physics – in
retrospect a revolution – “took place in a relatively unbroken and tranquil but
reformist and spirited manner.”
At the same time as the majority of physicists worked within the framework of
Newtonian mechanics, there was a growing dissatisfaction with this framework, in
part for scientifi c reasons and in part for reasons that may best be described as ideo-
logical. The dissatisfaction resulted in what has been called a “neoromantic” trend
(Brush 1978), attempts to establish the physical sciences on a new foundation that
did not share the elements of materialism with which the older paradigm was often
associated. As a result, classical physics was partially overthrown, but without a
new “modern” physics taking its place. The great unifying concepts of the new
physics were energy and ether, the latter described by the equations of electro-
magnetism rather than mechanics. Whether in the form of energetics or the electro-
dynamic world picture, the great expectations of the neoromantic physicists were
not fulfi lled. The revolution failed or rather, it was overtaken by another and at the
time hardly visible revolution that was antagonistic to both the classical world view
and the one envisioned by n-de-siècle physicists of a more radical outlook.
The two pillars of this revolution – what today is recognized as the beginning of
modern physics – were Planck’s quantum theory of 1900 and Einstein’s theory of
special relativity dating from 1905. Both theories stood apart from the fashionable
theories of the time based on ether, energy, and electrodynamics. With the recognition
of the theories of quanta and relativity the ethereal world view so characteristic of
n-de-siècle physics became obsolete. Einstein summarily dismissed the ether as an
unnecessary construct, and the new theory of quanta proved incompatible with the
electrodynamic ether embraced by avant-garde physicists. As seen in retrospect, the
enduring and really important contributions of the n-de-siècle period to modern
physics were not the ambitious attempts to create a new unifi ed foundation of
physics. They are rather to be found in the period’s experimental discoveries of, for
example, X-rays, the electron, and radioactivity. These discoveries were initially
interpreted within the framework of n-de-siècle physics, but, with the possible
exception of the electron, they were not products of it.
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