I
Emerson confessed in his "Journal" that he could not read the
physicists; their works did not appeal to him. He was probably repelled
by their formulas and their mathematics. But add a touch of chemistry,
and he was interested. Chemistry leads up to life. He said he did not
think he would feel threatened or insulted if a chemist should take his
protoplasm, or mix his hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon, and make an
animalcule incontestably swimming and jumping before his eyes. It would
be only evidence of a new degree of power over matter which man had
attained to. It would all finally redound to the glory of matter itself,
which, it appears, "is impregnated with thought and heaven, and is
really of God, and not of the Devil, as we had too hastily believed."
This conception of matter underlies the new materialism of such men as
Huxley and Tyndall. But there is much in the new physics apart from its
chemical aspects that ought to appeal to the Emersonian type of mind.
Did not Emerson in his first poem, "The Sphinx," sing of
Journeying atoms,
Primordial wholes?
In those ever-moving and indivisible atoms he touches the very
corner-stone of the modern scientific conception of matter. It is hardly
an exaggeration to say that in this conception we are brought into
contact with a kind of transcendental physics. A new world for the
imagination is open--a world where the laws and necessities of
ponderable bodies do not apply. The world of gross matter disappears,
and in its place we see matter dematerialized, and escaping from the
bondage of the world of tangible bodies; we see a world where friction
is abolished, where perpetual motion is no longer impossible; where two
bodies may occupy the same space at the same time; where collisions and
disruptions take place without loss of energy; where subtraction often
means more--as when the poison of a substance is rendered more virulent
by the removal of one or more atoms of one of the elements; and where
addition often means less--as when three parts of the gases of oxygen
and hydrogen unite and form only two parts of watery vapor; where mass
and form, centre and circumference, size and structure, exist without
any of the qualities ordinarily associated with these things through our
experience in a three-dimension world. We see, or contemplate, bodies
which are indivisible; if we divide them, their nature changes; if we
divide a molecule of water, we get atoms of hydrogen and oxygen gas; if
we divide a molecule of salt, we get atoms of chlorine gas and atoms of
the metal sodium, which means that we have reached a point where matter
is no longer divisible in a mechanical sense, but only in a chemical
sense; which again means that great and small, place and time, inside
and outside, dimensions and spatial relations, have lost their ordinary
meanings. Two bodies get inside of each other. To the physicist, heat
and motion are one; light is only a mechanical vibration in the ether;
sound is only a vibration in the air, which the ear interprets as sound.
The world is as still as death till the living ear comes to receive the
vibrations in the air; motion, or the energy which it implies, is the
life of the universe.
Physics proves to us the impossibility of perpetual motion among
visible, tangible bodies, at the same time that it reveals to us a world
where perpetual motion is the rule--the world of molecules and atoms. In
the world of gross matter, or of ponderable bodies, perpetual motion is
impossible because here it takes energy, or its equivalent, to beget
energy. Friction very soon turns the kinetic energy of motion into the
potential energy of heat, which quickly disappears in that great sea of
energy, the low uniform temperature of the earth. But when we reach the
interior world of matter, the world of molecules, atoms, and electrons,
we have reached a world where perpetual motion _is_ the rule; we have
reached the fountain-head of energy, and the motion of one body is not
at the expense of the motion of some other body, but is a part of the
spontaneous struggling and jostling and vibration that go on forever in
all the matter of the universe. What is called the Brunonian movement
(first discovered by the botanist Robert Brown in 1827) is within reach
of the eye armed with a high-power microscope. Look into any liquid that
holds in suspension very small particles of solid matter, such as dust
particles in the air, or the granules of ordinary water-color paints
dissolved in water: not a single one of the particles is at rest; they
are all mysteriously agitated; they jump hither and thither; it is a
wild chaotic whirl and dance of minute particles. Brown at first thought
they were alive, but they were only non-living particles dancing to the
same tune which probably sets suns and systems whirling in the heavens.
Ramsay says that tobacco smoke confined in the small flat chamber formed
in the slide of a microscope, shows this movement, in appearance like
the flight of minute butterflies. The Brunonian movement is now believed
to be due to the bombardment of the particles by the molecules of the
liquid or gas in which they are suspended. The smaller the particles,
the livelier they are. These particles themselves are made up of a vast
number of molecules, among which the same movement or agitation, much
more intense, is supposed to be taking place; the atoms which compose
the molecules are dancing and frisking about like gnats in the air, and
the electrons inside the atoms are still more rapidly changing places.
We meet with the same staggering figures in the science of the
infinitely little that we do in the science of the infinitely vast. Thus
the physicist deals with a quantity of matter a million million times
smaller than can be detected in the most delicate chemical balance.
Molecules inconceivably small rush about in molecular space
inconceivably small. Ramsay calculates how many collisions the molecules
of gas make with other molecules every second, which is four and one
half quintillions. This staggers the mind like the tremendous
revelations of astronomy. Mathematics has no trouble to compute the
figures, but our slow, clumsy minds feel helpless before them. In every
drop of water we drink, and in every mouthful of air we breathe, there
is a movement and collision of particles so rapid in every second of
time that it can only be expressed by four with eighteen naughts. If the
movement of these particles were attended by friction, or if the energy
of their impact were translated into heat, what hot mouthfuls we should
have! But the heat, as well as the particles, is infinitesimal, and is
not perceptible.