Abstract
ON April 19 last, Sir Oliver Lodge gave the nineteenth Kelvin lecture to the Institution of Electrical Engineers.1 When he gave the fifth Kelvin lecture in 1914, he chose as his subject the electricity of the atmosphere—both natural and artificial. This year he took as his subject the revolution in physics and expounded it in his inimitable way. He controverted the statement so confidently made a few years ago that the effect of the revolution has been to abolish the ether of space. He considers that not only has the existence of the ether been established, but also that a rational theory of it has already begun. He points out what a tremendous discovery it would be if the universe could be proved to be finite. Possibly the finiteness of space only means that it is our particular cosmos that is finite. We cannot say what is beyond it; there is no means of getting at what is beyond it. Still, absolute units have been discovered, that is, discontinuous things which can be counted; for example, the electron and the quantum. Many years ago the discontinuity of matter was observed. Now the atom itself has been resolved into electric charges which are localised portions of energy embedded in the ether. It is a great discovery that matter is a form of energy.
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References
Jour. Inst. Elec. Eng., vol. 66, p. 1005; 1928.
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The Revolution in Physics. Nature 122, 429–431 (1928). https://doi.org/10.1038/122429a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/122429a0