REVOLUTION IN PHYSICS.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 261, 3 November 1928, Page 13

REVOLUTION IN PHYSICS.

EXPLAINING THE UNIVERSE.

(From Our Own Correspondent.)

LONDON, September 21

Under the chairmanship of Mr. W. Wilson, M.Sc., M.1.E.E., a New Zealand graduate now settled in England, the annual meeting of the Institute of Electrical Engineers (South Midland) was held at Birmingham University, when Sir Oliver Lodge spoke on the subject, "The Revolution In Physics." At the supper after the meeting, Mr. Wilson said: "Although I have only been in Birmingham twelve years, I have lived here long enough to realise the great hold that Sir Oliver has upon the esteem and the affection of Birmingham people, where he was Principal of Birmingham University for twenty years. What I can inform you with even greater authority is the high regard in which he is held in the opposite side of the world, where almost from my earliest years the great name of Lodge has been a household word among all those interested in any form of science. . . ." Sir Oliver said he sometimes thought that, little as they know about the ether, they knew more about it than they knew about matter. The revolution in physics in the twentieth century had made them overhaul -their foundations and examine things they thought settled. It appeared that matter was compounded of electricity, and electricity only—the proton and the electron. But they could not explain the universe in terms of matter alone; they had to take the ether into account. That was what the twentieth century was beginning to discover. Wave dynamics was the most recent line of investigation. Personally he regarded it as the beginning of the real theory of the ether. Hitherto there had been two theories of light—the particle theory and the wave theory. It was thought they were dissimilar, but they were beginning to be reconciled. Professor George.P. Thomson, of Aberdeen, a son of the Master of Trinity, had been very successful in experiments to test the truth of this; and as recently as February he performed an experiment which determined a new kind of wave structure, a new kind of light which was amendable to the magnet, as light was .not. What it was he (Sir Oliver) did not know. He only knew it was something epoch-making. It was the beginning of a new theory of the universe, and he was ghu he had lived to see it.