What is Electricity?

New Zealand Mail, Issue 970, 3 October 1890, Page 10

What is Electricity?

People who have an idea that electricity is an entity rather than a form of expression of energy will be interested in a statement with regard to it from a gentleman of such high scientific attainments as Prof. A. E. Dolbear, of Tufts Collego. Prof. Dolbear says that in that interesting book on ‘ Modern Views of Electricity,’ by Prof. 0. .T. Lodge, there is made the suggestive statement that, after all the inquiries have been made as to what is electricity, the answer may have to bo, there is no such thing. The words ‘ electric ’ and ‘ electrification ’ may be retained, he says, but the word ‘ electricity ’ may have to go, simply because It does not stand for a reality. It may be difficult for one who looks at the phenomena, rather than to the relations involved in the phenomena, to imagine that electricity is not some sort of an entity, and may be described, if one knew liow, as one would describe any other something. It would certainly be curious if it should turn out that the reason no answer has been forthcoming to the question, What is electricity ? is that there is no such thing and the question is an improper one; as if one should ask, What is odour, or brightness, or zero ? Historically there are several parallel cases. A hundred years or more ago heat phenomena were attributed to phlogiston or caloric—each supposed to be an entity of some sort. The latter term is still retained for convenience, but it has ceased to have any significance as a something that gives origin to heat phenomena. When it was discovered that such phenomena were due to atomic and molecular vibrations, or what is now often called a ‘mode of motion,’ both the above words ceased to have any meaning; in other words, there was no such thing a? phlogiston or caloric. Again, light was once thought to be an entity; now we know that light is a sensation, and properly does not exist independent of the eye. What was treated as light is now called ‘radiant energy’ or ‘ether waves.’ Though the term ‘light’ is retained it lias lost the significance it had when it was supnosed to be a created something. The physiologists for a very long time explained the phenomena exhibited by living things, both vegetable and animal, as due to ‘ vital force ’ something supposed to be utterly unlike and not necessarily related to the other forces in nature —a force that could control the others in a living organisation. Now that has been altogether abandoned. No biologist of any repute now believes in ‘ vital force,’ and the question, What is life, which has baffled every one in his attempt to define it, now turns out to bo an improper question, as it is reducible to complicated molecular motions and not to au entity. As magnetism is known to be due to the position of molecules, as chemism may be explained as due to the other pressure, it really seems as if all along the line of knowledge of the physical universe what have been called ‘ forces ’ as peculiar, somethings, having individuality as matter has, have no existence at all, and that matter and ether and motions of one sort or another are all factors in phenomena. Lodge’s statement, then, has a degree of probability added to it by the antecedents in the history of physics.