Oliver Lodge

“ But whether big or small, they all travel at the sane pace, with a speed far beyond anything in our experience, a speed which it seems impossible even for the ether to over-top.
Imagine a thread wrapped round the equator of the world, crossing all the continents and oceans and going right round the earth; stretch such a thread out into a straight line, that is the distance which light can travel in the seventh part of a second. To get the distance traversed by light in one second, the thread would have to be wrapped round the world seven times and then stretched out ”

“ The mode of connection between the particles and the ether is not known: it is earnestly being sought: but the fact that therein a connection has been known a long time. We know it, because a particle cannot quiver, or inner, without disturbing the medium in which it is. A boat cannot oscillate on the surface of water without sending off waves; a bell cannot vibrate in air without sending out waves of sound; a particle cannot vibrate in ether without sending out waves of light.
So the second thing to learn about the ether is its property of conveying light. ”

“ We are surrounded by infinity, and the wealth of existence is such as to justify a faith in our highest conceptions, a hope in the possibilities which lie before us, and a clarity which enables us to do our daily work and to love our fellow-men. ”

“ There is evidently law and order reigning among the particles: however great the interstices between them, they must he full of something: space is not really empty, though it is empty of matter. Matter exists as separate particles, here one, there another. But the uniting "something" is not composed of particles at all; it is continuous: it unites the particles with a force which is known us Cohesion. ”

“ The speed in measured by timing the interval required light to travel a certain measured distance whether it be distance measured on the earth or a greater distance measured in the heavens. The results all agree; and there is no doubt that all ether waves, however else they differ, all travel at the same pace. The speed of light is not only the speed of that by which we see things, but it is the speed with which every disturbance travels in the ether of space. ”

“ Matter is full of discontinuity. The universe consists mostly of empty space: the portions of matter in apace are all well separated from each other in proportion to their size. Fire an infinitely long-range projectile into the sky. and the chances are it will not hit anything. Lord. Kelvin reckoned that the chance of hitting anything by such a projectile was about the name as the chance of hitting a bird if you fired a gun at random. That is one of the first things to realize about matter: there are great gaps between its particles. ”

“ To assert, requires knowledge; to deny, requires much more knowledge. Let us be satisfied with positive knowledge, so far as it has been vouchsafed to us, and leave negations to the self-sufficing and the omniscient. We can deny the self-contradictory and the absurd, but in the unknown and the mysterious, denials have no legitimate place ”

“ The light of the moon takes a second and a quarter to reach the earth; from the sun it takes eight minutes; from the stars, even the bright stars, it takes years or even centuries; while some of the dim and distant objects revealed in a large telescope we see only as they were a hundred thousand years ago. ”

“ A microscope is of some assistance, but nothing like sufficient: no microscope, however powerful, can show us an atom, still less can it show us how an atom is composed and how far apart its ultimate particles are: we know this otherwise and indirectly. ”

“ We know better than that; we know that the stars are not independent of each other; they are bound together into systems: them is a unifying and connecting force between them which is called Gravitation, though it is not understood. ”

“ All pieces of matter and all particles are connected together by the ether and by nothing else. In it they move freely, and of it they may he composed. We must study the kind of connection between matter and ether. ”

“ The particles embedded in the ether are not independent of it, they are closely connected with it, it is probable that they are formed out of it : they are not like grains of sand suspended in water; they seem more like minute crystals in a mother liquor. ”