The Permanence of Substance

Abstract

IN Victorian times the atoms of matter were described by Clerk Maxwell, in picturesque and weighty phrase, as the “foundation stones of the material universe.” It was believed that an eethereal medium for physical intercommunication in the cosmos was essential: and if so, material systems could not arise as other than mobile structures inhering in that universal medium. The standard illustration (for that was its true function) which went far by visual experiment to give vitality as well as precision to this general doctrine, was the Kelvin formulation of vortex atoms, based on Helmholtz's advances in the exact hydrodynamics of ideal perfect fluid, and lying in the natural succession to the brilliant but often fantastic gropings after vortical imagery by Descartes. The force of the illustration lay in the certainty that in the ideal pervading medium such vortex structures could not be wiped out, must be indestructible for ever. The ultimate atoms of matter, which stimulated the investigation of these vortical ring structures by way of analogy, have now been pushed back, first in theory and afterwards far more precisely by experimental discovery, to the electronic constituents of the chemical atoms.