ARTICLES 



PERTURBATIONS IN MODERN PHYSICAL 



PHILOSOPHY 



WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE MOTION OF 

 MATTER THROUGH ETHER, AS OPPOSED TO 

 THE PRINCIPLE OF RELATIVITY. 



By SIR OLIVER LODGE, F.R.S., D.Sc, Sc.D., LL.D., 



Principal of the University, Birmingham 



It appears to be becoming necessary for a conservative physicist 

 to criticise certain popular expositions of the Theory of Rela- 

 tivity, and especially the philosophical complications which 

 have been based upon that theory, with the result that in 

 the minds of philosophers and general readers, and in the 

 minds of some physicists, the foundations of Physics appear 

 to have been uprooted, and even the abstractions of space 

 and time interfered with in a confusing manner. I wish to 

 argue that no such conclusions really follow from the premises, 

 that Newtonian Dynamics is supplemented by modern dis- 

 coveries but by no means superseded, and that the existence 

 of the Ether of Space is not discredited but rather upheld. 



Let it be understood that in so far as precise physical 

 measurements are made more complex by the electrical theory 

 of matter, in combination with the finite speed of etherial 

 wave-propagation, and by the corresponding changes in shape 

 and in effective mass of bodies, no one has any complaint 

 nor any feeling but one of congratulation on the enlargement 

 of the boundaries of physical knowledge. 



Real complications of that sort are wholesome and invigorat- 

 ing, and the deductions based upon them belong to genuine 

 physics. Moreover, in so far as certain other formulae asso- 

 ciated with the Principle of Relativity are used for purely 

 physical purposes to enable calculators to reach conclusions 

 by a short cut, I have nothing to say against that negative 

 principle, except that it is rather a blindfold method which I 



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