288 The Outline of Science 



regulated by the inexorable laws of supply and demand, 

 which the biologists have recognised in their field as the 

 struggle for existence. 1 



It is certain that energy is an actual entity just as much as 

 matter, and that it cannot be created or destroyed. Matter and 

 ether are receptacles or vehicles of energy. As we have said, 

 what these entities really are in themselves we do not know. It 

 may be that all forms of energy are in some fundamental way 

 aspects of the same primary entity which constitutes matter : how 

 all matter is constituted of particles of electricity we have already 

 seen. The question to which we await an answer is: What is 

 electricity ? 



15 

 MATTER, ETHER, AND EINSTEIN 



The supreme synthesis, the crown of all this progressive con- 

 quest of nature, would be to discover that the particles of posi- 

 tive and negative electricity, which make up the atoms of matter, 

 are points or centres of disturbances of some kind in a universal 

 ether, and that all our "energies" (light, magnetism, gravitation, 

 etc. ) are waves or strains of some kind set up in the ether by these 

 clusters of electrons. 



It is a fascinating, tantalising dream. Larmor suggested in 

 1900 that the electron is a tiny whirlpool, or "vortex," in ether; 

 and, as such a vortex may turn in either of two opposite ways, we 

 seem to see a possibility of explaining positive and negative elec- 

 tricity. But the difficulties have proved very serious, and the 

 nature of the electron is unknown. A recent view is that it is 

 "a ring of negative electricity rotating about its axis at a high 

 speed," though that does not carry us very far. The unit of posi- 

 tive electricity is even less known. We must be content to know 



1 Matter and Energy, by Professor Soddy. 



