October 17, 1913] 



SCIENCE 



553 



Eecorded at the Cheltenham Magnetic Observa- 

 tory, " O. H. Tittmann ; ' ' The Magnetic Character 

 of the Year 1912," G. van Dijk. 



SPECIAL ARTICLES 



TRANSFORMATION OF GRAVITATIONAL WAVES INTO 

 ETHER VORTICES 



On a number of occasions since 1890, when 

 I first published my electrostatic doublet 

 theory of cohesion, Science has been so good 

 as to afford me the opportunity of making 

 public the results of my investigations along 

 this and other lines. '^ A brief account of 

 some later work on the origin of vortex sys- 

 tems, accomplished during the past five or six 

 years, may be of interest. 



In the above-mentioned series of papers it 

 was shown that all electrical and magnetic 

 phenomena known could be mathematically 

 derived from a system consisting of a single 

 vortex filament in a frictionless fluid, and 

 that gravitation was a compressional elasticity 

 phenomenon in this fluid. 



Now this single vortex filament, while sat- 

 isfactory from the mathematical point of view, 

 so far as all known phenomena go, is not 

 equally so if, as we may suspect, the universe 

 is conservative. There is a gap in the cycle. 

 Also, while the single vortex filament appears 

 to be forced upon us by the difficulty of form- 

 ing any plausible idea of an action which 

 would lead to a filling of the universe with a 

 number of exactly similar vortices, yet if such 

 an action could be formulated it would be 

 more satisfactory, on the ground of probabil- 

 ity, than the concept of the single vortex. 



While still incomplete, the work above re- 

 ferred to as having been done since 1900, and 

 mostly within the last five years, has given 

 results which are quite satisfactory in regard 

 to both the above-mentioned points. Put 

 briefly, it would appear that gravitational 

 waves shed off a portion of their energy as 

 vortices, and that these vortices are of exactly 



1 " Further Developments of the Electrostatic 

 Doublet Theory of Cohesion," Science, July 22, 

 1892, and March 3, 1893; "Determination of the 

 Nature and Velocity of Gravitation," Science, 

 November 16, 1900, etc. 



similar nature irrespective of the intensity of 

 the wave. 



In my search for a satisfactory theory to ac- 

 count for the apparently exact similarity of 

 vortex singularities in the ether I came again 

 to Lord Rayleigh's discussion^ of the difficulty 

 in the equations for the propagation of plane 

 sound waves (which difficulty was first pointed 

 out by Stokes).^ 



According to these equations, the motion of 

 a plane wave becomes after a time discontinu- 

 ous. Stokes suggested (and Lord Eayleigh 

 considered it probable) that some sort of re- 

 flection took place when the motion became 

 discontinuous. Eayleigh also states that di- 

 vergence would possibly prevent the occur- 

 rence of discontinuity, but my work seems to 

 show that there is no beneficial effect caused 

 by divergence; Eayleigh, Taylor and others 

 have pointed out that viscosity would tend to 

 prevent discontinuity. 



Some time previously I had done consider- 

 able work, in connection with yacht designing, 

 on the discontinuity of flow with the slipping 

 of water along the side of a moving vessel; on 

 the electromagnetic rotation of light in ab- 

 sorbing bodies;* and on the reflection of elec- 

 tric oscillations in electric wires with lumped 

 capacity and inductance,^ all of which work 

 had at some point or other led up to discon- 

 tinuities, when treated in the regular way, but 

 all of which could be made to give, beyond the 

 point of discontinuity, two part solutions, one 

 part consisting of a diminished flow or wave 

 intensity, and the other of an imaginary part 

 which was interpretable as a vortex, some- 

 times oscillating, and sometimes conjoined 

 with reflection. 



This was at least suggestive, and on a care- 

 ful examination of the difficulty referred to 

 by Stokes and Lord Eayleigh in the equations 

 for the propagation of plane waves, it was seen 

 that the essential thing necessary to keep the 

 wave from becoming discontinuous was that 

 it should shed off a certain fractional part of 



2 Eayleigh, ' ' Sound, ' ' Vol. 2, p. 35. 



3 FUl. Mag., November, 1848. 

 iPhys. Bev., March, 1900. 

 5U. S. patent 706,738, 1901. 



