ETHER AND REALITY. A Series of Discourses on the Many Functions of the Ether of Space. FIRST EDITION IN DUST JACKET, 1925.
London: Hodder & Stoughton, [1925]. First Edition (& 1st printing). Octavo, original green cloth lettered and ruled in black on spine panel. Pp ix, [1] p., 1 l., 13-179. Trifling foxing to page edges, a fine copy, in a Very good original pictorial dust jacket, minor wear at edges, small chip from spine, spine panel faded and with staining, small old interior cellotape mends at spine head & top edge of front panel. The jacket reproduces a photographic portrait of the author. Rare in dust jacket. Item #313706
¶ Sir Oliver Joseph Lodge FRS (1851 - 1940), English physicist and inventor. He identified electromagnetic radiation independent of Hertz's proof and at his 1894 Royal Institution lectures ("The Work of Hertz and Some of His Successors"), Lodge demonstrated an early radio wave detector he named the "coherer". In 1898 he was awarded the "syntonic" (or tuning) patent by the United States Patent Office. Lodge was Principal of the University of Birmingham from 1900 to 1920.
Lodge was also pioneer of spiritualism. His pseudoscientific research into life after death was a topic on which he wrote many books, including the best-selling Raymond; or, Life and Death (1916), which detailed messages he received from a medium, which he believed came from his son who was killed in the First World War.
Lodge was a proponent of the theory of the Ether. Among the widely agreed facts of physics in the late nineteenth century was the existence of luminiferous ether: the medium through which light was thought to travel. Theorised to be a highly rarefied substance, the ether accounted for the movement of light, gravity and even heat across a vacuum. It also had great implications for spiritualism. Where thought was not proven to be a result of chemistry in the brain, the presence of ether allowed for the idea that cognition and emotion might exist independently of a physical body.
The ether was assumed to be weightless, transparent, frictionless, undetectable chemically or physically, and literally permeating all matter and space. The theory met with increasing difficulties as the nature of light and the structure of matter became better understood. It was seriously weakened (1887) by the Michelson-Morley experiment, which was designed specifically to detect the motion of Earth through the ether and which showed that there was no such effect. (Ether theories were also used to explain gravity beginning in the 17th century, but they did not have the popularity of those explaining the propagation of light.)
With the formulation of the special theory of relativity by Albert Einstein in 1905 and its acceptance by scientists generally, the ether hypothesis was abandoned as being unnecessary in terms of Einstein’s assumption that the speed of light, or any electromagnetic wave, is a universal constant.
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