Five of Maxwell's Papers by James Clerk Maxwell (classic books for 13 year olds .txt) 📕

I hope to be able to lay before you in the course of the term some of the evidence for the existence of molecules, considered as individual bodies having definite properties. The molecule, as it is presented to the scientific imagination, is a very different body from any of those with which experience has hitherto made us acquainted.

In the first place its mass, and the other constants which define its properties, are absolutely invariable; the individual molecule can neither grow nor decay, but remains unchanged amid all the changes of the bodies of which it may form a constituent.

In the second place it is not the only molecule of its kind, for there are innumerable other molecules, whose constants are not approximately, but absolutely identical with those of the first molecule, and this whether they are found on the earth, in the sun, or in the fixed stars.

By what process of evolution the philosophers of the future will attempt to account for this identity in the properties of such a multitude of bodies, each of them unchangeable in magnitude, and some of them separated from others by distances which Astronomy attempts in vain to measure, I cannot conjecture. My mind is limited in its power of speculation, and I am forced to believe that these molecules must have been made as they are from the beginning of their existence.

I also conclude that since none of the processes of nature, during their varied action on different individual molecules, have produced, in the course of ages, the slightest difference between the properties of one molecule and those of another, the history of whose combinations has been different, we cannot ascribe either their existence or the identity of their properties to the operation of any of those causes which we call natural.

Is it true then that our scientific speculations have really penetrated beneath the visible appearance of things, which seem to be subject to generation and corruption, and reached the entrance of that world of order and perfection, which continues this day as it was created, perfect in number and measure and weight?

We may be mistaken. No one has as yet seen or handled an individual molecule, and our molecular hypothesis may, in its turn, be supplanted by some new theory of the constitution of matter; but the idea of the existence of unnumbered individual things, all alike and all unchangeable, is one which cannot enter the human mind and remain without fruit.

But what if these molecules, indestructible as they are, turn out to be not substances themselves, but mere affections of some other substance?

According to Sir W. Thomson’s theory of Vortex Atoms, the substance of which the molecule consists is a uniformly dense plenum, the properties of which are those of a perfect fluid, the molecule itself being nothing but a certain motion impressed on a portion of this fluid, and this motion is shewn, by a theorem due to Helmholtz, to be as indestructible as we believe a portion of matter to be.

If a theory of this kind is true, or even if it is conceivable, our idea of matter may have been introduced into our minds through our experience of those systems of vortices which we call bodies, but which are not substances, but motions of a substance; and yet the idea which we have thus acquired of matter, as a substance possessing inertia, may be truly applicable to that fluid of which the vortices are the motion, but of whose existence, apart from the vortical motion of some of its parts, our experience gives us no evidence whatever.

It has been asserted that metaphysical speculation is a thing of the past, and that physical science has extirpated it. The discussion of the categories of existence, however, does not appear to be in danger of coming to an end in our time, and the exercise of speculation continues as fascinating to every fresh mind as it was in the days of Thales.

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