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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Unseen World and Other Essays by John Fiske: medium for the transmission of thermal and luminous vibrations.
This scepticism has been, I think, partially justified by the
many difficulties encompassing the conception, into which,
however, we need not here enter. That light and heat cannot be
conveyed by any of the ordinary sensible forms of matter is
unquestionable. None of the forms of sensible matter can be
imagined sufficiently elastic to propagate wave-motion at the
rate of one hundred and eighty-eight thousand miles per second.
Yet a ray of light is a series of waves, and implies some
substance in which the waves occur. The substance required is one
which seems to possess strangely contradictory properties. It is
The Unseen World and Other Essays |
