These are delicate experiments, carried out by Michelson and I shall not expound their details ; they have given results altogether remarkable. However strange it may seem to us, it is necessary to admit that the third hypothesis is perfectly verified.
Such are the bases of the new mechanics; with the help of these hypotheses we find that it is compatible with the principle of relativity.
But it is necessary to connect it then to a new conception of matter.
For the modern physicist, the atom is no longer the simple element; it has become a veritable universe in which thousands of planets gravitate around tiny suns. Suns and planets are here particles electrified either negatively or positively; the physicist calls them electrons and with them builds the world. Some represent the neutral atom as a positive central mass around which circulate a great number of negatively charged electrons, whose total electric mass equals in magnitude that of the central nucleus.
This conception of matter enables us easily to account for the augmentation of the mass of a body with its velocity, which we have made one of the characteristics of the new mechanics. Since a body is only an assemblage of electrons, it will suffice to show it to be true of them. To this end we note that an isolated electron moving through the ether engenders an electric current, that is to say an electromagnetic field. This field corresponds to a certain quantity of energy localized not in the electron but in the ether. A variation in magnitude or in direction of the electron's velocity modifies the field and expresses itself by a variation of the electromagnetic energy of the ether. While in the Newtonian mechanics the expenditure of energy is due only to the inertia of the moving body, here a part of this expenditure is due to what may be called the
