Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III Nature Of The Corpuscle — The Electrical Theory Of Matter The conception of the corpuscle as originally advanced is that it is a small piece of matter having a mass about y 7 of that of the hydrogen atom, and carrying a unit negative charge of electricity, which is exactly the same as that carried by any univalent anion, such as the chlorine ion in solution. The corpuscle is thus both material and electrical in its nature. We shall now take up Thomson's study of the corpuscle itself, and see how the original conception has been modified, and the reasons for the view that we hold at present. Let us first ask what reason have we for supposing that the corpuscle contains any matter at all? How do we know that it is anything but electricity ? The answer would be that the corpuscle has both mass and inertia, and, therefore, must contain matter, since matter only has these properties. We shall now see whether this line of reasoning is valid. WORK OF THOMSON AND KAUFMANN In a paper published a number of years ago, J. J. Thomson at least raised the question as to whether inertia itself is not of electrical origin. The mass of a charged sphere would, in this case, be greater than that of the same sphere when uncharged. Thomson showed that the particle must move very rapidly in order to have appreciable changes in its mass. Indeed, it must move with a velocity which is comparable with that of light, in order to produce measurable changes in its mass. While the ordinary cathode rays move with a velocity that is only about 3X10 centimetres per second, the particles shot off from radium have a velocity as high as 2.8Xiol, which is nearly that of light itself = 3X101. If the velocity with which the charge moves has any effect on its apparent mass, we should e...