Karl K. Darrow: The Renaissance of Physics

When Dr. Darrow was invited last autumn to lecture at the Lowell Institute of Boston, he had already earned a reputation in scientific circles for writing and speaking of physics with unusual clarity and grace of style. He chose for his general subject the splendid renaissance of physics, rich with great events and great discoveries, which is flowering in our times. Matter has been broken into fragments, and its fragments are electricity. Electrons have been brought out of dense matter into the open, have been measured, controlled, and made useful in a thousand ways. Atoms have been isolated, traced, and measured, and have proved to be constellations of electrons and other electrified particles assembled in accordance with strange laws. Magnetism has been proved a quality of whirling atoms. Corpuscles of light - including many new kinds of light of remarkable properties - have been observed to dart from atom to atom, revealing the construction of the atom-constellations. The feat of transmutation, which formerly seemed an impossible miracle, has been achieved on a grand scale by novel and powerful processes at the disposal of physicists. Electricity, matter, and light have been shown to be different forms of a single substance, convertible one into another; yet just as this unification was being achieved, new and strange perplexities were arising. These, with a good deal of their historical backgroand, are among the topics of Dr. Darrow's Lowell lectures, which appear expanded in this book.