(no subject)

After a discussion on wonderful old book smells on Midgard turned into a hunt for the oldest books in our collections, I pulled out Lincoln's Library of Essential Information, a general knowledge collection/single volume encyclopedia passed onto to me from my maternal grandparents. It has sections for English Language, Literature, Geography/Travel, Science, Math, Economics and Useful Arts, Government, Art, Education, Biographies and Misc. Everything a well-rounded person would need to know for roaring the 20s away. The only dates in it are copyrights for 1924 and 1926, but some of the material seems to be much older. (And while old, the book didn't smell very good. None of the wonderful mustiness I was looking for.)

Light is a the form of radiant energy which excites the sense of vision in the eye and thus makes visible the objects from which it comes. Experiment shows that light is a transvere wave motion taveling with a finite velocity through a medium called the ether. It seems necessary to assume a medium, for, if light is undulatory, something must undulate. All wave motion has its source in some vibrating body; in the case of light, that body is the electron. Electrons of different ferquencies of vibration give different colors, just as different frequencies of vibrating strings give different tones in music.

However, in the section on relativity they do mention Michelson-Morely, but go on to use the FitzGerald/Lorentz explanation to link Einstein with the luminiferous ether. While Einstein did borrow the math from Lorentz, they seem to be missing the point pretty soundly.

I'm not sure if this is because the science section is older and hasn't been completely updated, or if they just hired some high school physics teacher who really didn't accept these new-fangled concepts. 1926 is pretty late, after all. We almost had all of quantum mechanics down by then.

...radioactive changes are entirely different from any known chemical reaction. Moreover, they are so exceedingly slow that they are practically negligible, and the metal radium itself, though being gradually transformed into the gases helium and niton, is unhesitantly classed as an element.

Niton is an old name for radon, btw. xmurf should get a kick out of the 'exceedingly slow' part.