Studies in spectrum analysis / by J. Norman Lockyer.

  • Norman Lockyer
Date:
1904
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Studies in spectrum analysis / by J. Norman Lockyer. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    other, is nothing more nor less than a difference almost identical with the difference between a high note and a low note upon the piano. The reason why one end of the coloured band, which in what follows will be called the spectrum, is red, and the other blue, is that in light as in sound we have a system of disturbances or waves ; we have long waves and short waves, and what the low notes are to music the red waves are to light, and what the high notes are to music the blue waves are to light. There is a strict analogy between the world of sound and the world of light. Ears are tuned to hear different sounds—some people can hear much higher notes than others, and some people can hear much lower notes than others. In the same way some people can see colours to which other people are blind; indeed, the more we go into this matter, and the more complete we make our enquiries, the more striking becomes the ana- logy between these two classes of phenomena. Hence it is that I have attempted to utilize the phe- nomena of sound as a sort of subsoil plough, to enable us better to cultivate those fields which modern science has annexed to the region of the known—fields won- derfully rich in facts dealing not only with the qualities of matter, but with the physical bases of matter itself; with this beautiful and undreamt of expansion, that it is indifferent whether that matter is in the hand of the experimenter in his own laboratory, or whether it is sending out light to us upon this earth from the very confines of the universe. Nature is so absolutely and universally true and regular in all that she does, and
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