A little study shows us that the steam engineers are perfectly right
in their doctrine. The heat of steam can only be called a variety of
the temperature of water. At 300 lb. pressure per square inch the heat
of steam is 417·5°F., while at 20 lb. pressure it is only 228·0°F.,
and therefore the steam engineer has good reason to say that steam at
the lower pressure--or derived from heat that can only produce that
pressure--can add no heat to the higher; on the contrary, the only
possible means of applying the heat of the lower to that of the other
would be by mixing them, and we know what the result of that would
be. This brings before us the fact that the steam engineer's heat is
very limited, and can only be communicated in certain ways, while the
sun's heat is comparatively unlimited, and can only be communicated
to anything through the medium of the ether. But it probably teaches
more than that. Were the engineer's heat unlimited in quantity at
low pressure it can easily be believed that it could be transmitted
to another body at any temperature by radiation, the same as it is
radiated from the sun to a hot box; but it is not, and we thus seem
to find that radiation is a mode, possessed by the ether alone, of
conveying heat from one body to another. It has nothing whatever to do
with mixing, conduction, convection, or anything, except in so far as
the ether is mixed in a more or less limited quantity with all matter.
In support of this idea we can refer to Professor Tait's treatise
on heat, where we find it stated that "heat does pass (though on an
infinitesimal scale) from colder to hotter bodies"; and we can easily
understand that the infinitesimal quantity so passed is due to the
comparatively infinitesimal quantity of ether there is in either of the
two bodies to perform the work of transference. Professor Tait has not
told us how heat is carried from a cold to a hot body, but there can
be no doubt about its being a function of the ether which can only be
found out by a careful and analytical study of that agent. Such a study
we propose to undertake presently without much expectation of being
successful, but still with the hope of helping in some measure to find
out how the ether operates. Meanwhile we shall return to what we had
begun to say about the sun being a hollow sphere, and to our proposal
to treat of the nebula contracted from 58 million miles to its present
diameter, as if it were a model representing a _résumé_ of all the
effects produced on the nebula by that amount of condensation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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