William Crookes Quotes
Which was first, Matter or Force? If we think on this question, we shall find that we are unable to conceive of matter without force, or force without matter. When God created the elements of which the earth is composed, He created certain wondrous forces, which are set free and become evident when matter acts on matter.
This quotation illustrates how scientifically sophisticated some of the Founding Fathers were.
He worked with Electricity and was not up on Einstein’s Relativity. Had he been, he would have realized as some other physicists did, that matter and energy were really the same and could be converted from one to the other. The original Atomic Bomb converted matter into huge amounts of Energy. Tesla was one of the great American immigrant scientists. He found in America the kind of intellectual and operational freedom that did not exist in the rigid, monarch-controlled, Austro-Hungarian Empire. He developed patents and techniques that formed the technological bases of radio, telephone long distance, TV, cell phones, Wi Fi, just to name a few. Most important he was Thomas Edison’s great nemesis. Edison invented DC electric generators that could power factories or entire streets in a neighborhood. Tesler invented and developed AC electrical technology which could power entire cities and he could move electricity over long distances which Edison could not. Tesler was one of the first scientists to conceive of and try to implement “Big Science” where there were huge capital investments to develop machines and systems to do what had never been done before—philosophically like the CERN Hadron Collider. Tesler even convinced a large corporation to finance the construction of a massive building and tower so he could experiment with the wireless transmission of electricity. However, as the industrial democracies have learned, Big Science can only be funded by governments and it often takes sever working in consort to afford the huge investment that is required. In Tesler’s era, the federal and state governments did not fund scientific research so his work was not only technically ahead of his time but also conceptually. He anticipated most of the problems and need for a national power grid that was challenging America even at the beginning of the 21st century.
This is a very interesting philosophical and scientific quotation because he states that in Science, matter and energy are equivalent, which 40 years later would be asserted and proven by Albert Einstein in his Theory of Relativity. There were no notes or details ever found from Ludlow, and he certainly did not have the mathematical background to have showed or proved the mathematical relationship. It was almost certainly a type of metaphysical statement and surely he had no idea of how accurate it was.
Sir William Crookes OM PRS was a British chemist and physicist who attended the Royal College of Chemistry in London, and worked on spectroscopy. He was a pioneer of vacuum tubes, inventing the Crookes tube which was made in 1875. This was a foundational discovery that eventually changed the whole of chemistry and physics.
