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Central claims: Very-Frank

The project holds one document: Frank W. Very, The Luminiferous Ether (1919). All claims come from it.

Source note: the PDF is a Google Books scan, and 63 of its 64 pages were OCR. Equations and exponents were garbled on PDF pp.37-38, so those pages were read from page images (as were pp.41, 46 and 49). PDF pp.11-59 have now been deep-read in four passes (pp.11-35, 36-42, 42-51, 51-59); the digest lines for pp.37-38 carry wrong exponents (10^10, 1.660e21), so use the deep read's page-image values. No other works by Very or by Fessenden are in the folder (Fessenden's Science 1900 and 1914 notes are known only as Very quotes them; the experiments Very cites, such as Eichenwald, Lenard, Swan, Hirn and Thornton, are likewise known only as he reports them). There is no source gap for the central text.

  1. Light is made of discrete, electron-sized "ether-particles" that travel at c and each carry one Planck quantum, not of waves in a continuous space-filling ether. A separate universal medium, the "aura", fills space. The speed c is never stated relative to any frame (deep read of pp.51-59 and whole-text search).
  2. The Planck quantum is the energy needed to gyroscopically overturn an electron and reverse its electric sign, which sheds the ethereal sheath that becomes an ether-particle. The book says (p.19) that the energy of formation is proportional to the frequency of the luminous vibration (Einstein/Lenard photoelectric relation), but gives no number and no derivation of that proportionality.
  3. The electron is a rotating vortical sphere of aura whose surface turns at the speed of light. Its size comes from Fessenden's "breaking strain" of the ether, giving a quoted 1.660 x 10^22 rev/s and a surface pressure of about 10^32 to 10^33 "dynes". It would collapse unless its volume elasticity were 10^73. (The book's own arithmetic does not reproduce the rotation rate or the units; see deep/ reads.)
  4. The Michelson-Morley null result, the Rayleigh and Brace double-refraction nulls, and refraction itself are explained by a bound-ether shell carried with each atom and so with the Earth, plus corpuscular light. Stellar aberration is said to be "entirely independent of the bound ether" (p.52), and the bound ether retards light "independently of its state of relative motion or rest" (p.53). Eichenwald's 1903 experiment is cited to show that the universal aura, unlike the bound ether, is not dragged by moving matter (p.23). Hirn's resisting-medium computations are used to argue that no continuous massive ether fills space, so ethereal atmospheres are confined near massive bodies (p.35).
  5. There is only one kind of electron and no positive electron. All atomic mass is electrical (hydrogen = 1,844 electrons, uranium nucleus about 439,000, 92 satellites in shells). Supporting items Very cites: Thornton's cube rule for the atomic weights of H, B, Al, Cu, Ru and Os (holds well only for Al and Cu against modern weights), Hicks's vortex aggregates, Swan's stress figures, and the firefly spectro-bolometry he made with Langley (1890), which he uses to argue luminescence comes from satellite electrons rather than nuclear vibration.
  6. Gravity is the synchronous pulsation of electrons in the aura, confined to a "galactic cell" around each galaxy, and galaxies repel one another at intergalactic distances. The evidence offered is that galaxies moving at about 1,000 km/s and spaced 20-50 diameters apart should collide often but do not. On Very's own 1918 distances (Andromeda 1,600-8,000 light-years) the collision time is about 10^8-10^9 yr, so the inference follows from his numbers; it fails because those distances are about 300 times too small. Leahy's 1889 objection (repulsion beyond a quarter wavelength) is turned into the prediction by setting the quarter wavelength to the aural-cell radius.
  7. Matter is gradually converted to radiation and re-originates from the aura, so entropy increase is not one-sided over the universe. This rests on grey (colour-independent) absorption of starlight by the aura, which Very says Shapley's M13 colour result does not exclude and his white-nebula study shows. The book also floats, as undecided, a resting atmosphere of free ether-particles around the Earth as a possible physical basis of telepathy (p.55), and links the aura to "an infinite source of energy which is spiritual" (p.44) and synchronous pulsation to "the finger of God" (p.49).