La nuova fisica e la sua evoluzione

Le prime righe

Perhaps in the future recourse may be had to very different phenomena. Thus Curie pointed out that if the air inside a glass tube has been rendered radioactive by a solution of radium, the tube may be sealed up, and it will then be noted that the radiation of its walls diminishes with time, in accordance with an exponential law. The constant of time derived by this phenomenon remains the same whatever the nature and dimensions of the walls of the tube or the temperature may be, and time might thus be denned independently of all the other units. We might also, as M. Lippmann has suggested in an extremely ingenious way, decide to obtain measures of time which can be considered as absolute because they are determined by parameters of another nature than that of the magnitude to be measured. Such experiments are made possible by the phenomena of gravitation. We could employ, for instance, the pendulum by adopting, as the unit of force, the force which renders the constant of gravitation equal to unity. The unit of time thus defined would be independent of the unit of length, and would depend only on the substance which would give us the unit of mass under the unit of volume. It would be equally possible to utilize electrical phenomena, and one might devise experiments perfectly easy of execution. Thus, by charging a condenser by means of a battery, and discharging it a given number of times in a given interval of time, so that the effect of the current of discharge should be the same as the effect of the output of the battery through a given resistance, we could estimate, by the measurement of the electrical magnitudes, the duration of the interval noted. A system of this kind must not be looked upon as a simple jeu d'esprit, since this very practicable experiment would