The energetists have
thus not succeeded in forming a thoroughly sound system, but their
efforts have at all events been partly successful. Most physicists are
of their opinion, that kinetic energy is only a particular variety of
energy to which we have no right to wish to connect all its other
forms.
If these forms showed themselves to be innumerable throughout the
Universe, the principle of the conservation of energy would, in fact,
lose a great part of its importance. Every time that a certain
quantity of energy seemed to appear or disappear, it would always be
permissible to suppose that an equivalent quantity had appeared or
disappeared somewhere else under a new form; and thus the principle
would in a way vanish. But the known forms of energy are fairly
restricted in number, and the necessity of recognising new ones seldom
makes itself felt. We shall see, however, that to explain, for
instance, the paradoxical properties of radium and to re-establish
concord between these properties and the principle of the conservation
of energy, certain physicists have recourse to the hypothesis that
radium borrows an unknown energy from the medium in which it is
plunged.
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