Professor Kaufmann has effected some very
careful experiments by a method he terms the method of crossed
spectra, which consists in superposing the deviations produced by a
magnetic and an electric field respectively acting in directions at
right angles one to another. He has thus been enabled by working _in
vacuo_ to register the very different velocities which, starting in
the case of certain rays from about seven-tenths of the velocity of
light, attain in other cases to ninety-five hundredths of it.
It is thus noted that the ratio of charge to mass--which for ordinary
speeds is constant and equal to that already found by so many
experiments--diminishes slowly at first, and then very rapidly when
the velocity of the ray increases and approaches that of light. If we
represent this variation by a curve, the shape of this curve inclines
us to think that the ratio tends toward zero when the velocity tends
towards that of light.
All the earlier experiments have led us to consider that the electric
charge was the same for all electrons, and it can hardly be conceived
that this charge can vary with the velocity.
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