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Nothing further could be done that night, and as I had worked hard all day preparing for my experiment, without even stopping for meals, I now felt the effect of the excitement I had undergone and resolved to take a walk in the cool air, I wanted to think, and, if possible, to plan a line of action for the morrow which would bring me better results, if my theory of light-waves should prove to be correct.
"For more than six hundred years we have been able to observe the progress of your planet," he went on, "through an instrument by which light-waves are projected and received, and have found it to be identical with ours of almost fifteen hundred years ago.
The light-waves cannot pass through the kettle, but the heat-waves can, and as they enter the water inside they agitate it violently. Quicker, and still more quickly, the particles of water near the bottom of the kettle move to and fro and are shaken apart; and as they become light they rise through the colder water letting another layer come down to be heated in its turn.
Here, as elsewhere, the different lengths of the light-waves give rise to iris-colours when white light is employed. Besides the regular crystals which produce double refraction in no direction, and the uniaxal crystals which produce it in all directions but one, Brewster discovered that in a large class of crystals there are two directions in which double refraction does not take place.
"Can't be done, I guess, Mart," he confessed, ruefully. "You see, it works fine up to a certain point; but beyond that, nothing doing. I've just found out why and in so doing, I think I've made a contribution to science. At velocities well below that of light, light-waves are shifted a minute amount, you know.
In a fanciful story written by Camille Flammarion, the French astronomer, many years ago, the principal character relates how, traveling in the astral body, he was able to witness the events of the French Revolution which had occurred many years before, by simply proceeding to the necessary distance from the earth and there perceiving the registered records in the earth's light-waves traveling through space at the rate of 186,000 miles a second.
"Having come in contact with another body in the heavens, this outward-flowing current of super-radium is changed to an inward-flowing current. In making this change it frees the light-waves it conveyed from Mars, and retains the light-waves of the objects about it, which is merely repeating its performance upon leaving Mars.
Of many ingenious improvements in spectroscopic appliances the most fundamentally important relate to what are known as "gratings." These are very finely striated surfaces, by which light-waves are brought to interfere, and are thus sifted out, strictly according to their different lengths, into "normal" spectra.
And as the electric force, the light-waves, and the nerve-vibrations caused by the impact of the light-waves on the retina, are all expressions of the molecular changes which are taking place in the elements of the battery; so consciousness is, in the same sense, an expression of the molecular changes which take place in that nervous matter, which is the organ of consciousness.
"This structure, floating in a planetary orbit, was designed by me and built under my direction. It is protected from meteorites by certain forces of my devising. It is undetectable and invisible your detectors do not touch it and light-waves are bent around it without loss or distortion. I am discussing these points at such length so that you may realize exactly your position.
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