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"Well, you're a star gazer, aren't you?" inquired Hooker, relighting his pipe. "Some one told me so I forget who. You must have a lot of interesting problems. They tell me that new planet of yours is full of uranium." Thornton laughed. "You mustn't believe all that you read in the papers. What are you working at particularly?" "Oh, radium and thermic induction mostly," answered Hooker.
No doubt the first idea of it arose, in the thought of Carnot, out of certain quantitative considerations on the yield of thermic machines. Unquestionably, too, the terms in which Clausius generalized it were mathematical, and a calculable magnitude, "entropy," was, in fact, the final conception to which he was led. Such precision is necessary for practical applications.
Up to recent years there was no reason for putting the question that forms the title of this article, for it was admitted by all that the conversion of thermic energy, or heat produced by the combustion of coal, into mechanical energy or work could no longer be effected economically except by having recourse to steam.
"The capsule is made of zircorundum, and we shall get only a trace of the disintegrating rays before it blows up. But you'll see 'em, or, rather, you'll see the lavender phosphorescence of the air through which they pass." He arranged a thick slab of plate glass between Thornton and the thermic transformer, and stepping to the wall closed a switch.
The physicist's imagination is necessarily more concrete; since he is incessantly obliged to refer to the data of sense or to that totality of visual, tactile, motor, acoustic, thermic, etc., representations that we term the "properties of matter." Our eye, says Tyndall, cannot see sound waves contract and dilate, but we construct them in thought i.e., by means of visual images.
Here Bennie drew with a burnt match on the back of an envelope a diagram of something which resembled a doughnut in a chianti flask. Thornton scratched his head. "Yes," he said, "but that's an old principle, isn't it? Why does Hiro what's his name call it thermic induction?" "Oriental imagination, probably," replied Bennie.
I was afraid to try the effect of more liberal watering, the more so that already the congelation of moisture upon the glasses from the internal air, dry as the latter had been kept, was a sensible annoyance an annoyance which would have become an insuperable trouble had I not taken so much pains, by directing the thermic currents upon the walls, to keep the internal temperature, in so far as comfort would permit it had now fallen to 4° C. as near as possible to that of the inner surface of the walls and windows.
The great physical instrumentality was heat without heat the reaction called life could never have taken place. This fact has led a French biologist to say that life is only a surface accident in the history of the thermic evolution of the globe.
Obviously this must be the tractor or radiant engine. There, too, swung far out from the side of the ring on a framework of steel, was the thermic inductor which had played the disintegrating Ray upon the Atlas Mountains and the great cannon of Von Heckmann.
During all the period required for his experiments and preparations he had never once glanced at a newspaper or inquired as to the progress of the war that was rapidly exterminating the inhabitants of the globe. Thermic induction, atomic disintegration, the Lavender Ray, these were the Alpha, the Sigma, the Omega of his existence.
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