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Updated: June 6, 2025
For a long time philosophers have argued, and commonsense has agreed with them, that an atom which could not be ideally broken into two parts was impossible, that one could at any rate think of half an atom as a real objective possibility. This vortex-ring theory shows easily how possible it is to-day to think what once was philosophically incredible.
A vortex-ring produced in the air behaves in the most surprising manner. It retains its ring form and the same material rotating as it starts with. It can travel through the air easily twenty or thirty feet in a second without disruption. Its line of motion when free is always at right angles to the plane of the ring. It will not stand still unless compelled by some object.
Natural causes have been shown, so far as scientific inference can extend, as not improbably sufficient to produce the observed effects; and therefore we are no longer free to invoke the hypothetical action of any supernatural cause. The same observations apply to Professor Flint's theistic argument drawn from recent scientific speculations as to the vortex-ring construction of matter.
In place of this hypothesis has been substituted a very different idea, namely, that an atom is a vortex-ring of ether floating in the ether, as a smoke-ring puffed out by a locomotive in still air may float in the air and show various phenomena.
Such a vortex-ring is made by the smoker who purses his lips into a round hole and sends out a puff of smoke. The outside of the ring is kept back by the friction of his lips while the inside is going forwards; thus a rotation is set up all round the smoke-ring as it travels out into the air."
All matter is magnetic in some degree, and that implies polarity. If one will recall the structure of a vortex-ring, he will see how all the motion is inward on one side and outward on the other, which gives different properties to the two sides: a push away from it on one side and a pull toward it on the other. That is, its properties are alike in every direction.
Relatively to our powers of comprehension the atom endures eternally; that is, it retains forever unalterable its definite mass and its definite rate of vibration. Now this is just what a vortex-ring would do in an incompressible frictionless fluid.
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