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The different colors represent rays with different wave-lengths; that is, they vibrate with different speed and do different work. The red vibrate only half as fast as the violet, at the other end of the spectrum, and, roughly speaking, they are the heat carriers. The blue and violet are cold by comparison. They are the force carriers.
Thus stations which desired to communicate could select a certain wave-length, and they could send and receive messages without interfering with others using different wave-lengths, or without the receiving station being confused by messages coming in from other stations using different wave-lengths.
Secrecy may also be secured by the use of code messages. Many of the advantages of tuning were lost by the international agreement which provided that but two wave-lengths should be used for commercial work. This, however, enables ships to get in touch with other ships in time of need.
As the result, not only all the nine white-star lines were photographed from a brilliant sun-flame, but five additional ones were found to continue the series upward. The wave-lengths of these last had, moreover, been calculated beforehand with singular exactness, from a simple formula known as "Balmer's Law."
"In the first place, as you know," explained Darrow," his power seems to be limited in certain directions. He apparently can stop vibrations only of certain defined wave-lengths at one time. It may be that he is unable to stop heat vibrations at all." "You'll have to do better than that," growled Curtis. "The rest is faith on your part," replied Darrow.
The great difficulty of the experiment proceeds from the vast difference which exists between the lengths to be compared, the wave-lengths barely amounting to half a micron; the process employed consisted in noting, instead of this length, a length easily made about a thousand times greater, namely, the distance between the fringes of interference.
After this, however, we get into the region of frequencies which, though still of exactly the same kind, we know and can feel as Radiant heat; these are situated in the next fourteen octaves, and bring us up to those subtle frequencies which affect another of our sense organs, and which we appreciate as light; these we have already seen have the enormous frequency of 530,000,000,000,000 pulsations per second for red light, up to 930,000,000,000,000 per second for violet, and having wave-lengths so small that it takes 40,000 and 70,000 of them respectively to cover one inch in length.
The index of refraction of these substances tends in the case of great wave-lengths to become, as the theory anticipates, nearly the square root of the dielectric constant. MM. Rubens and Nichols have even produced with the waves which remain phenomena of electric resonance quite similar to those which an Italian scholar, M. Garbasso, obtained with electric waves.
There were tiny noises from the communicator. There were whisperings and rustlings and the occasional strange and sometimes beautiful musical notes whose origin is yet obscure, but which, since they are carried by electromagnetic radiation of wildly varying wave-lengths, are not likely to be the fabled music of the spheres. He waited. In fifteen minutes a different voice came from the speaker.
Sure enough, he got a very faint transmission, on the same bands as before. The cells were talking to each other in their own language. They ignored Mannion even though his transmission must have blanketed everything within several hundred miles. We eventually brought one of them into the cargo lock and started trying different wave-lengths on it.
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