Sold – Agreeing With Einstein, Edison States That He Follows Physics

Charles Kassel was an attorney in Fort Worth, Texas and an author on matters of science, religion, spiritualism and philosophy. He was particularly interested in establishing that there is life after death and wrote an article for The North American Review on the subject in 1922. In it, he opined that until recently, the principles of conservation of mass and inertia had led many people to doubt that there was ever any element that was ever anything but what it is today. “The leading obstacle until now in the way of any scientific thought of a future life has been the difficulty of conceiving a state of being such as it is necessary to assume — a state of being which demands a yielding of all our notions of matter…The leading obstacle until now in the way of any scientific thought of a future life has been the difficulty of conceiving a state of being such as it is necessary to assume — a state of being which demands a yielding of all our notions of matter…The discovery of radioactivity, he maintained, changed all that and constituted an “opening up of these new vistas of the constitution of things.” Most 19th century scientists believed that light waves had to move through some sort of substance that filled space, just as ocean waves move through water and sound waves move through air. They called this invisible and weightless substance “luminiferous ether, “ though no instrument could detect its existence. Kassel believed strongly in the ether. Matter, he wrote in the article, is transitory rather than stable, and “it is the ether, that unseen, all-permeating thing…” that is fixed and lasting. He then quotes a scientist as saying that the ether is real but is not ordinary matter. His conclusion is that the in-dwelling intelligence (or perhaps soul) of a person is composed of the substance of the ether, and when the body dies, the essence of the person-as-ether remains. This tangibly explained the afterlife in concrete terms. He also found that the new scientific discoveries in radiation and atoms showed that they were interacting and thus possibly linking with another world.

To me it is entirely unnecessary to explain things generally but it is absolutely necessary to explain the theories of the mathematical brain

In 1887, Albert Michelson and Edward Morley performed an experiment that provided strong evidence against the theory of an ether. Still there were many who could not give up the ether theory and set about trying to make revisions to make it fit. At this time, questions concerning the nature of the universe were mainly tackled by mathematical equations, as they had been since Isaac Newton. In 1895, physicist Hendrik Lorentz concluded that the “null” result obtained by Michelson and Morley was caused by a effect of contraction made by the ether on their apparatus and introduced a length contraction equation as a potential answer. Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity in 1905 supported the Michelson/Morley conclusion and could generate the same mathematics as Lorentz without referring to an ether at all. To most scientists, the whole concept of ether was abandoned after Einstein, being replaced by the vacuum of empty space.

Kassel sent Edison a copy of his article, and Edison responded. Typed Letter Signed on his laboratory letterhead, Orange, N.J., December 14, 1923, to Kassel, informing him that he closely follows physics, and denying both the existence of the ether and the need to determine questions of physics through mathematics. “I thank you for the reprint from the North American Review which was enclosed with your kind letter of December 7th. The article is very interesting. Someday somebody will get the right theory and open up a new conception of space, matter, motion and ourselves. For years I have read and collected everything I could find time to read relating to the ether of space as created by the mathematical mind to explain physics. The more I read the more I reject their conceptions and theories. I cannot think by the use of mathematics hence am compelled to use other instrumentalities and capacities of the brain. The result is that I do not believe there is any ether with the extraordinary properties ascribed to it. To me it is entirely unnecessary to explain things generally but it is absolutely necessary to explain the theories of the mathematical brain. Someday I hope to get enough courage to print a few observations in that line.”

So Edison rejects the idea that knowledge of physics must come through application of mathematics, feeling that sole reliance on mathematics is in fact unnecessary.  It is also interesting that Edison says that his mind is not a mathematical one, indicating that his inventions were developed through other modalities (such as concepting, engineering and experimentation). And it is somewhat strange to read his statement that “Someday somebody will get the right theory and open up a new conception of space, matter, motion,” as although he agrees with Einstein’s conclusions, one wonders whether he was familiar with Einstein’s work.