Abstract
IN my letter in NATURE of July 24 (p. 295) I objected to Prof. Schuster's statement that the fact that free atoms must turn a gas into a conductor of electricity was fatal to the theory of the electric discharge given by me in the Philosophical Magazine in 1883, and I maintained that the presence of free atoms in a gas free from electric strain was in no way essential to the theory given in that paper. I see no reason, after reading Prof. Schuster's letter in this week's NATURE, to change that opinion. Prof. Schuster bases his statement, not on my description of the theory itself, but on the explanation by it of the weakening of the electric strength produced by a diminution in the density of the gas. A reference to this explanation will show, however, that it really rests solely on the well-known fact that dissociation is assisted by diminution of pressure, and that the passage which Prof. Schuster quotes is merely an explanation of this property of dissociation from the point of view of the kinetic theory of gases; if this explanation is held to be inconsistent with the absence of free atoms from gas in a normal state, then any alteration in the explanation which might be made to meet this difficulty, though of primary importance in the kinetic theory of gases, is only of secondary importance for the theory of the electric discharge given in my paper, which I still maintain is not all bound up with the existence or non-existence of free atoms in gases not in the electric field.
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THOMSON, J. The Passage of Electricity through Gases. Nature 42, 614 (1890). https://doi.org/10.1038/042614d0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/042614d0
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