James Jeans (1877 – 1946)
British physicist, astronomer and mathematician.
Faraday, Maxwell, Larmor and a great number of others tried to explain electromagnetic action on these lines, but all attempts failed, and it began to seem impossible that any properties of ether could explain the observed pattern of events.
It can hardly be a matter for surprise that our race has not succeeded in solving any large part of its most difficult problems in the first millionth part of its existence. Perhaps life would be a duller affair if it had. for to many it is not knowledge but the quest for knowledge that gives the greater interest to thought - to travel hopefully is better than to arrive.
As the pattern of events is unaltered by motion, the mechanism must be the same when the electron is in motion as when it is at rest. But experiment shows that an electron in motion exerts additional forces which are not the same for all directions in space; if we picture this electron as moving head-foremost through space, these forces surround it like a belt around its waist.
The motion of the stars over our heads is as much an illusion as that of the cows, trees and churches that flash past the windows of our train.
...experimental physics was particularly interested in the processes taking place inside the atom, and in this field the classical mechanics was failing conspicuously and completely. Perhaps its most spectacular failure was with the fundamental problem with the structure of the atom.