On the Constitution of the Electron;[1]
by W. Kaufmann.
Introduction
In the year 1881, J. J. Thomson[2] showed that an electrically charged body (due to its magnetic field caused by its motion according to Maxwell's theory) must behave with respect to external forces, as if its mass would be increased by a certain amount depending on the magnitude of its charge and its shape. After O. Heaviside[3] calculated the distortion of the field dragged by a charged sphere, which occurs when the velocity of the moving charge is comparable to the speed of light, it was additionally shown by Thomson[4], that the mass-increase stated by him is not constant anymore with respect to such velocities, but grows with increasing velocity. The
- ↑ Under the same title, I have already published a short excerpt of this investigation (carried out with the kind support of the Berlin Academy of Sciences) in the Berl. Ber. 45. p. 949. Nov. 1905. For those readers who are essentially interested in the general results, the following treatise provides nothing new. It contains a detailed representation of the experimental setup applied, and in the appendix also the most important measuring-protocols, to allow a verification of the numbers and error margins at any time. It furthermore contains an improved representation of the trajectory, already reported in my earlier publications on the some subject. Eventually, some things that appear as of importance to me, are additionally dealt with in the appendix, which, however, would have disturbed the context when placed in the main text. Some of the numbers reported in the excerpt had some small errors in the last decimals after renewed verification, which have been corrected here.
- ↑ J. J. Thomson, Phil. Mag. (5) 11. p. 229. 1881.
- ↑ O. Heaviside, Phil. Mag. April 1889.
- ↑ J. J. Thomson, Rec. Researches p. 21.
