A tale of two papers

In 1921 a paper arrived at the Royal Society’s London offices for consideration by the editors of the Proceedings of the Royal Society. Written by mathematician Richard Hargreaves of Liverpool University, the submission bore the title “Atomic systems based on free electrons, both positive and negative, and their stability.”

By 1921 evidence that atoms consist of a dense, positively charged nucleus surrounded by electrons in quantized orbits was strong, even overwhelming. Hargreaves, however, eschewed quantum mechanics. His mathematical description of the properties of atoms was Newtonian. In spirit, his description resembled the idea, proposed in the 1860s by Lord Kelvin and others, that atoms consist of vortices spinning in the ether.

Hargreaves did not attempt to break into the prestigious Proceedings alone. To beef up the paper’s physics and to submit the paper on his behalf, Hargreaves enlisted his friend Joseph Larmor. From 1903 until his retirement in 1932, Larmor held Cambridge University’s Lucasian Chair of Mathematics, whose previous occupants included Isaac Newton and whose next occupant would be Paul Dirac. Although Larmor advocated the existence of ether and was skeptical of both quantum mechanics and general relativity, his opinions carried weight. In 1921, the same year that he helped his friend Hargreaves, Larmor was awarded the Royal Society’s highest honor, the Copley Medal, “for his researches in mathematical physics.”

With Larmor’s backing, Hargreaves’s quixotic paper was duly reviewed by the Proceedings. The first reviewer, John William Nicholson of King’s College London, conceded the paper’s ingeniousness but recommended rejection on the grounds that the theory it contained had been refuted by experiments. The second reviewer, Charles Galton Darwin of Cambridge University, recommended publication, but only if Hargreaves accounted for Niels Bohr’s atomic theory. The paper was rejected.

Then, as now, spurned authors have other options. Hargreaves shortened his paper and submitted it to the Philosophical Magazine, which at the time did not subject papers to peer review. Meanwhile, Larmor wrote to the journal’s principal physics gatekeeper, Oliver Lodge, recommending publication. Lodge, who also advocated the existence of ether, replied, “I know nothing at present about Hargreaves’s paper: but on your recommendation I feel sure that the Phil. Mag. will find room for it.”

A more relaxed approach

The story of Hargreaves’s paper is recounted by historian of science Imogen Clarke in a fascinating paper that appeared in the March 2015 issue of Isis.

At face value, the fate of Hargreaves’s paper might seem like a vindication of modern physics over classical physics and of peer review at the Proceedings over the more relaxed approach of the Philosophical Magazine. But Clarke makes a convincing case for a more nuanced conclusion.

For one thing, despite the existence of a formal reviewing mechanism at the Proceedings, editorial decisions on physics papers were often made solely by the journal’s principal physics gatekeeper, James Jeans. Indeed, Jeans would sometimes accept papers on the same grounds as his opposite number at the Philosophical Magazine, Oliver Lodge, would: because he held the communicating author—say, Ernest Rutherford—in high esteem.

Nor was the Philosophical Magazine a mere dumping ground for flaky research. Among the papers published in its pages were Albert Michelson and Edward Morley’s 1887 measurement of the speed of light that challenged the notion of ether and J. J. Thomson’s 1897 discovery of the electron.

Another factor that Clarke identifies at play was the pervasive influence of academic cliques. Of the volunteer editors at the Proceedings in the 1920s, most were currently at or had attended just one university, Cambridge.

After Hargreaves’s paper was rejected by the Proceedings, Larmor submitted a deliberately antagonistic paper to the journal entitled “On the nature and amount of the gravitational deflexion of light.” In 1919 Arthur Eddington and others had observed the bending of light from a distant star by the gravitational field of the Sun during a total solar eclipse. Eddington explained the deflection using Albert Einstein’s general relativity. Larmor sought to explain it classically.

Eddington carefully reviewed the paper, as did Darwin. Both men were inclined toward acceptance on the grounds that its analysis of the bending of light was not formally wrong. But the electromagnetic analysis that occupied the second part of the question was difficult to follow—not least because Larmor’s handwriting was hard to read.

Jeans and the other gatekeepers recommended that Larmor split his paper in two. Larmor rejected the proposal. His friend Lodge promptly published it in the Philosophical Magazine.

Clarke ends her paper with an insightful observation that ties the different editorial policies of the Philosophical Magazine and the Proceedings to the relative status of classical and modern physics in the 1920s:

In an irony that lies outside the scope of Clarke’s paper, Eddington would later find himself swimming outside the physics mainstream—like Larmor and Lodge before him—when he asserted that the fine structure constant was, for numerological reasons, exactly 1/137.