Re: cathode rays - historical question

["John S. Denker" <jsd@MONMOUTH.COM>]

On 04/06/2003 10:52 AM, Mark Sylvester wrote:
> The debate in the latter part of the 19th century about the nature of
> cathode rays, leading to J.J. Thompsons discovery of the electron: was it
> primarily a wave vs particle question, or was the issue whether the
> negative charge came attached to discrete particles as opposed to a
> continuous fluid (bearing in mind that the atomic theory was not fully
> accepted by the physics community in that period),

All of the above.  I suspect you could have found the
answer yourself:

  http://www.google.com/search?q=cathode-ray+history+thomson

It is helpful but not even 100% necessary to
spell it "Thomson".

> or is there essentially
> no distinction between the concepts of waves and continuous fluid (in that
> anything not a particle had to be wavelike)?

Not true.  To quote from the first site returned from google:
  http://www.aip.org/history/electron/jjrays.htm

  Maybe cathode rays were
  similar to light waves? Another
  possibility was that cathode rays
  were some kind of material particle.
  Yet many physicists, including
  J.J. Thomson, thought that all
  material particles themselves might
  be some kind of structures built
  out of ether, so these views were
  not so far apart.