Statistical experiments on the motion of electrons in gases

Abstract
While the Quantum Theory is now almost universally accepted as the basis of discussion, when any question of energy-interchanges between molecules and free electrons is being considered, there is one collection of papers, of quite appreciable extent, that claims to treat part of the subject on totally different assumptions; these are the papers describing experiments performed in the laboratory of Prof. Townsend in Oxford. They do not claim to account for any of the results obtained by investigators elsewhere, but they do claim to have established phenomena which it is quite impossible to fit into the otherwise universally accepted views, and which necessitate, or at least justify, a number of different assumptions which Prof. Townsend formulates. The position can only be cleared up by reconciling the experiments of the one party with the theories of the other, and it is this task which will here be attempted. The experiments to be considered are of a quite different type from those which claimed to establish the existence of critical potentials; moreover, if the Quantum Theory statements are broadly correct, they are of a type unsuited to the problem. None the less, they would probably have led unaided, if not to the same conclusions, at least to the discovery of their own unsuitability, if it had not been for a somewhat unfortunate coincidence. This is, to put it briefly, the fact that the term-systems of the principal gases studied contain metastable states among their lowest excited levels. This fact is relatively unimportant in the critical potential work, but effects an enormous, and apparently quite unsuspected, disturbance when statistical high-pressure methods are employed, as is always the case in the work of Prof. Townsend.

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