Letter from Geo Fras [George Francis] Fitzgerald, Trin Coll Dub [Trinity College, Dublin], to [Joseph] Larmor He sees Larmor's postulate, which is soemthing like conservation of areas in the atomic system. The continuous spectrum is the irregular disturbance, 'like the cooling of the earth that carries away the heat generated by the tides'. Fitzgerald discusses [Samuel] Haughton's 'Newtonian theory of chemistry', but this does not get over the difficulty of how the periods are independent of amplitudes. Perturbations must mean there are fundamental periods which are unperturbed, explaining this via the Moon's orbit and supposing that this is what Larmor has in mind. One of the difficulties in [Hermann von] Helmholtz is his assumption of frictional forces, and Fitzgerald thinks there can be no friction in the motion of atoms. Something like radiation must distribute energy. The aether gives a means of redistribution of energy among many atoms. 23 March 1895