He published his paper 'On Vortex Atoms' in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1867. He further speculated that multiple knots might aggregate into molecules of somewhat lower stability. Thomson suggested that each type of knot might represent an atom of a different chemical element. According to HelmholtzвЂ™s theorems, these vortices would correspond to different kinds of knot. He was inspired by Helmholtz's findings, reasoning that the aether, a substance then hypothesised to pervade all of space, should be capable of supporting such stable vortices. William Thomson, later to become Lord Kelvin, became concerned with the nature of Dalton's chemical elements, whose atoms appeared in only a few forms but in vast numbers. It remained only to bring the two strands of discovery together. Helmholtz also showed that vortices exert forces on one another, and those forces take a form analogous to the magnetic forces between electrical wires.Дuring the intervening period, chemist John Dalton had developed his atomic theory of matter. It is not necessary for the core to circulate, as it did in the Cartesian model. Hermann Helmholtz realized in the mid-19th century that the core of a vortex, analogous to the eye of a hurricane, is a line-like filament that can become tangled up with other filaments in a knotted loop that cannot come undone. However his Treatise on Light remained unfinished. Thus, all movement consisted of endless circular vortices at all scales. He realised that a circular chain of such objects, all replacing each other, would enable such movement. He believed that there was no vacuum and any object which moved had to be entering a gap left by another moving object. In the seventeenth century Descartes developed a theory of vortex motion to explain such things as why light radiated in all directions and the planets moved in circular orbits. About 60 scientific papers were subsequently written on it by approximately 25 scientists. William Thomson, who became better known as Lord Kelvin, first conjectured that atoms might be vortices in the aether that pervades space. This, together with the discovery of subatomic particles such as the electron, led to the theory being abandoned.Д«etween 18 the vortex atom theory, which hypothesised that an atom was a vortex in the aether, was popular among British physicists and mathematicians. However, as more elements were discovered and the periodicity of their characteristics established in the periodic table of the elements, it became clear that this could not be explained by any rational classification of knots. Many elements had yet to be discovered, so the next knot, the trefoil knot 3 1, was thought to represent carbon. The simple toroidal vortex, represented by the circular 'unknot' 0 1, was thought to represent hydrogen. Knots can be tied in the core of such a vortex, leading to the hypothesis that each chemical element corresponds to a different kind of knot.

In the vortex theory of the atom, a chemical atom is modelled by such a vortex in the aether. Such vortices could be sustained in the luminiferous aether, a hypothetical fluid thought at the time to pervade all of space. The vortex theory of the atom was based on the observation that a stable vortex can be created in a fluid by making it into a ring with no ends.

Vile vortices theorys