Problems of the future, and essays / by S. Laing.

  • Laing, Samuel, 1780-1868.
Date:
1889
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Problems of the future, and essays / by S. Laing. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    44/480 (page 28)
    gravitation, and if its motion were arrested, the heat engendered must be in an even larger proportion^ seeing that it depends on the square of tlie velocity,, than any heat which could be supplied by its gradual contraction, on the theory applied by Thomson and Helmholtz to solar heat. After all, what do we really know of the contents of space except this, that it contains a vast number of stars which are suns like ours, scattered at enormous distances from one another, and also innumerable meteorites? And also this, that the phenomena of light and heat prove the existence of waves of known dimensions vibrating with known velocities, and transmitted at a known rate ; which waves compel us to assume a medium or ether with certain calculable qualities. But these qualities are so extraordinary that it may almost be doubted whether such an ether has a real material existence, and is anything more than a sort of mathe- matical entity. Its elasticity must be a million million times that of air, which, as we know, is equal to a pressure of about 15lbs. to the square inch; the number of its oscillations must be at least 700,000,000,000,000 in one second of time; and it must be destitute of any perceptible amount of the ordinary qualities of matter, for it exerts no gravitating or retarding force, even on the attenuated matter of comets moving through it with immense velocities. Beyond this we can only conjecture that space may contain a number of larger meteors or dark suns, rushing through it in all directions, and possibly in the state of dissociated atoms the elements of substances such as carbon and oxygen, which are locked up in the earth's crust through the medium of life and vegetation, in