Joseph Lovering

“ I am confronted on the very threshold of my address by the doubt whether it were better to beat out the little bit of golden thought, for which I have time and capacity, into a thin leaf which shall merely gild the whole vast surface of scientific investigation, even for a single year, or to condense it into a solid though minute globule, only big enough and bright enough to light up some narrow specialty. ”

“ The luminiferous ether and the undulatory theory of light have always troubled what is supposed to be the imperturbable character of the mathematics. The proof of a theory is indisputable when it can predict consequences, and call successfully upon the observer to fulfill its prophecies. It is the boast of astronomers that the law of gravitation thus vindicates itself. The undulatory theory of light has shown a wonderful facility of adaptation to each new exigency in optics, and has opened the eye of observation to see what might never have been discovered without the promptings of theory. ”

“ Newton, in his third letter to Bentley, wrote in this wise: "That gravity should be innate, inherent, and essential to matter, so that one body may act upon another at a distance, through a vacuum, without the mediation of any thing else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity, that I believe no man, who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it." ”

“ Whatever theory of the constitution of bodies holds out a prospect of the ultimate explanation of the process by which gravitation is effected, men of science will be found ready to devote the whole remainder of their lives to the development of that theory."
The hypotheses of Challis and Le Sage have one thing in common: the motion of the ether and the driving storm of atoms must come from outside the world of stars. "On either theory, the universe is not even temporarily automatic, but must be fed from moment to moment by an agency external to itself." Our science is not a finality. ”

“ The mathematicians certified that the solar system was protected against the inroads of comets, and the border warfare of one planet upon another, and that its stability was secure in the hands of gravitation, if only space should be kept open, and the dust and cobwebs which Newton had swept from the skies should not reappear. Prophetic eyes contemplated the possibility of an untimely end to the revolution of planets, if their ever-expanding atmospheres should rush in to fill the room vacated by the maelstroms of Descartes. ”

“ If numbers count for any thing, this is the grandest problem which can be presented to the mind of the astronomer. The argument from probabilities, which reposes on a substantial mathematical foundation, is loud in affirming some kind of motion, and repudiates the notion of absolute rest. We must place the stars outside the pale of science, and where no process of reasoning can reach them, or we must suppose that they subscribe to the universal law of all matter which we know, and exert attractive or repulsive forces upon each other. ”

“ Unless our physicists are contented to lag behind and gather up the crumbs which fall from the rich laboratories and studies of Europe, they must unite to delicate manipulation the power of mathematical analysis. Mathematics wins victories where experiment has been beaten. ”

“ These instruments, the veterans of many a hard-fought battle, science still enjoys; not superannuated by their long service, but continually growing in power and usefulness. The little opera-glass with which Galileo first lifted the veil from the skies and awoke the thunders of the Vatican, has blossomed out into the magnificent refractors of Cambridge, Chicago, and Washington. The little reflector with which Newton, by a happy mistake, expected to supplant the lens, has grown into the colossal telescopes of Herschel, Rosse, and the Melbourne Observatory. ”

“ Mathematical analysis, with its multitudinous adaptations, is the only key which will fit the most intricate wards in the treasury of science. With the help of her mathematical physicists, Great Britain has now taken a position in science which she has not held before since the days of Newton. In Germany, the physicists do not hold back from the most difficult problems of the day, because they are led along by experiment on one arm and by mathematics on the other. ”

“ The fact that certain well-known substances on this planet pass current everywhere in Nature, leads irresistibly to the conclusion that all the specimens came originally from the same mint. It is the legitimate office of science to reduce the more complex to the simple; to explain, if possible, the existing state of matter by an anterior state. The nebular hypothesis, which attempts to do this, no longer starts from a conjecture but a reality, viz., the existence of diffused incandescent vapor; and science will hold on to it, until a better theory of mechanical development is found. ”

“ With all the experimental devices and all the mathematical appliances of this generation, the human mind has been baffled in its attempts to construct a universal science of physics. But nothing will discourage it. When foiled in one direction, it will attack in another. Science is not destructive, but progressive. ”

“ All our knowledge of mechanical forces is derived from the conscious effort we ourselves make in producing motion. As this motion employs the machinery of contact, the force of gravitation is wholly outside of all our experience. The advocates of action at a distance reply that there is no real contact in any case, that the difficulty is the same with the distance of molecules as that of planets, that the mathematics are neither long-sighted nor short-sighted, and that an explanation which suits other forces is good enough for gravitation. ”

“ The ring-vortices may hustle one another, and pass through endless transformations; but they cannot be broken or stopped. Thomson seized upon them as the impersonation of the indestructible but plastic molecule which he was looking for, to satisfy the present condition of physical science. The element of the new physics is not an atom or a congeries of atoms, but a whirling vapor. The molecules of the same substance have one invariable and unchangeable mass; they are all tuned to one standard pitch, and, when incandescent, emit the same kind of light. ”

“ In the philosophy of Comte, every science passes through a theological and metaphysical crisis before it reaches the healthy condition of positive knowledge, and its whole history is written out by him in these three acts. With Buckle, the progress of science, without which there could be no history, is coincident with the advance in civilization; but the action begins with science, and the reaction only comes from external causes. All that science and civilization demand is perfect freedom of thought. ”

“ The world, as science looks at it, is not self-sustaining. We may abandon the hope of explaining gravitation, and make attraction itself the primordial cause. Our refuge then is in the sun. When we qualify the conservation of energy by the dissipation of energy, the last of which is as much an induction of science as the first, the material fabric which we have constructed still demands outward support. Thomson calculates that, within the historical period, the sun has emitted hundreds of times as much mechanical energy as is contained in the united motions of all the planets. ”

“ It is now believed, and to a large extent demonstrated, that the force, apparently lost, has been transformed into heat, electricity, or some other kind of molecular motion, of which the change of shape is only the outward sign. The establishment on a firm foundation of theory and experiment of the so-called conservation of energy, the child of the correlation of physical forces, is one of the first fruits of molecular mechanics. ”

“ And yet one physicist, by using a distance of less than six miles, and another, without going outside of his laboratory, have discovered what astronomers had searched heaven and earth to find out.
By these capital experiments the science of optics has achieved its own independence. Let us see what they have done, at the same time, for astronomy. The sequences in the eclipses of Jupiter's moons are modified by the velocity of light. The aberration of starlight is a measure of the ratio between the velocity of light and the velocity of the earth. ”

“ With such an indorser, I may venture to quote these words of a consummate mathematician without fear of their being cast aside by the naturalists as one of Bacon's Idols of the Tribe: "An intelligence which at any given instant should know all the forces by which Nature is urged, and the respective situations of the beings of which Nature is composed, if, moreover, it were sufficiently comprehensive to subject these data to calculation, would include in the same formula the movements of the largest bodies of the universe and those of the slightest atom. ”

“ The fundamental and only admissible idea of force is that of pressure, exerted either actively by the ether against the surface of the atoms, or as reaction of the atoms on the ether by resistance to that pressure. The principle of deriving fundamental physical conceptions from the indications of the senses does not admit of regarding gravity, or any other force varying with distance, as an essential quality of matter, because, according to that principle, we must, in seeking for the simplest idea of physical force, have regard to the sense of touch. ”

“ There may be one solitary body, or more probably an ideal point of space, the centre of gravity of the material universe, around which there is equilibrium, but everywhere else there must be motion. Though distance may reduce the effect of each one of the forces to a minimum, in the aggregate their influence will not be insignificant. ”

“ When it is said that the pendulum has no rival as a standard of length except the metre, that it furnishes an exact measure of time, and that time is an indispensable element in the study of all motion, and also the most available means of obtaining longitude on the earth and right ascension in the heavens, a strong case has been made out for the practical and scientific usefulness of Galileo's discovery. ”

“ It is a happy circumstance in the history of science, that this vast mechanical problem did not rush upon the mind at once in all its crushing generality. The solar system, with a despotic sun at the centre, competent to overrule all insubordination among planets and comets, and check all eccentricities and jealousies, and so far isolated from neighboring systems as to fear nothing from foreign interferences and entangling alliances, presented a comparatively simple problem ”

“ The motions which the telescope uncovers may decide in favor of a central attraction, but it is silent as to the intensity of this attraction unless the moving body belongs to the solar system. The universality of a gravitation may be proved, but not the universality of the very gravitation which pervades our own system, except by an argument from analogy. We see that one star differs from another star in glory. But what the other differences or resemblances are we know not, without the spectroscope. ”

“ If we define the molecule of any substance as the smallest mass of that substance which retains all its chemical properties, we can start with the extensive generalization of Avogadro and Ampère, that an equal volume of every kind of matter in the state of vapor, and under the same pressure and temperature, contains an equal number of such molecules. The conception of matter as consisting of parts, which are perpetually flying over their microscopic orbits, and producing by their fortuitous concourse all the observed qualities of bodies, is as old as Lucretius. ”

“ The restlessness of human inquiry will never be satisfied with knowing what things are, until it has also discovered how and why they are, and all the relations of space, time, matter, and force, in all the kingdoms of Nature, have been worked out with mathematical precision. ”

“ At the beginning of this century the universe was as empty as an exhausted receiver: now it has filled up again. Nature's abhorrence of a vacuum has been resuscitated, though for other reasons than those which satisfied the Aristotelians. ”

“ Even in astronomy, the inspiration of mechanics and the pride of mathematics, how trifling is the region which has been subjugated to the rigid rules of the exact sciences when compared with the immense territories which remain under the jurisdiction of natural history, and must be studied, if at all, by the methods of the naturalist, though with an inverted microscope!
If, now, we circumscribe our outlook by the line which marks where physical science ends and natural history begins, it will be possible to examine only a few of the salient points in the prospect before us ”

“ In the phraseology of our mechanics we define matter and force as if they had an independent existence. But we have no conception of inert matter or of disembodied force. All we know of matter is its pressure and its motion. ”

“ The classification which the spectroscope makes of the nebulæ corresponds so well with their telescopic appearance as to justify the confidence which one class of astronomers had in their way of deciding on the truth of the nebular hypothesis. While the spectroscope has manifested varieties of material, color, temperature, and consolidation in nebulæ and stars, both single and composite, beyond any thing which the perfected telescope could ever have revealed, it has at the same time found enough of earth in all of them to make man feel at home anywhere in the visible universe. ”

“ From the earliest dawn of intellectual life, a general theory of the constitution of matter has been a fruitful subject of debate, and human science and philosophy have ever been dashing their heads against the intractable atoms. ”

“ All structures, large or small, simple or complex, have a definite rate of vibration, depending on their materials, size, and shape, and as fixed as the fundamental note of a musical cord. They may also vibrate in parts, as the cord does, and thus be capable of various increasing rates of vibration, which constitute their harmonics. If one body vibrates, all others in the neighborhood will respond, if the rate of vibration in the first agrees with their own principal or secondary rates of vibration, even when no more substantial bond than the air unites a body with its neighbors. ”