Sir Oliver Lodge

“ He took out his old papers and began again the calculation. If gravity were the force keeping the moon in its orbit, it would fall toward the earth sixteen feet every minute. How far did it fall? The newly known size of the earth would modify the figures: with intense excitement he runs through the working, his mind leaps before his hand, and as he perceives the answer to be coming out right, all the infinite meaning and scope of his mighty discovery flashes upon him, and he can no longer see the paper. He throws down the pen; and the secret of the universe is, to one man, known. ”

“ Yes, that is what Herschel discovered—the life and activity of the whole visible universe. No longer was our little solar system to be the one object of regard, no longer were its phenomena to be alone interesting to man. With Herschel every star was a solar system. And more than that: he found suns revolving round suns, at distances such as the mind reels at, still obeying the same law of gravitation as pulls an apple from a tree. He tried hard to estimate the distance of the stars from the earth, but there he failed: it was too hopeless a problem. ”

“ These may be workers, they may and do advance knowledge, but they are never pioneers. Not to them is it given to open out great tracts of unexplored territory, or to view the promised land as from a mountain-top. Of them we shall not speak; we will concern ourselves only with the greatest, the epoch-making men, to whose life and work we and all who come after them owe so much. Such a man was Thales. Such was Archimedes, Hipparchus, Copernicus. Such pre-eminently was Newton.
Now I am not going to attempt a history of science. Such a work in ten lectures would be absurd. ”

“ Another thing one may notice, as showing their enormous distances, is that from every planet of the solar system the aspect of the heavens will be precisely the same. Inhabitants of Mars, or Jupiter, or Saturn, or Uranus, will see exactly the same constellations as we do. The whole dimensions of the solar system shrink up into a speck when so contemplated. And from the stars none of the planetary orbs of our system are visible at all; nothing but the sun is visible, and that merely as a twinkling star, brighter than some, but fainter than many others. ”

“ Fate has been a little unkind to Hooke in placing him so near to Newton; had he lived in an ordinary age he would undoubtedly have shone as a star of the first magnitude. With great ingenuity, remarkable scientific insight, and consummate experimental skill, he stands in many respects almost on a level with Galileo. But it is difficult to see stars even of the first magnitude when the sun is up, and thus it happens that the name and fame of this brilliant man are almost lost in the blaze of Newton. ”

“ But before the century closed there was destined to arise one remarkable exception—a man who was comparatively ignorant of that which had been done before—a man unversed in mathematics and the intricacies of science, but who possessed such a real and genuine enthusiasm and love of Nature that he overcame the force of adverse circumstances, and entering the territory of astronomy by a by-path, struck out a new line for himself, and infused into the science a healthy spirit of fresh life and activity. ”

“ But to predict in the solitude of the study, with no weapons other than pen, ink, and paper, an unknown and enormously distant world, to calculate its orbit when as yet it had never been seen, and to be able to say to a practical astronomer, "Point your telescope in such a direction at such a time, and you will see a new planet hitherto unknown to man"—this must always appeal to the imagination with dramatic intensity, and must awaken some interest in almost the dullest. ”

“ True he is best known as an artist, but if you read his works you will come to the conclusion that he was the most scientific artist who ever lived. He teaches the laws of perspective (then new) , of light and shade, of colour, of the equilibrium of bodies, and of a multitude of other matters where science touches on art—not always quite correctly according to modern ideas, but in beautiful and precise language. For clear and conscious power, for wide-embracing knowledge and skill, Leonardo is one of the most remarkable men that ever lived. ”

“ Conversely, if our life-period embraced myriads of æons, things which now seem permanent would then appear as in a perpetual state of flux. A continent would be sometimes dry, sometimes covered with ocean; the stars we now call fixed would be moving visibly before our eyes; the earth would be humming on its axis like a top, and the whole of human history might seem as fleeting as a cloud of breath on a mirror. ”

“ The Church had a rigid system of dogma, which must be accepted in its entirety on pain of being treated as a heretic. Philosophers had a cast-iron system of truth to match—a system founded upon Aristotle—and so interwoven with the great theological dogmas that to question one was almost equivalent to casting doubt upon the other.
In such an atmosphere true science was impossible. The life-blood of science is growth, expansion, freedom, development. ”

“ Ignorant himself of every branch of mathematics, he presumed that they were useless in science but a few years before Newton achieved by their aid his immortal discoveries.
"It is time that the sacred name of philosophy should be severed from its long connection with that of one who was a pretender in science, a time-serving politician, an insidious lawyer, a corrupt judge, a treacherous friend, a bad man." ”

“ And what about science? The atmosphere of science is a more quiet and less stirring one; it thrives best when the fever of excitement is allayed; it is necessarily a later growth than literature. Already, however, our second great man of science was at work in a quiet country town—second in point of time, I mean, Roger Bacon being the first. Dr. Gilbert, of Colchester, was the second in point of time, and the age was ripening for the time when England was to be honoured with such a galaxy of scientific luminaries—Hooke and Boyle and Newton—as the world had not yet known. ”

“ To make intelligible Newton's theory of the tides, I must not attempt to go into too great detail. I will consider only the salient points. First, you know that every mass of matter attracts every other piece of matter; second, that the moon revolves round the earth, or rather that the earth and moon revolve round their common centre of gravity once a month; third, that the earth spins on its own axis once a day; fourth, that when a thing is whirled round, it tends to fly out from the centre and requires a force to hold it in. ”

“ LECTURE IV GALILEO AND THE INVENTION OF THE TELESCOPE
Contemporary with the life of Kepler, but overlapping it at both ends, comes the great and eventful life of Galileo Galilei, [5] a man whose influence on the development of human thought has been greater than that of any man whom we have yet considered, and upon whom, therefore, it is necessary for us, in order to carry out the plan of these lectures, to bestow much time. A man of great and wide culture, a so-called universal genius, it is as an experimental philosopher that he takes the first rank. ”

“ Newton never seems to have been aware that he was under any obligation to Bacon. Archimedes, and the Alexandrians, and the Arabians, and Leonardo da Vinci did very well before he was born; the discovery of America by Columbus and the circumnavigation by Magellan can hardly be attributed to him, yet they were the consequences of a truly philosophical reasoning. But the investigation of Nature is an affair of genius, not of rules. No man can invent an organon for writing tragedies and epic poems. Bacon's system is, in its own terms, an idol of the theatre. ”

“ That is the great discovery—the origin of the moon.
Once, long ages back, at date unknown, but believed to be certainly as much as fifty million years ago, and quite possibly one hundred million, there was no moon, only the earth as a molten globe, rapidly spinning on its axis—spinning in about three hours. Gradually, by reason of some disturbing causes, a protuberance, a sort of bud, forms at one side, and the great inchoate mass separates into two—one about eighty times as big as the other. The bigger one we now call earth, the smaller we now call moon. ”

“ But the sun is one of the stars—not by any means a specially large or bright one; Sirius we now know to be twenty times as big as the sun. The sun is one of the stars: then is it at rest? Herschel asked this question and endeavoured to answer it. He succeeded in the most astonishing manner. It is, perhaps, his most remarkable discovery, and savours of intuition. ”

“ Now you are not to suppose that the system of Copernicus swept away the entire doctrine of epicycles; that doctrine can hardly be said to be swept away even now. As a description of a planet's motion it is not incorrect, though it is geometrically cumbrous. If you describe the motion of a railway train by stating that every point on the rim of each wheel describes a cycloid with reference to the earth, and a circle with reference to the train, and that the motion of the train is compounded of these cycloidal and circular motions, you will not be saying what is false, only what is cumbrous. ”

“ But it must be admitted that he himself felt the hypothesis of the motion of the earth to be a difficulty. Its acceptance is by no means such an easy and childish matter as we are apt now to regard it, and the hostility to it is not at all surprising. The human race, after having ridiculed and resisted the truth for a long time, is apt to end in accepting it so blindly and unimaginatively as to fail to recognize the real achievement of its first propounders, or the difficulties which they had to overcome. ”

“ But Galileo, with more experience, replies:—"You almost make me laugh by saying that these clear observations are sufficient to convince the most obstinate; it seems you have yet to learn that long ago the observations were enough to convince those who are capable of reasoning, and those who wish to learn the truth; but that to convince the obstinate, and those who care for nothing beyond the vain applause of the senseless vulgar, not even the testimony of the stars would suffice, were they to descend on earth to speak for themselves. ”

“ These last have been the men of science, the great and heaven-born men of science; and they are few. In our own day, amid the throng of inventions, there are a multitude of small men using the name of science but working for their own ends, jostling and scrambling just as they would jostle and scramble in any other trade or profession. ”

“ But so gigantic is the extent of visible space, that even with its amazing speed of 200 miles every second, this star will take two or three million years to get out of sight of our present telescopes, and several thousand years before it gets perceptibly fainter than it is now.
Have we any reason for supposing that the stars we see are all there are? In other words, have we any reason for supposing all celestial objects to be sufficiently luminous to be visible? ”

“ Until, after the lapse of ages, we find the day twenty-four hours long, the moon 240,000 miles distant, revolving in 271⁄3 days, and the tides only existing in the water of the ocean, and only a few feet high. This is the era we call "to-day."
The process does not stop here: still the stately march of events goes on; and the eye of Science strives to penetrate into the events of the future with the same clearness as it has been able to descry the events of the past. ”

“ No, it is no mistake: there is something wrong in the theory, gravity is too strong.
Instead of falling toward the earth 51⁄3 hundredths of an inch every second, as it would under gravity, the moon only falls 42⁄3 hundredths of an inch per second.
With such a discovery in his grasp at the age of twenty-three he is disappointed—the figures do not agree, and he cannot make them agree. Either gravity is not the force in action, or else something interferes with it. Possibly, gravity does part of the work, and the vortices of Descartes interfere with it. ”

“ But, it may be asked, if Kepler's third law only gives us the mass of a central body, how is the mass of a satellite to be known? Well, it is not easy; the mass of no satellite is known with much accuracy. Their mutual perturbations give us some data in the case of the satellites of Jupiter; but to our own moon this method is of course inapplicable. Our moon perturbs at first sight nothing, and accordingly its mass is not even yet known with exactness. The mass of comets, again, is quite unknown. ”

“ Our distance from the sun shrinks up into a mere speck—the whole solar system into a mere unit of measurement, to be repeated hundreds of thousands of times before we reach the stars.
Yet their motion is visible—yes, to very accurate measurement quite plain. One star, known as 61 Cygni, was then and is now rushing along at the rate of 100 miles every second. Not that you must imagine that this makes any obvious and apparent change in its position. No, for all ordinary and practical purposes they are still fixed stars; thousands of years will show us no obvious change ”

“ The outside universe would have existed, but man would have been entirely and hopelessly ignorant of it. The bare idea of an outside universe beyond the world would have been inconceivable, and might have been scouted as absurd. We do possess the sense of sight; but is it to be supposed that we possess every sense that can be possessed by finite beings? There is not the least ground for such an assumption. It is easy to imagine a deaf race or a blind race: it is not so easy to imagine a race more highly endowed with senses than our own ”

“ We have every ground for believing the contrary. Every body in the solar system is dull and dark except the sun, though probably Jupiter is still red-hot. Why may not some of the stars be dark too? The genius of Bessel surmised this, and consistently upheld the doctrine that the astronomy of the future would have to concern itself with dark and invisible bodies; he preached "an astronomy of the invisible." Moreover he predicted the presence of two such dark bodies—one a companion of Sirius, the other of Procyon. ”

“ The earliest recorded notion of the earth is the very natural one that it is a flat area floating in an illimitable ocean. The sun was a god who drove his chariot across the heavens once a day; and Anaxagoras was threatened with death and punished with banishment for teaching that the sun was only a ball of fire, and that it might perhaps be as big as the country of Greece. ”

“ If the earth were not the central and all-important body in the universe, if the sun and planets and stars were not attendant and subsidiary lights, but were other worlds larger and perhaps superior to ours, where was man's place in the universe? [Pg 14] and where were the doctrines they had maintained as irrefragable? I by no means assert that the new doctrines were really utterly irreconcilable with the more essential parts of the old dogmas, if only theologians had had patience and genius enough to consider the matter calmly. ”

“ Up to the time of Herschel, astronomical interest centred on the solar system. Since that time it has been divided, and a great part of our attention has been given to the more distant celestial bodies. The solar system has by no means lost its interest—it has indeed gained in interest continually, as we gain in knowledge concerning it; but in order to follow the course of science it will be necessary for us to oscillate to and fro, sometimes attending to the solar system—the planets and their satellites—sometimes extending our vision to the enormously more distant stellar spaces. ”

“ But among a people hurried and busy and preoccupied, some in the pursuit of riches, some in the pursuit of pleasure, and some, the majority, in the struggle for existence, there arise in every generation, here and there, one or two great souls—men who seem of another age and country, who look upon the bustle and feverish activity and are not infected by it, who watch others achieving prizes of riches and pleasure and are not disturbed, who look on the world and the universe they are born in with quite other eyes. ”