Page:A short history of astronomy(1898).djvu/447

§ 293] Propositions which profess to be—or are commonly interpreted as being—"exact" and valid throughout all future time are consequently regarded with considerable distrust, unless they are clearly mere abstractions.

In the case of the particular propositions in question the progress of astronomy and physics has thrown a good deal of emphasis on some of the points in which the assumptions required by Lagrange and Laplace are not satisfied by the actual solar system.

It was assumed for the purposes of the stability theorems that the bodies of the solar system are perfectly rigid; in other words, the motions relative to one another of the parts of any one body were ignored. Both the ordinary tides of the ocean and the bodily tides to which modern research has called attention were therefore left out of account. Tidal friction, though at present very minute in amount (§ 287), differs essentially from the perturbations which form the main subject-matter of gravitational astronomy, inasmuch as its action is irreversible. The stability theorems shewed in effect that the ordinary perturbations produced effects which sooner or later compensated one another, so that if a particular motion was accelerated at one time it would be retarded at another; but this is not the case with tidal friction. Tidal action between the earth and the moon, for example, gradually lengthens both the day and the month, and increases the distance between the earth and the moon. Solar tidal action has a similar though smaller effect on the sun and earth. The effect in each case—as far as we can measure it at all—seems to be minute almost beyond imagination, but there is no compensating action tending at any time to reverse the process. And on the whole the energy of the bodies concerned is thereby lessened. Again, modern theories of light and electricity require space to be filled with an "ether" capable of transmitting certain waves; and although there is no direct evidence that it in any way affects the motions of earth or planets, it is difficult to imagine a medium so different from all known forms of ordinary matter as to offer no resistance to a body moving through it. Such resistance would have the effect of slowly bringing the members of the solar system nearer to the sun, and gradually diminishing their times of revolution round