Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/73

Rh utilize the rays, or unknown worlds of wbich we have no cognizance, beyond the stars.

Now, for my own part, I am very little troubled by accusations of wastefulness against Nature, or by demands for theories which will show what the human mind can recognize as "use" for all energy expended. Where I can perceive such use, I recognize it with reverence and gratitude, I hope; but the failure to recognize it in other cases creates in my mind no presumption against the wisdom of Nature, or against the correctness of an hypothesis otherwise satisfactory. It merely suggests human limitations and ignorance. How can one without sight understand what a telescope is good for?

At the same time perhaps we assume with a little too much confidence that, in free space, radiation does take place equally in all directions. Of course, if the received views as to the nature and conduct of the hypothetical "ether" are correct, there is no possibility of questioning the assumption; but, as Sir John Herschel and others have pointed out, the properties which must be ascribed to this "ether," to fit it for its various functions, are so surprising and almost inconceivable that one may be pardoned for some reserve in accepting it as a finality. At any rate, as a fact, the question is continually started (the idea has been brought out repeatedly, in some cases by men of recognized scientific and philosophic attainment), whether the constitution of things may not be such that radiation and transfer of energy can take place only between ponderable masses; and that, too, without the expenditure of energy upon the transmitting agent (if such exist) along the line of transmission, even in transitu. If this were the case, then the sun would send out its energy only to planets and meteors and sister-stars, wasting none in empty space; and so its loss of heat would be enormously diminished, and the time-scale of the life of the planetary system would be correspondingly extended. So far as I know, no one has ever yet been able to indicate any kind of medium or mechanism by which vibrations, such as we know to constitute the radiant energy of light and heat, can be transmitted at all from sun to planet under such restrictions; and it is very difficult to see how any such limited transmission, confined to the lines of gravitational force, could be reconciled with the law of inverse squares. That this law of radiation actually holds in interplanetary space is of course demonstrated by the fact that the calculated brightness of a planet at different places in its orbit and varying distances from the earth agrees with the results of photometric observation. Still, one ought not to be too positive in assertions as to the real condition and occupancy of so-called vacant space. The "ether" is a good working hypothesis, but hardly more as yet.

I need not add that a most interesting and as yet inaccessible problem, connected with the preceding, is that of the mechanism of gravitation, and, indeed, of all forces that seem to act at a distance: