Modern scientific ideas : especially in the idea of discontinuity / by Sir Oliver Lodge, F.R.S.

  • Lodge, Oliver, Sir, 1851-1940.
Date:
1927
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Modern scientific ideas : especially in the idea of discontinuity / by Sir Oliver Lodge, F.R.S. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    14/84 (page 12)
    all ultimately intelligible, in harmony with mind, and amenable to reason. Now take the idea of Continuity. At first sight things do not appear to be continuous. Every common object seems detached and independent of others. The pebbles on a gravel walk, the grains of sand on a sea beach, are all loose, detached, and disconnected from each other. The stars in the sky are also separate bodies, each apparently independent of the rest. Yet gradually we have learnt that they are not so independent as they seem. The moon is separate from the earth in one sense, but in another sense is attached to it, so that it has to remain at a fixed distance and revolve round the earth once a month. Similarly, the earth is attached to the sun. So also every pebble is attached to the earth, for if you raise it it will fall back again. We call the attachment gravitation, and we do not fully understand it. But we have gradually perceived that in that sense everything is attached to everything else. Every pebble attracts every other pebble, though truly with a force which is almost infinitesimal. Comets and meteors, which seem isolated and independent bodies, are all subject to the same connecting force. A piece of iron near a magnet, though apparently separate from it, feels, as it were, the threads of this attachment, and demonstrates in an interesting and conspicuous manner a special variety of the kind of action which is universal. Thus the idea has grown up that there is a continuity running through the whole of material existence, that space cannot be really empty in the full sense of that word, but that there must be some continuous connecting medium to which all these linking phenomena are due. But just as we may have faith in an ultimate uniformity of nature, while yet we admit the existence of certain vital phenomena which seem with our present know¬ ledge to run counter to it, so we find that, however strong our faith in an ultimate continuity may be, we yet