And the first thing to be said about Newton’s fourth law is that it is not a law at all, but simply a hypothesis.21 Indeed it is not even a hypothesis. As is shown in more detail in
paragraphs 64-73 the purported law makes no attempt to say what gravity is, how it works, what causes it. It only attempts to give a basis of measurement; and a claim that a basis of measurement is a law about a thing would have been greeted by scientists of the Middle Ages with derision. They knew that one could never be truly certain of a theory until one knew its cause;22 that mathematics was not an explanation – did not try to explain, did not even try to prove a thing’s existence – but merely a method of calculation; and that quantity was only one attribute of things, and to them one of the least important.23 They also well knew that it was very possible to make assumptions which could form the basis of accurate or nearly accurate calculation, and were therefore useful, but which were nevertheless entirely false.24 The socalled Universal Law of Gravitation is a perfect example of the new scientific method that Newton gave to civilization. This method, of which the germ was contained in the scientific revolution initiated at turn of the seventeenth century by Francis Bacon25 and which has since been adopted by every branch of science and by countless pseudo-sciences such as politics, economics, the social sciences, and even art, religion, ethics and psychology, 26 is as follows. Take a phenomenon that can be observed, such as a weight falling to the ground, produce a mathematical measurement for it which fits, concoct a hypothesis which, however far fetched, could possibly account for the phenomenon, and finally call the hypothesis and the mathematical formula a law and, regardless of whether or not there is any theoretical justification for it whatever, apply it throughout the universe.
That is all that the famous Fourth Law consists of. To this day, after more than two millennia of hypothesizing about possible causes of action at a distance, no-one knows what gravity is and why it should be that two bodies should attract each other and thus whether they do. Newton’s theory enables certain calculations to be made with reasonable accuracy, however,27 and despite the facts that some of the calculations are not subject to independent check, leaving merely Newton’s theory as the sole authority on which we rely for belief in their accuracy, and that – as we shall see – some observations and calculations actually contradict the theory, the theory had become a law. “Hypothesis, my dear young friend, establishes itself by a cumulative process: or, to use popular language, if you make the same guess often enough, it ceases to be a guess and becomes a Scientific Fact.” (The Pilgrim’s Regress by C.S. Lewis)
Although proclaiming laws which have no logical justification is already unscientific enough to shock any reasonably well educated mind of the past, Newton went further still. [unclear] promulgated the Law of Gravitation in spite of his own clear conviction that it had no possible theoretical justification whatever. The indoctrination that the theory of gravitation is an indisputable law has been so effective that for most people a person who questions it is providing evidence of his insanity. It will come as a surprise to many, therefore, that it is not long since intelligent people held that it was belief in the concept of the pulling force of gravity that provided evidence of insanity, and it will certainly come as a surprise to most that Newton was emphatically one of these people. This conviction of his is well evidenced, perhaps most clearly in two of the four well known letters on gravitation he wrote to the Rev. Richard Bentley, who had studied his work carefully and was using it extensively in lectures he was giving at the time. In his second letter to Bentley, Newton wrote:
You sometimes speak on gravity as essential and inherent to matter. Pray do not ascribe that notion to me. (Newton’s Correspondence, Royal Society edition, vol 3, p. 240 – Newton to Bentley 17th Jan, 1693) 66
In his third letter, Newton expounded his meaning more fully in this remarkable and much quoted passage:
It is inconceivable that inanimate brute matter should, without the mediation of something else -which is not material, operate upon and affect the matter without mutual
contact; as it must do if gravitation, in the sense of Epicurus, be essential and inherent in it. And this is the reason why I desired you would not ascribe innate gravity to me. 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 mediation of anything 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. Gravity must be caused by an agent acting constantly according to certain laws; but whether the agent be material or immaterial I have left to the consideration of my readers. (Ibid. vol 3, p. 253 – Newton to Bentley 25th February, 1693)
Newton, it can be seen, went even further than Charles Darwin, who disbelieved his own theory of evolution28: he believed that his theory could not be held by anyone with a competent faculty of thinking in philosophical matters, which in plainer language means no more than a routine capacity to think straight.
The material agent which Newton proposed as an alternative to immaterial agents, such as Aristotle’s “immaterial substances” or spirits, was the ether, the “material substances of a more subtle kind than visible bodies, supposed to exist in those parts of space which are apparently empty.” (Encyclopaedia Britannica: “Aether”) As mentioned in the last chapter there is no doubt as to the existence of the ether and until Einstein abolished it by decree no one ever did doubt it; but how the ether could possibly produce the effect which Newton ascribed to gravitation was something that remained unexplained – perhaps understandably when it is realized that, as Koestler points out, a steel cable of a thickness equalling the diameter of the earth would not be strong enough to hold the earth in its orbit and yet the gravitational force which is supposed to hold the earth in its orbit is transmitted from the sun across ninety-three million miles of space without any material medum to carry that force. (The Sleepwalkers by Arthur Koestler: p. 151) “Newton endeavors to account for gravity,” Encylopaedia Britannica says, “by differences of pressure in an ether;” but he did not publish his theory, “because he was not able from experiments and observations to give a satisfactory account of this medium, and the manner of its operation in producing the chief phenomena of nature...” (Encylopaedia Britannica : “Aether”)29
Koestler expands this a little further.
Newton’s concept of a “gravitational force” has always lain as an undigested lump in the stomach of science... He in effect could only get round the “absurdity of his own concept by invoking either ubiquitous ether (whose attributes were equally paradoxical) and/or God in person. The whole notion of a “force” which acts instantly at a distance without an intermediary agent, which traverses the vastest distance in seconds, and pulls at immense stellar objects with ubiquitous ghost fingers – the whole idea is so mystical and “unscientific”, that modern minds like Kepler, Galileo and Descartes, who were fighting to break loose from Aristotelian animism, would instinctively reject it as a relapse into the past... What made Newton’s postulate nevertheless a modern law of Nature, was his mathematical formulation of the mysterious entity to which it referred. (The Sleepwalkers by Arthur Koestler: p. 344)
The fact is that, far from disbelief in the notion that objects pull at each other by virtue of their masses being evidence of insanity, “magnetism, gravity and action-at-a-distance,” in the words of Koestler, “have not lost an iota of their baffling mystery since Dr. Gilbert...”30 ( Ibid. p. 507)
In the words of Professor Kline, the only sense in which gravitation has been accepted is as a “common unintelligibility.” (Mathematics in Western Culture by Morris Kline: p. 244)
It should not, incidentally, be imagined that the concept of gravitation was a new one when Newton encapsulated it into a law. His immediate predecessors in this field of science had considered the possibility but had discarded it for reasons that are equally valid and applicable today. Koestler writes:
Like Kepler who hit on the concept of gravity, then kicked it away, like Galileo who rejected even the moon’s influence on the tides, Descartes’ wide open mind boggled in horror at the idea of ghost arms clutching through the void – as unprejudiced intelligence was indeed bound to do, until “universal gravity” or “electro-magnetic field” became verbal fetishes which hypotized it into quiescence, disguising the fact that they are metaphysical concepts dressed in the mathematical language of physics. (The Sleepwalkers by Arthur Koestler: p. 508)
There is one more important objection to the notion of a gravitational pulling force. No less important a failing than the lack of logical support for it that has just been shown up is the fact that it does not account for all observed phenomena. Chief of a number of experiments which contradict the theory are those concerning pendulums, which exhibit many properties which cannot be reconciled with the view of gravity that Newton founded. During eclipses of the sun, for instance, they behave strangely, and swing -irregularly; and if other masses are placed near them they do not swing in the directions that the laws of gravity would lead a mathematician to predict. (I add in parentheses that although these inconvenient experiments are occasionally recorded and commented on in specialized scientific journals, they are never thought worth including in text-books on physics.)
It would not be right to conclude this criticism of Newton’s gravitation theory without mentioning that it has one great triumph to its credit which does on the face of it give it experimental support. This is the story of the discovery of the planet Neptune.
In the nineteenth century it was observed that the orbit of Uranus deviates from the path that would be expected of it from the gravitational influences of the sun and the known planets. From this it was deduced that there must be some massive body beyond Uranus which causes these deviations from the calculated orbit. Two astronomer/ mathematicians J.L. Adams and U.J.J. Leverrier then used the observed irregularities and the general astronomical theory of Newton to calculate the orbit of the supposed new planet, and observers were instructed to search for the planet at the time and place which had been mathematically determined.
In 1846 the planet, now called Neptune, was found, just one degree from its predicted position. Very reasonably, this was at the time “widely proclaimed as the final proof of the universal application of Newton’s law of gravitation.”
(Mathematics in Western Culture by Morris Kline: p. 244)
What is the solution? Ruling out pure coincidence there are four possibilities.
The first and least likely is that despite what is said in this chapter and despite its offensiveness to common sense, Newton’s theory is correct after all.
The second is that an alternative theory to Newton’s, using very different forces but producing much the same mathematical effects, is correct, and that Newton’s theory therefore produced the right answer for the wrong reason. Such a theory is that of Le Sage, which I shall shortly be describing.
The third theory, which will be rejected by most readers but is in fact the most likely, is that the existence of Neptune has long been known, presumably discovered by an earlier civilization which possessed advanced technology, has been preserved in occult tradition, and was released to support Newton’s theory just as missing link fossils have been concocted to support Darwin’s evolutionary theory.
The fourth possibility is that the position of Neptune was revealed directly by Satan to his followers. This too is not improbable. Satan has limitations - he does not know the future and he cannot read our minds (except what he can guess from external observation) – but he certainly knows where the planets are. [ I'm afraid Satan would be unemployed if he couldn't read human minds. Anyway it is one of the reasons we should have some compassion for him, to look at contains of the most humans mind, isn't much different from searching in dustbin, I suppose. VB]
The circumstantial evidence, both negative and positive, in favour of one or other of the last two possibilities is in fact surprisingly good. On the negative side the mathematics involved in the calculation that Adams and Leverrier are supposed to have made are virtually impossible. Not only were they working backwards – in other words instead of calculating the effects of a planet whose mass and path were (supposedly, in the case of the mass) known, they had to deduce the mass and path from its effects on Uranus – but since they knew neither the mass nor the path of their hypothetical planet they were dealing with two unknowns. Under those circumstances, let alone the impossibility of making really accurate calculations over the distance involved, it is not credible that they could make even a reasonably accurate prediction of time and place.31
The positive evidence is that we know for certain that there are occasions when bodies in the solar-system are known about well before they are officially discovered. Of this inside knowledge I give two examples.
The first concerns the two satellites of Mars, Deimos and Phobos. In the year 1720 Jonathan Swift’s famous work of fiction Gulliver’s Travels was published. In it Swift gave a remarkable description of two moons belonging to Mars, one of which he said was three diametres of Mars away from the centre of Mars and had a period of revolution of ten hours, and the other five diametres away with a period of revolution of twenty-one and a half hours. More than one hundred and fifty years later, in the year 1877, it was discovered that Mars, which until then was thought to be on its own, did indeed have two satellites, so small that they were not observed until long after those of other planets (even of Neptune) had been discovered. Their respective distances from Mars and orbiting periods were just over two diametres and seven and a half hours and four diametres and thirty and a quarter hours. Swift’s figures are not quite correct but anyone who imagines that he plucked the number of moons, and their distances and orbiting times out of his imagination is living in a world of fantasy. It is worth adding that Kepler too predicted two moons for Mars in 1610, his ostensible reason being that since the earth had one moon and Jupiter, at that time, was known to have four it was clearly logical that Mars must have two. Although this provides an excellent example of a phenomenon I mentioned earlier in this chapter – that of a wrong theory producing the right answer – once again we can suspect that what was published was not the real basis for Kepler’s prediction.
The second example of inside knowledge, one that is even more analogous to the discovery of Neptune, concerns the discovery of the least known (so far) and most distant planet of the solar system, Pluto. After the discovery of Neptune there remained unexplained perturbations32 in Uranus’ orbit and in addition seemingly unexplainable perturbations were discovered in Neptune’s orbit. This time some calculations were made by Professor Percival Lowell. A still more distant planet was hypothesized, and in 1930, situated in approximately the right place at the predicted time, the planet Pluto was located. So far so good; but pay attention to the sequel. It then discovered that the calculations of Lowell, who had died even before the discovery of the new planet, were based on bad data; and, as all are agreed, the discovery of Pluto in approximately the right position at the right moment was pure chance. Certainly pure chance is possible, though no one who took a glance at the night sky would wish to calculate the odds against such a coincidence; but in my view it is more reasonable to suppose that the predictions of Pluto, of the two moons of Mars, and of Neptune were the result of neither pure chance nor mathematics and that their existence was already known.33
Instead of the Law of Gravity?
If the so-called Law of Gravity has now been sufficiently criticized, the fact that people in the twentieth century are so accustomed to the idea of gravitation that they will find it difficult to conceive the possibility that it may not exist requires the raising at this stage of a new question. If gravity be not explicable, if it be not proved, and if, for the sake of discussion, we assume that it is not true, what is the alternative? The planets do move in relation to the sun, either the earth or the sun does move in relation to the other, satellites do orbit round the earth, the tides are affected by the moon.
Something does happen. What is that something? If you are going to reject Newton’s explanation, Newton’s defenders may demand, you must produce a btter explanation.
It is, of course, not true that a better explanation must be produced before rejecting Newton’s. In the first place, Newton’s “explanation” itself is not an explanation. As we have alrady seen, it explains nothing but merely measures. In the second place, even if no alternative to the theory had been advanced there could be no excuse for describing it as a law. If in the days when it was held that things could be known for certain it was permissible to confess ignorance, and indeed it was permissible, it is clearly outrageous to refuse to confess ignorance in an age which no longer believes in absolute truth. Having made this proviso I shall try to answer the question nevertheless; for it is a little known fact that alternative theories that are a more rational than Newton’s have been advanced and seriously considered.
The most appealing of these theories, and the only one I shall describe, is the collision theory of gravity put forward by the Swiss physicist, George Louis Le Sage (1724-1803).34 It was first aired in 1782 in the Transactions of the Royal Berlin Academy in a paper called “Lucrece Newtonien” (“A Newtonian Lucretius”) and was published in its final form posthumously in Geneva in 1818 in Traite Physique Mecanique. Le Sage’s suggestion was that space was filled with a fluid – which of course was none other than the ether which, until Einstein, was generally held to exist (and undoubtedly does exist) throughout the universe35 – consisting of minute particles (he called them “ultra mondane corpuscles”) that traversed space in straight lines in all directions. They were so small that the collision between one particle and another was an event of rare occurence, but they did collide with any molecules of such other matter as lay in their path. Thus these corpuscles were physical agents which did not pull matter but pushed it.
The way in which Le Sage’s corpuscles affected the various bodies in the universe can most easily be understood with the help of an example. If a single ball is assumed to exist, the particles will bombard the ball equally from above, beneath and from all sides, so that, like a balloon held in equilibrium in the atmosphere, it will not move. If, then, a second ball is brought into the picture, each ball will shield the other; so that the first ball is bombarded with particles from every side except that shielded by the second ball, creating an inequality of pressure and a net force in the direction of the second ball, and the second ball is similarly pushed in the direction of the first ball. For the two balls can be substituted the earth and the moon, the earth and the sun, and any other celestial bodies which affect each other’s movement, and also any object on or near this planet which behaves as though it is attracted to it. The denser the materials are of which the matter under bombardment is composed, the less easily the particles will be able to penetrate the matter and therefore the greater the force that will be exerted on the matter, thus accounting for the variations in specific gravity between one material and another.
The theory, already attractive, has a further outstanding feature. Not only has the magnitude of the force postulated by it been computed to be exactly the same force as that postulated by Newton, but the aberrations in pendulum behaviour which, as mentioned in paragraph 74, the Newtonian model could not account for – for instance during eclipses of the sun or when the pendulum is approached by other masses – become, when the Le Sage model is applied, explicable and predictable. What Le Sage produced, therefore, was an explanation for gravity which required no metaphysical ghostly fingers or mind-straining concepts of action-at-a-distance but instead was both physical and entirely reasonable.36
Mental habit, hypnotized into existence, as Koestler says, by twentieth century verbal fetishes, may make most people wish to dismiss Le Sage’s collision theory as that of a crank. It was not thus dismissed in its day. Three of the leading and most reputed physicists of the nineteenth century, Lord Kelvin, Hermann Helmholtz and J.C.Maxwell, investigated the theory thoroughly and did considerable work on it. Each of them stated positively that it was the most satisfactory explanation for the phenomenon of gravity and that it explained all of gravity’s observed effects.37 The theory is reasonable, physical and was approved by leading physicists; and, it has been dropped. The reason officially given was that the amount of heat generated by the bombardment of the corpuscles would in a short space of time raise the temperature of the whole material universe to a white heat. “It does not appear to us that the theory can account for the temperature of bodies remaining moderate while these atoms are exposed to the bombardment,”(ibid.) wrote Professor Maxwell. It is doubtful whether much ingenuity would be needed to produce such an accounting.38 A Professor James Hanson of Cleveland State University has suggested a much more likely reason why the theory was abandoned and has never been considered by establishment scientists since. (The only place I know of where this suggestion has been published is in a taped lecture given on April, 27th, 1979 in St. Thomas Church, Houston, Texas at the 16th Annual Conference on Teaching in Christian Schools. The tapes were sold by The Rose Enterprises, P.O. Box 308, Port Hueneme, California 93041.) Using the geocentric model of the universe and applying Le Sage’s principle, the motions of the planets can be calculated showing not only their orbits but also their perturbations; and indeed every celestial phenomenon which needs Einstein to explain it becomes explainable on physical grounds and therefore without the help of Einstein.
Geocentricity, however, according to the modern scientific mind which denies absolute knowledge, is as absolutely untrue as evolution is absolutely true; and if Le Sage’s theory implies geocentricity it “cannot” be right.
In concluding the specific examination of gravitational theory on which I have engaged I emphasize strongly that I do not put forward Le Sage’s collision theory as proven fact. I put it forward only to demonstrate that in respect of Newton’s unquestioned “law” of gravitation there is at least one alternative theory which supplies a physical and reasonable explanation which Newton’s lacks and which accounts for observed phenomena better.
21 Defenders of Newton can at first sight reasonably claim that Newton himself would not dispute this statement, since when he set out the four laws covering the universe in the Principia he called them not laws but propositions and theorems, and it can be suggested that it is only subsequent interpreters and commentators who have raised them to the status of laws. Nevertheless, while it is true that he avoided the word “law” in the Principia, it is certain from elsewhere in his writings that he regarded his propositions and theorems as laws. Indeed in a later addition to the Principia itself, the General Scholium, he says, in a discussion on planets and comets: “These bodies may indeed continue in these orbits by the mere laws of gravity.” (My emphasis – N.M.G.)
22 Aristotle said: “We suppose ourselves to possess unqualified scientific knowledge of a thing when we think we
know the cause on which the fact depends.” (Posterior Analytics by Aristotle: 71B)
23 In the time of Aristotle it was considered beneath the dignity of a gentleman, whose business was to know what
things were, to involve himself with calculating quantities. All making of calculations was therefore left to the slaves.
24 An example of this is Ptolemy’s cosmological system of cycles and epicycles described briefly in the last chapter. It enabled calculations and predictions to be made as accurately as was necessary for the purpose for which astromony was needed, of which much the most important was navigation, and without complicated mathematics. It was not supposed that this was necessarily how the universe was constructed, however. The function of the Ptolemaic system was that of a useful calculating tool. (See paragraphs 65 and its footnotes 1-4, and 66 in chapter “Galileo versus the Geocentric Theory of the Universe”.
25 See chapter...
26 The apostle of reducing the study of human nature to various branches, each constructed on mathematical principles, was Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832). His system of ethics, for instance, was based on the principle that pleasure (which in some people can of course be caused by malevolence) promotes happiness, while pain provokes unhappiness; that since a particular act may please some and harm others, the greatest good of the greater number is the measure of right and wrong; and that since different acts cause different degrees of pleasure or pain, measures (i.e. mathematical values) must be assigned to each type of act. As a system it is a big departure from that of the Ten Commandments, which are based on the principle that God says so and that is all we need to know; but it is the system which is in use today, it is the whole basis of modern democracy, and it provides the justification for abortion, euthanasia and any other form of mass murder. A good description of the history and implications of the reduction of human affairs to various mathematical sciences is contained in chapter 21 of Mathematics in Western Culture by Morris Kline.
27 But the mathematics needed to make this calculation are greatly more complex than those needed for the Ptolemaic system and indeed without Newton’s and Leibnitz’ invention of Calculus it would not be possible to make the calculation.
Newton in fact did the very reverse of simplifying the universe as will be seen later in this chapter.
28 See chapter... (“Evolution or...”, paragraph...)
29 It is interesting that Newton actually hit upon Le Sage’s theory to explain gravitation (see paragraphs 88-91) and
then discarded it. Why he discarded it is by no means clear because Le Sage and the three most respected physicists of the nineteenth century – Kelvin, Helmholta and Maxwell – calculated that it was both in accordance with observed data and mathematically sound. A possible reason, that to me seems very probable, is that Newton, or the subversive forces associated with him, preferred to impose upon the world an occult and metaphysical explanation rather than an obvious and realistic one.
30 It was only thanks to Dr. Gilbert, who was court physician to Queen Elizabeth, that Newton’s concept of gravitation
was by his (Newton’s) day capable of being even remotely acceptable to the human mind. Of his contribution Koestler writes: “Dr. William Gilbert increased the confusion with the sensational theory that the earth was a giant lodestone, which induced Kepler to identify the sun’s action on the planet’s as a ‘magnetic force’. It was quite natural, and indeed logical, that the confusion between magnetism and gravity should arise, for the lodestone was the only concrete and tangible demonstration of the mysterious tendency of matter to join matter under the influence of a force which acted at a distance without contact or intermediaries. Hence the magnet, which demonstrated that the grappling by ghostly fingers was a fact, became the archetype of action-at-a-distance and paved the way for universal gravity. Without Dr. Gilbert, man would have been much less prepared to exchange the homely and traditional view that ‘weight’ meant the natural tendency of bodies to fall towards the centre for the adventurous notion that it meant the grappling of bodies at each other across empty space.- (Ibid. p. 601) Some readers may at first wonder why, given the definite existence of magnetic attraction, the idea of gravitation as a pulling force should be so unacceptable. Why, in other words, should not magnetism and gravity be confused (if confusion is the right term for something that appears so reasonable)? The answer is that magnetism is very different in its action from what is conceived of as gravity. To take just one example of difference, magnetism is as much a repelling force as an attracting force: opposite poles attract. and like like poles repel, and there is no way in which this law can be fitted into gravitational theory.
31 Further evidence of the virtual impossibility of making such a prediction will be found in the Appendix to this
chapter, in which I reproduce some extracts from Gravitation Versus Relativity by Professor Charles Lane Poor. In one of these extracts Professor Poor says: “So long as there are but two bodies in the system,... the actual position of the smaller body, (travelling) for ever and ever around and around its unvarying path, can be calculated at any time by a very simple formula. If, however, a third body be introduced into our universe,...the paths of the three bodies become so complicated as to defy mathematical description.”
32 A perturbation is the deviation of a heavenly body form its theoretically regular orbit. It is usually
assumed that the cause of the perturbation of any given of planet is either the attractions of bodies other than the primary body which attracts it (in the case of the planets and the sun) or its imperfect spherical form. This of course adds strength to my suggestion that the pinpointing of the whereabouts of Neptune was not genuinely based on mathematical calculations. Had they been genuine the perturbations of Uranus that remained unexplained after the discovery of Neptune would have thrown them out.
33 After completing this chapter I noticed a major piece of circumstantial evidence adding weight to my
insistence that the manner of the discovery of Neptune, as recorded by history up to the present, is false. In an important book called The Case Against Einstein, from which I quote in the next chapter (“Einstein and Modern Physics”), the author, Dr. Arthur Lynch, includes the following intriguing footnote on page 160. As evidence it is especially impressive in that Dr. Lynch is clearly at a complete loss as to what it could signify, and has no suspicions along the lines that I am suggesting. “The celebrated astronomer, Le Verrier, once showed to Wilfred de Fonvielle, who told me the story, the great mass of his “cahiers” (memoranda books) which contained the calculations that led to the discovery of the planet Neptune. He gazed for some time on these repositories of his genius and his patience, then suddenly remarked: ‘Si tout cela n’etait que de blaguel’. (What if all that were not mere humbug.) I have often meditated on the saying.” The most obvious, but most shocking solution apparently did not occur to Dr. Lynch, and he continues: “I think it was a philosophic reflexion, in Jacobi’s vein, of the perilous nature of a long series of deductions where any step may have lacked the necessary rigour. In any case Le Verrier – so M. de. Fonvielle assured me – burnt his book, though – as M. Escanglon has assured me – the calculations are preserved.” The burning of the books, the alleged preservation of the calculations, together with the clear inference that no one has undertaken the appalling labour of checking their validity, are strong confirmation, given that grounds for suspicion already existed, of fraud. See Appendix for a further discussion of the improbabilities involved in the claim that these heavenly bodies were located by calculation.
34 The account of Le Sage’s theory which follows is somewhat compressed because of limitations of space. The
reader who finds it difficult to grasp is referred to a fuller and very easily comprehended account in the article “Atom” in the ninth and tenth editions of Encyclopaedia Britannica.
35 See chapter “Galileo and the Geocentric Theory of the Universe”, paragraphs 20-27.
36 As mentioned earlier Newton did in fact consider a theory along the lines of Le Sage’s; but he discarded it because he was unable “to give a satisfactory account of the medium, and the manner of its operation in producing the chief phenomena of nature.” (See paragraphs 69 and 69F) It is, incidentally, reasonable to ask why, if the Le Sage theory be true, we do not become lighter if we walk underneath a thick lead roof. The answer is that, although the effect is extremely small, we do! To give an example, if a person bends himself over a modern gravimeter, the gravimeter records a small reduction of the earth’s gravity. The explanation for this of course is either, as Newton would assert, that the person’s body “pulls” against the earth’s pull; or, according to Le Sage, that the body “screens” a tiny bit of the universal . . .((this line on EU paper size cut off at bottom of US paper))
37 An example of such approbation of the theory is to be found in the articles on “Atom” and “Attraction”, in which the Le Sage theory is described, in the ninth and tenth editions of Encyclopaedia Britannica, the author of the articles in question being Professor Maxwell. For instance: “The force of attraction would vary directly as the product of the areas of the sections of the bodies taken normal to the distance between them. “Now the attraction of gravitation varies as the product of the masses of the bodies between which it acts, and inversely as the square of the distance between them. If, then, we can imagine a constitution of bodies such that the effective areas of the bodies are proportional to their masses, we shall make the two laws coincide. Here, then, seems to be a path leading towards an explanation of the law of gravitation, which, if it can be shown to be in other respects consistent with the facts, may turn out to be a royal road into the very arcana of science.” (Encyclopaedia Britannica: 9th and 10th editions: “Atom”) Moreover in the same article the account of the theory ends as follows: “We have devoted more space to this theory than it seems to deserve because it is ingenius and because it is the only theory of gravitation which has been so, far developed as to be capable of being attacked and defended.”
38 Maxwell himself did not regard his objection on the grounds of overheating as the final word on the subject, as
he admitted subsequently in the Philosophical Maqazine and other journals of that period. This difficulty with Le Sage’s theory that Maxwell has raised is that although energy can be turned into another form it is never lost. Therefore it would be expected that when the corpuscles struck a solid object either they would bounce off with exactly the same velocity as that with which they struck it, which would push the two objects apart again and result in no net “gravitational attraction” and thus destroy the theory, or the energy, which must go somewhere, would be converted into heat (which is what happens in normal collisions - the collision of two billiard balls warms up the balls). It is, however, purely an assumption that the energy released by the conversion must be converted into heat, and it is certainly not beyond the power of God to produce an alternative which solves the problem. In other words, if the Le Sage fluid exists, God could easily have endowed it with properties that allowed such disastrous effects on the universe not to take place, anyway within a time span of under ten thousand years. One solution, suggested in Maxwell’s own article in the Encylopaedia, is that the particles might some how acquire a spin on collision, and there are doubtless many other ways in which the energy might be stored.
From the paper
SIR ISAAC NEWTON AND MODERN ASTRONOMY
by
N. Martin Gwynne
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