Some unrecognized laws of nature Author:Ignatius Singer Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV. THE BASIC PRINCIPLE OF THE CURRENT THEORY OF GRAVITATION. // is always safe and philosophic to distinguish, as much as is in our power, fact fr... more »om theory ; the experience of past ages is sufficient to show us the wisdom of such a course; and considering the constant tendency of the mind to rest on an assumption, and, when it answers every purpose, to forget that it is an assumption, we ought to remember that it, in such cases, becomes a prejudice, and inevitably interferes, more or less, with a clear-sighted judgment.—Faraday. After this somewhat lengthy, though necessary, disquisition concerning methods of inquiry and verification, we will return to the consideration of those theories of Newton which bear on the subject of this essay—i. e. the cause or quality of gravitation—and show that his theories do not in all cases accord with present- day knowledge. One of these is that " attraction is proportional to mass." This is now a universally accepted theorem in connexion with gravitation, and may be said to be the basic conception in the light of which all phenomena of gravitation are interpreted. To the modern mind it is in respect of gravitation what the idea of a flat earth, or the geocentric conception, was to the ancients. Everything is viewed from this standpoint; and every phenomenon in any way connected with gravitation is explained in accordance with this fundamental conception. It is, in fact, the primal theory, and the test of every subsidiary theory. An explanation of any particular manifestation relating to gravitation which would not agree with this fundamental conception is not even admitted by the mind. And even should any such explanation suggest itself, it is at once rejected as untenable so soon as it is perceived that it would not conform...« less