Modern cosmogonies

Very few even of the most savage tribes are content to take the world just as it is without speculating as to how it came to be. For time has three dimensions--past, present, an...

Immanuel Kant was, in 1751, still in the plastic stage. His period of 'pure reason' was remote, and might have appeared improbable. Such as they were, his distinctions had been...

Laplace's theory was a perfectly definite conception. In this lay its distinctive merit; in this also its special susceptibility to attack. Here was no question of condensation...

'Restorations' often go very far. Things may be improved beyond recognition, nay, out of existence. So it has happened to the nebular hypothesis. _Stat nominis umbra._ The name...

The effects of tidal friction are of almost infinite complexity. How it will act in each particular case cannot be predicted offhand; it is a matter for detailed inquiry. Mutual...

Few people need to be told that a rotating fluid mass is shaped very much like an orange. It assumes the form of a compressed sphere. And the reason for its compression is obvio...

The idea is seductive that we see in every meteoric fire-streak a remnant of the process by which our world, and other worlds like or unlike it, were formed. It is not a new ide...

Prospective and retrospective inquiries into physical conditions stand very much on the same footing. The same degree of uncertainty attaches to results of both kinds; the same...

The notion of a primordial form of matter meets us at every stage of cosmogonical speculation. It is the outcome of an instinctive persuasion that, if we could only 'lift the pa...

We find it equally impossible to conceive of matter without force, as of force without matter. The two modes of action, or of being, are inseparable. Yet our minds strongly dist...

Ether is the fundamental postulate of physics. Its existence, nowise apparent, is in all manner of ways implied. The properties that must be assigned to it are certainly arduous...

Sir William Herschel's celestial surveys first made the classification of nebulæ practicable. Until he began grinding specula at Bath very few such objects were known, and those...

Phenomena are functions of time, and the form of the function has to be determined in each particular case. That is what the historical method comes to, and its use is prevalent...

Our sun is clearly middle-aged. It bears none of the marks associated with juvenility in stars, while its decrepitude is in the distant future. It is crossing, most likely, a le...

If the sun and planets were, in sober truth, wrought into their present shape out of a primordial nebula, the comparatively void surrounding space should naturally be strewn wit...

The making of worlds, we are assured, was not purposeless, and its most obvious purpose to our minds is the preparation of suitable abodes for organic life. No other seems of co...