THE LE SAGE THEORY OF GRAVITATION
Scanned, proofed and corrected from the original hardcover edition for enjoyable reading. (Worth every penny spent!)
***
INTRODUCTION
Le Sage's paper is one much oftener referred to than directly quoted from or read, and this is partly because the original is very little known, although it is in no more obscure a place than the Memoirs of the Berlin Academy, printed in the year 1784.
Le Sage appears to have been one of the academicians who, though in the capital of Prussia, were bound to write French of any sort rather than German, and it is only fair to the present translator to say that certain passages of the original hold the meaning of the author so securely hidden that it is doubtful if anyone could render them into English with entire confidence that their whole meaning had been grasped. Whatever the original obscurity, however, the translation, I believe, means something definite and, I hope, true.
The reader will recall that at the time when Le Sage wrote, the corpuscular theory of light was universally accepted, the laws of the conservation of energy and of matter were as yet unknown, and the kinetic theory of gases was quite beyond the scientific horizon. Hence it is a matter for surprise, not that Le Sage introduces in explanation of the difficulties met with hypotheses now in a form appearing somewhat crude, though doubtless still conceivable, but rather that his statement requires so little modification to fit it to the thought of the present day.
Some of the great objections made to Le Sage's theory, such as the supposed impossibility of this shower of his atoms acting with equal effect in the interior of the densest bodies as on the surface, are made in probable ignorance of how entirely satisfactory the hypothesis of the author is in this respect; I mean so far as the use of the mathematical infinity can render it so; while other difficulties have been, if not cleared up, at least rendered less formidable by the advance of modern knowledge, which is on the whole clearly making more for the hypothesis than against, if we put it in the form in which Le Sage would doubtless put it were he living now.
Thus the objection of the hypothesis of countless atoms coming from and going to infinity, to the dissipation of their kinetic energy into heat upon impact with solids-this latter class of objections seems to have been very generally met in recent years. Thus it has been made evident that the particles in question could vibrate in long closed paths with the same effect as if they came in from outer space and returned to it in straight lines, as the author originally supposed; and as to their infinitesimal smallness, our purely physical conceptions of space and even of time are not only still, as is well known, relative, but have received a curious extension since Le Sage wrote, so that our limit of the physically infinitesimal has been pushed farther back by studies into the nature of the molecule and the atom until we have before us actual things of an order of magnitude incomparably below anything known to the physicists of our author's time.
On the whole, then, the tenor of modern thought goes in the direction in which we are led by this theory, if by that we understand it, not in its first crude enunciations, but with the modifications which can now be legitimately associated with it, and which tend to make it both more suggestive and to maintain a continued interest in it-an interest which seems to justify the present publication of a paper with which so few are familiar at first hand.
1104530147
***
INTRODUCTION
Le Sage's paper is one much oftener referred to than directly quoted from or read, and this is partly because the original is very little known, although it is in no more obscure a place than the Memoirs of the Berlin Academy, printed in the year 1784.
Le Sage appears to have been one of the academicians who, though in the capital of Prussia, were bound to write French of any sort rather than German, and it is only fair to the present translator to say that certain passages of the original hold the meaning of the author so securely hidden that it is doubtful if anyone could render them into English with entire confidence that their whole meaning had been grasped. Whatever the original obscurity, however, the translation, I believe, means something definite and, I hope, true.
The reader will recall that at the time when Le Sage wrote, the corpuscular theory of light was universally accepted, the laws of the conservation of energy and of matter were as yet unknown, and the kinetic theory of gases was quite beyond the scientific horizon. Hence it is a matter for surprise, not that Le Sage introduces in explanation of the difficulties met with hypotheses now in a form appearing somewhat crude, though doubtless still conceivable, but rather that his statement requires so little modification to fit it to the thought of the present day.
Some of the great objections made to Le Sage's theory, such as the supposed impossibility of this shower of his atoms acting with equal effect in the interior of the densest bodies as on the surface, are made in probable ignorance of how entirely satisfactory the hypothesis of the author is in this respect; I mean so far as the use of the mathematical infinity can render it so; while other difficulties have been, if not cleared up, at least rendered less formidable by the advance of modern knowledge, which is on the whole clearly making more for the hypothesis than against, if we put it in the form in which Le Sage would doubtless put it were he living now.
Thus the objection of the hypothesis of countless atoms coming from and going to infinity, to the dissipation of their kinetic energy into heat upon impact with solids-this latter class of objections seems to have been very generally met in recent years. Thus it has been made evident that the particles in question could vibrate in long closed paths with the same effect as if they came in from outer space and returned to it in straight lines, as the author originally supposed; and as to their infinitesimal smallness, our purely physical conceptions of space and even of time are not only still, as is well known, relative, but have received a curious extension since Le Sage wrote, so that our limit of the physically infinitesimal has been pushed farther back by studies into the nature of the molecule and the atom until we have before us actual things of an order of magnitude incomparably below anything known to the physicists of our author's time.
On the whole, then, the tenor of modern thought goes in the direction in which we are led by this theory, if by that we understand it, not in its first crude enunciations, but with the modifications which can now be legitimately associated with it, and which tend to make it both more suggestive and to maintain a continued interest in it-an interest which seems to justify the present publication of a paper with which so few are familiar at first hand.
THE LE SAGE THEORY OF GRAVITATION
Scanned, proofed and corrected from the original hardcover edition for enjoyable reading. (Worth every penny spent!)
***
INTRODUCTION
Le Sage's paper is one much oftener referred to than directly quoted from or read, and this is partly because the original is very little known, although it is in no more obscure a place than the Memoirs of the Berlin Academy, printed in the year 1784.
Le Sage appears to have been one of the academicians who, though in the capital of Prussia, were bound to write French of any sort rather than German, and it is only fair to the present translator to say that certain passages of the original hold the meaning of the author so securely hidden that it is doubtful if anyone could render them into English with entire confidence that their whole meaning had been grasped. Whatever the original obscurity, however, the translation, I believe, means something definite and, I hope, true.
The reader will recall that at the time when Le Sage wrote, the corpuscular theory of light was universally accepted, the laws of the conservation of energy and of matter were as yet unknown, and the kinetic theory of gases was quite beyond the scientific horizon. Hence it is a matter for surprise, not that Le Sage introduces in explanation of the difficulties met with hypotheses now in a form appearing somewhat crude, though doubtless still conceivable, but rather that his statement requires so little modification to fit it to the thought of the present day.
Some of the great objections made to Le Sage's theory, such as the supposed impossibility of this shower of his atoms acting with equal effect in the interior of the densest bodies as on the surface, are made in probable ignorance of how entirely satisfactory the hypothesis of the author is in this respect; I mean so far as the use of the mathematical infinity can render it so; while other difficulties have been, if not cleared up, at least rendered less formidable by the advance of modern knowledge, which is on the whole clearly making more for the hypothesis than against, if we put it in the form in which Le Sage would doubtless put it were he living now.
Thus the objection of the hypothesis of countless atoms coming from and going to infinity, to the dissipation of their kinetic energy into heat upon impact with solids-this latter class of objections seems to have been very generally met in recent years. Thus it has been made evident that the particles in question could vibrate in long closed paths with the same effect as if they came in from outer space and returned to it in straight lines, as the author originally supposed; and as to their infinitesimal smallness, our purely physical conceptions of space and even of time are not only still, as is well known, relative, but have received a curious extension since Le Sage wrote, so that our limit of the physically infinitesimal has been pushed farther back by studies into the nature of the molecule and the atom until we have before us actual things of an order of magnitude incomparably below anything known to the physicists of our author's time.
On the whole, then, the tenor of modern thought goes in the direction in which we are led by this theory, if by that we understand it, not in its first crude enunciations, but with the modifications which can now be legitimately associated with it, and which tend to make it both more suggestive and to maintain a continued interest in it-an interest which seems to justify the present publication of a paper with which so few are familiar at first hand.
***
INTRODUCTION
Le Sage's paper is one much oftener referred to than directly quoted from or read, and this is partly because the original is very little known, although it is in no more obscure a place than the Memoirs of the Berlin Academy, printed in the year 1784.
Le Sage appears to have been one of the academicians who, though in the capital of Prussia, were bound to write French of any sort rather than German, and it is only fair to the present translator to say that certain passages of the original hold the meaning of the author so securely hidden that it is doubtful if anyone could render them into English with entire confidence that their whole meaning had been grasped. Whatever the original obscurity, however, the translation, I believe, means something definite and, I hope, true.
The reader will recall that at the time when Le Sage wrote, the corpuscular theory of light was universally accepted, the laws of the conservation of energy and of matter were as yet unknown, and the kinetic theory of gases was quite beyond the scientific horizon. Hence it is a matter for surprise, not that Le Sage introduces in explanation of the difficulties met with hypotheses now in a form appearing somewhat crude, though doubtless still conceivable, but rather that his statement requires so little modification to fit it to the thought of the present day.
Some of the great objections made to Le Sage's theory, such as the supposed impossibility of this shower of his atoms acting with equal effect in the interior of the densest bodies as on the surface, are made in probable ignorance of how entirely satisfactory the hypothesis of the author is in this respect; I mean so far as the use of the mathematical infinity can render it so; while other difficulties have been, if not cleared up, at least rendered less formidable by the advance of modern knowledge, which is on the whole clearly making more for the hypothesis than against, if we put it in the form in which Le Sage would doubtless put it were he living now.
Thus the objection of the hypothesis of countless atoms coming from and going to infinity, to the dissipation of their kinetic energy into heat upon impact with solids-this latter class of objections seems to have been very generally met in recent years. Thus it has been made evident that the particles in question could vibrate in long closed paths with the same effect as if they came in from outer space and returned to it in straight lines, as the author originally supposed; and as to their infinitesimal smallness, our purely physical conceptions of space and even of time are not only still, as is well known, relative, but have received a curious extension since Le Sage wrote, so that our limit of the physically infinitesimal has been pushed farther back by studies into the nature of the molecule and the atom until we have before us actual things of an order of magnitude incomparably below anything known to the physicists of our author's time.
On the whole, then, the tenor of modern thought goes in the direction in which we are led by this theory, if by that we understand it, not in its first crude enunciations, but with the modifications which can now be legitimately associated with it, and which tend to make it both more suggestive and to maintain a continued interest in it-an interest which seems to justify the present publication of a paper with which so few are familiar at first hand.
1.29
In Stock
5
1
THE LE SAGE THEORY OF GRAVITATION
THE LE SAGE THEORY OF GRAVITATION
eBook
$1.29
Related collections and offers
1.29
In Stock
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940013118935 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | OGB |
| Publication date: | 07/27/2011 |
| Series: | Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution , #1 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 266 KB |
From the B&N Reads Blog