Читать книгу A Modern Zoroastrian онлайн

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Consider what this means. Air blowing at the rate of 100 miles an hour is a hurricane uprooting trees and levelling houses. If ether were as dense as air the resistance to the earth in passing through it would be 600 times that of going dead to windward in a tropical hurricane. But in point of fact there is no sensible resistance, for the earth and heavenly bodies move in their calculated paths according to the law of gravity exactly as they would do if they were moving in a vacuum. Even the comets, which consist of such excessively rare matter that when one of them got entangled among the satellites of Jupiter it did not affect their movements, are not retarded by the ether, or so slightly, that any retardation in the case of one or two of them is suspected rather than proved. But, if the ether has no weight, how can we call it material, weight being, as we have seen, the invariable test and measure of all matter down to the minutest atom? And yet how can we deny its existence when it is demonstrably necessary to account for undoubted facts revealed to us every day by the prism, the spectroscope, electricity, and chemical action, and deductions from these facts based on the strict laws of mathematical calculation? For the existence of the ether is not based only on the phenomena of light: it is an equally necessary postulate to explain those of heat, electricity, and chemical action. We must conceive of our atoms and molecules as forming systems and performing their movements, not in vacuo, but in an all-pervading medium of this ether, to which they impart, and from which they receive, impulses.