Ether (Space); Force and energy; Gravitation; Matter
out, there is no such thing as action at a distance, therefore the Law
of Gravitation demands a medium for its operation, production, and
continuity. Newton distinctly points this out in his Letters to Bentley,
where he says: "That one body should act upon another through empty
space without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their
action and pressure 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 faculty for thinking can ever fall into it." It has already
been pointed out (Art. 42), that the only medium which is universal is
the Aether medium, and we have therefore to look to the motions and
properties of that medium for the solution of the problem as to the
physical cause of Gravitation. That such a medium has motions which are
as regular as the tides of the sea, or the trade winds of the
atmosphere, will be proved later on, when it will be found that
Gravitation, with all that that law implies, is due, as Newton and
Challis suggested, to the pressure, properties, and motions of the
aetherial medium, which is as universal as Gravitation itself. This
being so, it is essential that we should set ourselves to find out from
the analogies of Nature, what are those properties and motions of the
Aether which give rise to the universal Law of Gravitation. This I
propose doing by a consideration of three different modes of
motion--viz. Heat, a mode of motion; Light, a mode of motion; and
Electricity, a mode of motion. I venture to premise, from a careful
consideration of these three truths, that we shall be able logically and
philosophically to arrive at the simple, yet grand truth which reveals
the physical source of all motion of the universe.
CHAPTER VI
HEAT IS MOTION
ART. 60. _Heat is Motion._--On the phenomena of Heat, Newton in his
eighteenth query in _Optics_ asks the questions: "Is not the heat of a
warm room conveyed through the vacuum by the vibrations of a much
subtler medium than air, and is not the medium the same as that medium
by which light is reflected and refracted, or by whose vibrations light
communicates heat to bodies? And do not the vibrations of this medium in
hot bodies, contribute to the intenseness and duration of their heat?
And do not hot bodies communicate their heat to contiguous cold ones by
the vibrations of this medium propagated from them into the cold ones?
And is not this medium exceedingly more rare and subtle than air, and
exceedingly more elastic and active?" Thus it can be seen that Newton
was of the opinion that heat consists in a minute vibratory motion of
the particles of bodies, and that such motion was communicated through
what he calls a vacuum by the vibrations of an elastic medium, the
Aether, which was also concerned in the phenomena of light.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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