Life comes to matter as the flowers come in the spring,--when the time
is ripe for it,--and it disappears when the time is over-ripe. Man
appears in due course and has his little day upon the earth, but that
day must as surely come to an end. Yet can we conceive of the end of the
physical order? the end of gravity? or of cohesion? The air may
disappear, the water may disappear, combustion may cease; but oxygen,
hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon will continue somewhere.
V
Science is the redeemer of the physical world. It opens our eyes to its
true inwardness, and purges it of the coarse and brutal qualities with
which, in our practical lives, it is associated. It has its inner world
of activities and possibilities of which our senses give us no hint.
This inner world of molecules and atoms and electrons, thrilled and
vibrating with energy, the infinitely little, the almost infinitely
rapid, in the bosom of the infinitely vast and distant and
automatic--what a revelation it all is! what a glimpse into "Nature's
infinite book of secrecy"!
Our senses reveal to us but one kind of motion--mass motion--the change
of place of visible bodies. But there is another motion in all matter
which our senses do not reveal to us as motion--molecular vibration, or
the thrill of the atoms. At the heart of the most massive rock this
whirl of the atoms or corpuscles is going on. If our ears were fine
enough to hear it, probably every rock and granite monument would sing,
as did Memnon, when the sun shone upon it. This molecular vibration is
revealed to us as heat, light, sound, electricity. Heat is only a mode
of this invisible motion of the particles of matter. Mass motion is
quickly converted into this molecular motion when two bodies strike each
other. May not life itself be the outcome of a peculiar whirl of the
ultimate atoms of matter?
Says Professor Gotch, as quoted by J. Arthur Thomson in his
"Introduction to Science": "To the thought of a scientific mind the
universe with all its suns and worlds is throughout one seething welter
of modes of motion, playing in space, playing in ether, playing in all
existing matter, playing in all living things, playing, therefore, in
ourselves." Physical science, as Professor Thomson says, leads us from
our static way of looking at things to the dynamic way. It teaches us to
regard the atom, not as a fixed and motionless structure, like the
bricks in a wall, but as a centre of ever-moving energy; it sees the
whole universe is in a state of perpetual flux, a flowing stream of
creative energy out of which life arises as one of the manifestations of
this energy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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