The world machine. The first phase: the cosmic mechanism

Front matter

DAany shall run to and fro^ and knowledge shall he increased

THE FIRST PHASE

THE COSMIC MECHANISM

Chapter I Page

The vv-orld-old effort of the race to construct a world image, a picture of the universe — Its history — It is scattered through a variety of works, most of which had appeared before the idea of evolution had taken hold — The permanence of our present-day conceptions ....... i

CHAPTER n

The whole intellectual and scientific advance has been characterised by the overturning of primitive impressions and beliefs — A survey of the wondrous change in our ideas which this process has WTOught — The implication . . . . .19

Chapter III Micro-man : The Bacillus On The Wheel

Endeavouring to portray the extraordinary difficulties with which man has had to contend in his struggle for knowledge — His helplessness and his ignorance — His littleness compared with the cosmos he has learned to know . . . - ^7

Chapter IV

Primitive man and his world — His earhest ideas of fixity and law must have come from the development of mathematics and its applications — How he first learned " to count, to measure, to time, and to weigh " . . . . . .47

X CONTENTS

Chapter V Bion And The Doctrine Of A Round Earth

PAGE

The earliest recorded geometrical demonstration of the earth's shape

— How he proved it — The mechanism of night and day . .61

Chapter VI Eratosthenes And The Earliest Measures Of The Earth

The earliest accurate measure of the circumference of the earth in Alexandria, B.C. 275 — The simplicity of his method — Subsequent confirmation . . . . . • 7i

CHAPTER Vn

ARISTARCHUS AND THE DISTANCE AND GRANDEUR

OF THE SUN

The simple method by which he calculated that the sun was 300 times the volume of the earth — Other calculations of the ancients — The littleness of the earth was early recognised . 83

CHAPTER Vni

THE TURNING OF THE EARTH : THE FIXITY OF THE SKY

The teachings of Pythagoras, Philolaus, and others, as to the motion

of the earth on its axis — Their mode of proof . . '97

CHAPTER IX

THE FLYING EARTH : THE FIXITY OF THE SUN

The Coppernican system 2000 years before Coppernicus — It is in reality the system of Aristarchus of Alexandria — How he reached it — Why it failed of acceptance . . .109

CONTENTS xi

CHAPTER X

ARCHIMEDES AND THE FIRST IDEAS OF GF^VITATION

PAGE

The ancients just failed of attaining to Ne\\i:on's discovery — The

conditions which hindered them . . . .119

CHAPTER XI

DEMOCRITUS AND THE CONCEPT OF AN ATOMIC UNIVERSE

His mode of reasoning — The grandeur of his conceptions — In their

larger outlines the}' have been but little modified since . .129

CHAPTER XII

THE LEGACY OF THE GREEKS : THE REBIRTH OF TIME

The ideas of Lucretius, Cicero, Cleomedes — It was aU a heritage from Greek science — The utter intellectual aridity of Roman culture — The submergence of Hellenic civilisation — Greek traditions kept ahve by the Arabs — Their original contributions were slight — The cause of the Renaissance — The discovery of America 143

CHAPTER XIII

COPPERNICUS; THE TRUE SYSTEM OF THE WORLD

His work was thoroughly in the modern spirit ; it was inspired undoubtedly by the discovery of America — What there was in it that was new — Its confirmation due to chance . .161

CHAPTER XIV

BRUNO AND THE RECEPTION OF THE COPPERNICAN IDEAS

Bruno was the first to spread the Coppernican doctrine over Europe

— His grandiose extensions of the doctrine — His tragic death 173 xii CONTENTS

CHAPTER XV

KEPLER : PIONEER OF THE MODERN IDEAS OF

NATURAL LAW

PAGE

He was the first to undertake to reduce natural phenomena to mathematical formulae — He was the forerunner of Newton in the ideas of gravitation . . . . . .183

CHAPTER XVI

He was the true inventor of the telescope — His discoveries as contrasted with the meagreness of his resources — His greatest work was his investigation of the laws of motion and his foundation of dynamics ....... I95

CHAPTER XVn

THE ADVANCE TOWARD A RATIONAL WORLD CONCEPTION

Ideas and contributions of Bacon, Descartes, Gassendi, and Hobbes — Descartes was the first distinctly to picture the world as a mechanism . . . . . . ,211

CHAPTER XVni

The first accurate measures of the sun's distance and size by Domenico Cassini — The amazing change which had already come over European thought . . . . .225

CHAPTER XIX

THE DEVELOPMENT OF MECHANICS : THE FORERUNNERS OF NEWTON

Rise of the great mathematical school of the seventeenth century — Doctrine of inertia — The discoveries of Torricelli — Many minds on the edge of the law of gravitation . . .237

CONTENTS xiii

CHAPTER XX

NEWTON AND THE MOTOR FORCE OF THE WORLD MACHINE

PAGE

The precise nature of his discovery — Its history — Just what it

CHAPTER XXI

HALLEY AND THE MESSENGERS OF THE GODS

The terror formerly inspired by the appearance of comets — Its powerful influence towards superstition — Computation of the first cometary orbit — The first prediction and its realisation . 267

CHAPTER XXn

ROEMER AND THE PROOF OF THE EARTH'S MOTION

How he came to his discovery — Its general rejection — Confirmed by

Bradley's discovery of aberration . . . .279

CHAPTER XXni

LAPLACE AND THE STABILITY OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM

The work of Newton taken up by the French mathematicians — Laplace and Lagrange determine that the planets constitute a stable system . . . . . . .291

CHAPTER XXIV

FIXING THE BOUNDARIES OF OUR SOLAR WORLD

The ancient ideas of the world enlarged by the discovery of Uranus and Neptune — The triumph of the theory of gravitation through the calculations of Adams and Leverrier . , . . 303 xiv CONTENTS

CHAPTER XXV

HERSCHEL AND THE HELTER-SKELTER FLIGHT OF THE STARS

PAGE

He demonstrates stellar motion^ and with it the motion of the whole solar system — The grandeur of his ideas — The wonderful advance from the time of Galileo to the death of Herschel . -315

CHAPTER XXVI

The forst successful measures of stellar parallax — The final proof — It supplies the absolute proof of the Coppemican theory — The size of the stars — The grandeur of Canopus — It may be a million times our sun . . . . . .329

CHAPTER XXVII

THE SPECTROSCOPE AND THE STUFF OF COSMOS

The proof that the material of the universe is all the same — Other

revelations — A second method of deri\T.ng stellar motion , 343

CHAPTER XXVIII

OUR PLACE IN SPACE : THE PLURALITY OF WORLDS

The endeavour to fix the number of the stars — The difficulty — Probability of thousands of worlds in parallel development to our own . . . . . . , .353

CHAPTER XXIX

Discovery of dark suns — Probability that their number vastly exceeds that of luminous stars — Binar\^ or t%^dn suns — The spectroscope and steUar collisions .... 369

CONTENTS XV

CHAPTER XXX

PAGE

Lambert's vast reveries — The evidence for the grindstone theory — The question of a central sun — Probabihty that the structure of the universe corresponds more to the modern kinetic theory of gases — Analogies . . . . . . .383

CHAPTER XXXI

The increasing evidence for the nebular hypothesis — Ideas of Buffon, Kant, Laplace, and their successors — Evidence from the theory of solar heat — Evidence from photographs of the nebulae — They are sketches of worlds in the process of creation . . -399

CHAPTER XXXn

THE COSMIC EXCHANGE OF MATTER AND LIFE

Worlds and systems are not isolated as was formerly supposed — The incessant exchange of matter and energy implies a more or less homogeneous universe — Possible means of a cosmic propagation of life — Ideas of Kelvin, Helmholtz, and Arrhenius ........ 427

CHAPTER XXXni

The problem of gravitation and the force or forces which hold the universe together — Gravitation seems insufficient — The mystery of an apparently inexhaustible outpour of attractive energy — Speculations of Newton — Modern attempts at a solution . 443 xvi CONTENTS

CHAPTER XXXIV

PAGE

The apparently increasing aggregation of matter — Evidence for the Spencerian formula — The existence of vast bodies like Canopus, a million times or more the bulk of our sun, seems to indicate the final congregation of the material of cosmos into a single inert body — The doctrine of energy likewise presents the simile of a clock that is running down — Resume and conclusions — This volume to be followed by another on the mechanism of life and of human society . . .457

Bibliography. ....... 469

CHAPTER I IMAGO MUNDI Critias, long since, I know

(For Fate decreed it so), Long since the world hath set its heart to live ;

Long since, with credulous zeal It turns life's mighty wheel,

Still doth for labourers send Who stiU their labour give,

And still expects an end.

Yet, as the wheel flies round.

With no ungrateful sound Do adverse voices fall on the world's ear.

Deafen' d by his own stir The rugged labourer

Caught not till then a sense So glowing and so near

Of his omnipotence.

Matthew Arnold, The World and the Quietist.

For the purged ear apprehends

Earth's import, not the eye late dazed : The Voice said, " Call my works thy friends !

At Nature dost thou shrink amazed ? "

Browning. Asolando.

CHAPTER I

(J tot) Some morning afield, when you seem peculiarly alive, a mind all open to the clamour of sensations, impressions, ideas, let your eye range the sky — it is taciturn ; the hills — they are cryptic ; the sea, if it be there — its murmuring voice is confused. Reflect then a little on what could be our ideas of creation, what sort of a " world image " we could form, if we had found no supplements or aids to the primitive senses with which we are born, if we had no miracle-working lenses and prisms, no angle measures, no strange magnetic needles, no Euclid, no long line before us of explorers and discoverers to write that ample page of knowledge which the pressed types make now the universal heritage of the race. As it would be to us, so it was to men and minds like yours and mine, ten, twenty thousand years ago.

In ten or twenty thousand years, we may imagine, the face of the earth has changed but little. The sky, the monotonous wash of the sea, the hills, the plains, the yellow wastes of the desert, must have looked very much to the cave-dwellers as they do to us. The human animal, too, has not varied greatly — his dress, his speech, his social relations, a little ; the main activities of his daily life, his pleasures, his moral and economic problems, the struggle for existence, the ceaseless round of birth and death, remain much the same. What has so wonderfully changed in these ten or twenty thousand years is the human mind and its outlook on the world.

The transformation has been immense — how immense we have learned but recently, through the larger development of anthropology, to know. The earlier ideas of mankind were almost pure fancy. The earth rested serenely upon the back of a turtle, and the sun with Chesterfieldian urbanity stood still at the voice of the prophet. The imagination was unfettered and untrained. The coming of the spring, the yield of the harvest, the fate of battles, were conceived as in control of the gods. In the storm there were demons, in the fields there were fairies, in the woods the hamadryads played. There were omens and signs ; the conditions of a chicken's entrails might forecast the destiny of empires. In the antique world there was a universal belief in the intervention of the preternatural in the affairs of men.

Little by little these beliefs fell away. In apparent chaos was found an order, and instead of caprice a scheme of nature in some sense understandable and in some sense predictable.

The change was slow, the path obscure and difficult. Probably the hardest thing the human race has had put before it to learn was the idea of fixity and consequence ; the certitude that one event follows inevitably from another — the notion, as we say, of cause and effect ; in Hume's phrase, of invariable sequence ; what we have come in latter days to style the reign of law.

Even now it has penetrated but a very little way. It is the keynote of every rational work now written ; it adorns the pages of amiable efforts at the conciliation of science and religion. The phrase has a sort of literary vogue. Yet, at each new extension of this idea of fixity and law into our daily lives and thoughts, the generality cries out, just as it did at the motion of the earth, at the law of gravitation, at the scheme of evolution, and all the rest.

The emotional side of the race has not changed. Law and fixity it will recognise now, after a painful effort, in the march of the heavens, in the course of the seasons, in the succession of geological epochs, of genera and species ; even in a vague way, in human development. But find this same fixity and law in the rise and fall of nations, of human institutions, of human beliefs, its creeds, its political doctrines ; to find this in the present primacy of America and the decadence of Spain; to view history as a tableau of destiny ; our daily lives, down to the minutest detail of actions " good " or '* evil," of thoughts " noble " or " vile," as the necessary and unescapable consequence of our surroundings which were created for us, our characters and bodily constitutions which were given to us :

to view the world so — no, we are as yet very far from that ; for all practical consequences, scarce nearer than the barbarians who trembled before the thunder and offered human sacrifices to calm an infuriate Being above.

It seems a formidable theorem to grasp. It might be called the pons asinorum of intellectual development, alike of the individual and of the race.

But, if yet far from spiritual clarity, we have come some way. We no longer think the earth is fiat, as was probably true, for example, of Socrates or of Solomon. We no longer believe that the sun is a god ; nor do we regard it as an object two feet in width, as Epicurus taught. Nowadays frogs are not bom from the mud, as Aristotle believed. The alchemist who offers us a receipt for transmuting base metal into noble gold we receive with a benevolent smile ; the man with a new scheme for perpetual motion we know to be a crook or a fool ; and if a priestess of spooks may still befuddle many seeming sane and clever men, at least presidents and premiers no longer consult an oracle before they go to war. How has all this come about ?

In a way we may answer : Through the growth of calculation and experiment, and the invention of mechanical devices which have almost infinitely widened, corrected, and supplemented our primitive five senses ; in a larger way, we may say: From an inherent impulse to know — the effort of^ "the restless cause-seeking animal " to probe the eternal riddle that surrounds and envelops him. Born into a world the mystery of whose phenomena fascinates even as it baffles, he has sought, undaimted by failure, undismayed by time, to find the elusive thread which binds events. It is the working of that instinct, not wholly absent in animals, which Renan calls the noblest craving of our nature : curiosity. It is the instinct of the child, whose incessant question is " Why ? — Why ? " It is the interrogation which must have troubled the childhood of the world: " What am I ? " " Where am I ? '' " Whence ? and O heavens, whither ? "

From the infancy of the race there have been minds which, turning aside from the ordinary pursuits and passions of men, from the prizes of trade, from the clamour of war, from the pluckings of fame, have given over their lives to the search. Argonauts in quest of the golden fleece of knowledge and of truth, their voyages have penetrated to the remotest corners of the earth and reached out among the stars. Magicians and sorcerers to tribal man ; philosophers, the lovers of wisdom, when Hellenism rose ; discoverers and men of science — Galileos, Newtons now — civilisation is their work ; the modern world is in some sense their creation. Amid the destruction and decay that attends all else from human hands, their achievements remain. The fabrics of the kingdoms melt away ; where Accad and where Carthage stood, no broken pillar Hfts its lonely form to mark the spot amid the desert silences. The dust and dreams of Caesar mingle with the forgotten ashes of his slaves. But Archimedes' lever and Thales' magic stone, the theorems of Euclid and Hipparchus' starry sphere, the magnetic compass of the dynasty of Tsin, and the black powder of Berthold Schwartz and his forerunners, the pendulum of Ibn-Junis and Hans Lippershey's far-reaching, near-drawing tubes, the presses of Gutenberg and Coster, the balance and retorts of Lavoisier, James Watt's labouring giants of steam, Volta's pile, and Faraday's whirling magnets, are possessions imperishable while civilisation, their fruit, survives.

Thanks to five or ten thousand years, perhaps a still greater period, of tolerably connected and consecutive effort, there has been built up a considerable stock of knowledge which, deftly fitted together in an orderly way, has become our one sure guide in this weird journey through the wilderness. Supported by this slowly wrought fabric of fact and logical theory, it is possible now to give at least a partial answer to some of the primitive human problems. Relative to the rest of the cosmos, we know to some extent what we are, we know to some extent where we are, we have some slight idea as to whence we have come, we are beginning to perceive dimly whither we are going.

Much of this is very new. In nature there is a certain tendency to the dramatic, some little also in the progress of knowledge. In some sense, it seems as if we had attained to a sort of climax. This may be but an illusion, born of the natural inability of the mind to see beyond its own day and time. It may be that the astonishing advance of the last three hundred years will continue without check, and perhaps with accelerated pace. Yet we know that such a dramatic moment came at the opening of the seventeenth century, with the establishment of our ideas of the solar system. So it may be that some future historian, chronicling the stages of human development, will write : —

" It was at about the beginning of the twentieth century that man attained at last a true picture of the world — came to know, in brief, the cosmos as it is. It was at about this time that he came to perceive the eternal round of matter in the universe — the coalescence of vague and formless nebular masses into suns and satellites, their slow refrigeration into dark bodies, with the transient appearance of life, their dissipation again into primitive nebula through the incessant collisions to which they are subject.

" It was then that he came definitely to conceive the whole scheme of world formation as a mechanical process, following simple and well-understood laws ; likewise that the incessant destruction of worlds is the result of a larger but still purely mechanical process.

" It was at about the same time that he came to recognise that the germs of life are being driven each whither from one planet and one world system to another, under the pressure of light — that it is in this manner that sterile planets are fertilised ; that the varied life of these vast globes springs up under appropriate material conditions and in response to simple physical or chemical stimuli ; that the races of intelligent beings, v.4th all their attendant creations of civilisation, their art, literatures, sciences, institutions, are part and parcel of this same mechanical or physical process, and like the hills or the suns, like worlds or atoms, are the fleeting and mysterious manifestations of that eternal we-know-not-what, that under- Ijdng reality which is back of aU phenomena, whose nature it is not given to the conscious intelligence, part and product of it like the rest, to know.

" In larger phrase, it was at this period that the more instructed among men came definitively to regard the universe as a cyclic process — that is to say, as an unceasing machine, with no beginning and without an end.

" This result came as the culmination of a period of unparalleled intellectual activity, dating from the discovery of the New World and the appearance of a work by a Polish astronomer, wherein the true character of our immediate solar system was first adequately set forth. The accidental discovery of the telescope following shortly after placed in the hands of the investigator an implement of extraordinary utility. In a few years the central force of the mechanism had been revealed by Newton. An immense development in the domains of physics and chemistry found a climax in the almost magical revelations of the spectroscope, which filled as it were the last gap in the circle of cosmic knowledge. So it was that in the brief space of three or four centuries, and after an incalculable period of blind groping, man was able at last to work out a rational theory of the world, complete in all its essential details."

It may well be, let it be said again, that our present ideas of the cosmos, even in their larger outlines, are not yet final. They may be infinitely expanded with the years and the knowledge to come. Yet in many considerable items of this knowledge we may be certain that finality and completeness have been attained. Not so long as an intelligent ■ race of beings survives its precarious existence upon this globe shall we ever cease to believe that the earth is a ball eight thousand miles in diameter. We shall never cease to believe that it turns upon its own axis, or that it booms through an orbit about the sun. It is for ever inconceivable that we should ever change our belief that the sun is a million times the bulk of the earth and four hundred times further than the moon. It is inconceivable that any subsequent knowledge will ever change our ideas of the distance of the nearest visible stars.

This much we know.

In a way this makes up, for us, three-quarters or four-fifths of the cosmic landscape. It will abide. For when we speak of this knowledge as being so very new, at the utmost three hundred years old, in some sense we err. In some sense it is as old as the race itself. Our ideas of the earth upon which we dwell, of the orb of fire whose children, literally, we are — in a word, the whole world-picture, spacially at least, is the result of geometrical methods of reasoning and measurement. And geometry is old. It was old to the Greeks, who had it from the Egyptians, and we gather that the Egyptians had attained to a considerable stage of culture, intellectual and otherwise, certainly seven thousand years ago.

And again, what is all our geometry and mathematics, what are all our inductions and deductions, our inferences and demonstrations, but the codified experience, not merely of the human race but of all conscious intelligence. A careful observer of nature's plan has very cleverly remarked that the deer, scenting danger in the wind, and gauging the direction, turns to flee oppositely, reasons no less scientifically, builds up the same complex inference from previous experience as does the man of science.^ The fox, eluding his pursuers by doubling upon his tracks, the hound in following the scent, and when it is lost beating about the bush in the expectation that it will be caught again, follows out a train of reasoning differing neither in degree nor kind, and probably but little less conscious, than Newton inferring the law of gravitation from the falling of the apple.

With due deference to the piquant reveries of the geometers of multi- dimensional space, it is in little that we may conceive the main conclusions of Euclid vitiated through another two thousand or twenty thousand years. His axioms and his conclusions rest upon a registered racial experience — an experience that, as Spencer was perhaps the first to point out, is now a part, an anatomical part, of the physical constitution of our minds. It seems a little lost to view that our ideas of space, our conceptions of three dimensions and no more, are the physical product of a physical process that began with the appearance of life upon the earth. If the fourth dimension existed, it would to-day be as distinctly a part of our current beliefs, as distinctly a factor of our modes of daily thought, as are the primal three.

The foundations of science are firm. Its conclusions are not chimeras, unless indeed we are to accept the monstrous idea that the mind is so capable of turning round upon itself as to believe it has no individual existence. Like Kapila, in the early dawn of speculative philosophy, we may dream that " Neither I am, nor is aught mine, nor is there any I." It seems to the present writer there is no middle ground ; it is an absolute nihilism that must outdo the Fichtean akosmism as does the latter a Berkeleyan idealism, or the acceptance of the conclusions of experimental science for what they seem.

For sane folk with a work to do in the world there will be little hesitation, and for them and all of those whose endeavour it is to follow in the pathways of the light, the horizons have of late been considerably enlarged. I doubt not that a future age will accord to our own something like a clear and somewhat

1 Williams, History of Science, chap. i.

detailed conception of the cosmic Reality. In any event, whether this prove true or no, this surely is certain, that our present-day ideas of creation represent the highest flight, or in varied metaphor, the loftiest monument of the human mind which we possess.

I wish to trace out the path and the method by which these ideas, these results, have been reached. Hereafter I shall present an argument, describe a doctrine, point out, as it were, the moral of the tale. But first of all there is need of a connected presentation of the facts. From age to age there have been various attempts towards such a complete world-picture. Their value naturally becomes impaired with the advance of knowledge. Such an idea was more or less the basis of the Hebraic Pentateuch, and indeed the fundament of almost aU religious systems has been an attempt towards an intelligible cosmogony. Such a work too, we may conjecture, was the Diakosmos of Democritus, written in the fourth century B.C., but now lost to us. A similar attempt is seen in Pliny's Natural History, in the first century a.d. ; in the works of Roger Bacon, the Admirable Doctor, in the thirteenth century ; in the Imago Mundi of Cardinal d'Ailly, which was the inspiration of Columbus ; in the Natural History of Buffon and in many another.

In our own day the most noteworthy endeavour towards a complete physical description of cosmos was that made more than half a century ago by Humboldt. It was begun long after that splendid mind had passed the customary limits of productivity, before the doctrine of the conservation of energy had been established, and before it came to be understood that the sun is a cooling body whose light and life may one day die out — ^with it the light and life of the tiny bits of worlds which flutter in circles about him. In no later single work has Humboldt's vast design been realised. Such a work would be a summation, and more, of the physical sciences in their present state ; the task is probably beyond the powers of any single pen.

The same is true of the historical side. The full story of the slow growth of this body of knowledge, of theory, and of ideas, is to be found only in pages the most diverse. It has been dealt with in a variety of works, rather drearily by Whewell, rather dreamily by Apelt, with a good deal of bias by Draper,

IMAGO MUNDI n

in graceful account by Williams, more technically by Bailly and Delambre, by Montucla and Libri ; various phases of it by countless others. The volumes of Bailly comprise an exquisitely conceived work of high philosophic interest ; but it stops short even of Herschel and Laplace. There are some inspiring pages in Buckle, some instructive chapters in Lecky. But the work of Lecky begins in the Middle Ages, while the spirit of rationalism and inquiry, whose history he designed to trace, had flourished throughout Greater Greece through a longer period than in our modern world. The two volumes of Buckle are but a fragment, and in any event his work would have been a history of civilisation in England only in the older and more restricted sense of the word ; it would have had nothing to do with the growth of English culture from its aboriginal elements. Draper treats of the intellectual development of Europe more as if it were the history of philosophies and religions and their political influence among one people and another.