Fortunately for the progress of humanity, there are other learned men who firmly maintain that the business of science is the discovery and teaching of simple sober truth.
The writer of the Daily News article above referred to very charitably suggests that Sir W. Thomson may be “poking fun at some of his colleagues,” and compares the moss-grown meteorite hypothesis with the Hindoo parable which explains the stability of the earth by stating that it stands on the back of a monster tortoise, that the tortoise rests upon the back of a gigantic elephant, which stands upon the shell of a still bigger tortoise, resting on the back of another still more gigantic elephant, and so on. Sir W. Thomson, of course, requires to smash two more worlds in order to provide a moss-grown fragment for starting the life upon the world which was broken up for our benefit, and so on backwards ad infinitum.
WORLD-SMASHING.
Sir W. Thomson’s moss-grown fragment of a shattered world is not yet forgotten. In the current number of the Cornhill Magazine (January, 1872) it is very severely handled; the more severely, because the writer, though treating the subject quite popularly, shows the fallacy of the hypothesis, even when regarded from the point of view of Sir W. Thomson’s own special department of study. That an eminent mathematician should make a great slip when he ventures upon geological or physiological ground is not at all surprising; it is, in fact, quite to be expected, as there can be no doubt that the close study of pure mathematics, by directing the mind to processes of calculation rather than to phenomena, induces that sublime indifference to facts which has characterized the purely mathematical intellect of all ages.
It is not surprising that a philosopher who has been engaged in measuring the imaginary diameter, describing the imaginary oscillations and gyrations of imaginary atoms, and the still more complex imaginary behavior of the imaginary constituents of the imaginary atmospheres by which the mathematical imagination has surrounded these imaginary atoms, should overlook the vulgar fact that neither mosses nor other vegetables, nor even their seeds, can possibly retain their vitality when alternately exposed to the temperature of a blast furnace, and that of two or three hundred degrees below the freezing point; but it is rather surprising that the purely mathematical basis of this very original hypothesis of so great a mathematician should be mathematically fallacious—in plain language, a mathematical blunder.
In order to supply the seed-bearing meteoric fragment by which each planet is to be stocked with life, it is necessary, according to Sir W. Thomson, that two worlds—one at least flourishing with life—shall be smashed; and, in order to get them smashed with a sufficient amount of frequency to supply the materials for his hypothesis, the learned President of the British Association has, in accordance with the customary ingenuity of mathematical theorists, worked out the necessary mathematical conditions, and states with unhesitating mathematical assurance that—“It is as sure that collisions must occur between great masses moving through space, as it is that ships, steered without intelligence directed to prevent collision, could not cross and recross the Atlantic for thousands of years with immunity from collision.”
The author of the paper in the Cornhill denies this very positively, and without going into the mathematical details, points out the basis upon which it may be mathematically refuted—viz., that all such worlds are traveling in fixed or regular orbits around their primaries or suns, while each of these primaries travels in its own necessary path, carrying with it all its attendants, which still move about him, just as though he had no motion of his own.
These are the conclusions of Newtonian dynamics, the sublime simplicity of which contrasts so curiously with the complex dreams of the modern atom-splitters, and which make a further and still more striking contrast by their exact and perfect accordance with actual and visible phenomena.
Newton has taught us that there can be no planets traveling at random like the Sir W. Thomson’s imaginary ships with blind pilots, and by following up his reasoning, we reach the conclusion, that among all the countless millions of worlds that people the infinity of space, there is no more risk of collision than there is between any two of the bodies that constitute our own solar system.