Aether and Gravitation. William George Hooper

PHILOSOPHY OF GRAVITATION

       Table of Contents

      Art. 1. Gravitation.--In the realm of Science, there exists a Force or Law that pervades and influences all Nature, and from the power of which, nothing, not even an atom, is free.

      It holds together the component parts of each and every individual world, and in the world's revolving prevents both its inhabitants and its vegetation from being whirled off its surface into space. It exists in each and every central sun, and circles round each sun its associated system of planets. It rolls each satellite around its primary planet, and regulates the comet's mysterious flight into the depths of space, while the pendulation of even the remotest star is accomplished by this same force. Our own rocking world obeys the same mysterious power, that seems to grasp the entire material creation as with the grasp of the Infinite.

      It exists in, and influences every atom, whose combinations compose and constitute the entire material creation, or each and every orb that bespangle the blue infinity.

      As is readily seen, it weaves as it were around each and all, a mysterious network or chain, that binds star to star, and world to world, blending all into one entire, vast and complete unity. It decides all their orbits and distances, regulates and controls all their motions, from the most simple even to the more complex and intricate, ultimately producing that wondrous and beauteous order, unity and harmony that everywhere pervade and blend all the universe into one grand and harmonious whole.

      That Law I need hardly say is the Law of Gravitation.

Art. 2. Cause of Gravitation.--Now the question arises, and indeed has arisen a thousand times since the discovery of this law by Sir Isaac Newton over two hundred years ago, as to what is the physical cause, the true explanation of this universal attraction.

       MacLaurin in his work on the philosophical discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton says: “In all cases when bodies seem to act upon each other at a distance, and tend towards one another without any apparent cause impelling them, this force has been commonly called Attraction, and this term is frequently used by Sir Isaac Newton. But he gives repeated caution that he pretends not by the use of this term to define the nature of the power, or the manner in which it acts. Nor does he ever affirm or insinuate that a body can act upon another body at a distance, but by the intervention of other bodies.”

      The results of modern discovery show that action at a distance, without the intervention of any medium, as for example the sun attracting the earth, is not the universal condition which governs all so-called forces.

      It is now recognized that light and heat are both forms of energy, and therefore forces, using the term in the same sense that it is applied to Gravitation.

      Both light and heat are transmitted through space with finite velocity through the intervention of a medium, the universal Aether. It is therefore only reasonable to suppose, that if one or more particular kinds of energy, or forces, require a medium for their transmission, why not another force, as for example Gravitation?

      Gravitation is an universal force which operates throughout the length and breadth of the entire universe, and if there be a medium which is to Gravitation, what the Aether is to light and heat, the question at once confronts us, as to what are the characteristics, properties, and qualities of that universal medium, which is to form the physical basis of this universal attraction?

      Newton himself suggested that Gravitation was due to an aetherial subtle medium, which filled all space.

      In his well-known letter to Bentley, Newton writes as follows: “That Gravity should be innate, inherent, and essential to matter, so that one body can act upon another body at a distance through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity, that I believe no man who has any philosophical nature or competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it.”

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