Letters to the Editor
THE NEW PHYSICS
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] pm,—Your interesting article upon the solar eclipse and the Einstein theory prompts me to put in your columns a question which ever since the promulgation of Einstein's theory as a new theory of the Universe has puzzled a great many people. A projectile from outer space directed towards the earth will be deflected from its path in passing the sun. It may fall
into the sun. It may miss the earth and become a satellite. If it hits the earth it will be at a point different from where this would have occurred but for the deflection. We attribute this to the operation of the law of gravitation. We cannot explain that law. But nobody has ever suggested that it is other than a physical law. It is not metaphysical in the sense that its discovery introduced a new theory of the structure of the Universe.
It seems now to appear that there is good reason to believe that a ray of light suffers a similar deflection in passing a mass such as that of the sun. We cannot explain this any more than we can explain the law of gravitation as between masses of ponderable matter. But why should the former any more than the latter be regarded as other than a physical law, and as opening up some entirely new theory of the structure of the Universe ?
Light travels with immense speed, yet apart altogether from this new discovery it has long been recognized that we do not see moving objects at the spot where they actually are at the moment of vision. We are travelling and they are travelling whilst the light is travelling between them and the retina of our eye, and moreover the impact upon the retina is not simultaneous with the vision.
But this fact, recognized for centuries, has never been deemed to found a new theory of the Universe. The deflection of a ray of light under the operation of a physical law myste- riously similar to the law of gravitation is a highly interesting discovery in physical science. But this supplies no answer to the question why this discovery should be taken as a verifica- tion of a new theory of the Universe.
• A fourth dimension, the curvature of space, the finitude of space—these things we may not fully understand, but we can appreciate that they may go to create a new conception of the Universe. But what new light does the physical law, if such it be, that a mass of matter gives a side pull by some form of attraction to a passing vibration similar to that which it gives to a passing piece of matter, throw upon these theories ? That is the question which puzzles many plain but not wholly unin- telligent readers of the Spectator.—I am, Sir, &c.,
Previous page
